You already know how to get more followers

Stubbornness or integrity?

Labelled as free to use though I’m not sure it was supposed to be.

I’m sure most of us have noticed the deluge of articles on how to increase your follower count, which have grown in number alongside Substack’s transition to a social media app model. I suspect most of you have, like me, taken the bait and read one… only to find that you knew that you already knew most of the advice it contained.

Perhaps it’s due to reading too much Alfred Adler – Freud’s suspiciously normie contemporary who combined a socialist political ethos with a pragmatism more often associated with American individualism, later inspiring the self-help mega success The Courage to be Disliked (2013) and its sequel The Courage to be Happy (2019) – but I have a tendency to see most human behaviour as purposeful. As such, I believe that most of us are not failing to amass a large follower count, but succeeding at stubbornly sticking to writing what we want to write about – and that’s okay.

Very occasionally someone will succeed in a creative field online through sheer talent/ skill honed through practice, but in a consumer-capitalist society the easiest way to gain followers is through a combination of hucksterism and ripping other people off. For instance, which is going to amass more followers faster: Designing and coding your own indie horror videogame or producing a steady stream of ‘react’ videos in which the only new content you add to the labour of others is your mugging face, meme references and the occasional exaggerated scream? Do you think more people will willingly pay for (rather that pirate) the game or watch somene else play it for free (save for the cost of an internet connection and the small amount of profit you generate for the content creator for eyeballing a few videos)?

If I think about the most ‘‘successful’’ creative work I have provided over the years (measured in terms of quantity of engagement) they are:

• An audio recording of Marlow’s Dr. Faustus (1616) for Librivox in which I voiced Mephastophilis.

• A fan music video for John Maus’ song ‘The Fear’ set to clips from the film Crime Wave (1985) by John Paizs.

Notably, neither of these creative works derived primarily from my own creativity, but from that of Marlowe for the recording (and my recording being edited alongside that of other readers) and that of Maus and Paizs for the music video. That’s okay, I consider voice acting and video editing to be creative persuits and they’re probably the areas where my personal strengths lie, despite writing being more important to me. However, more dispiriting is the fact that the dramatic play reading has some 180,000 listens via a video belonging to ‘Greatest Audio Books’, which sells Librivox recordings – which are recorded for free in the public domain by volunteers to aid the blind and partially sighted – for a profit. They have over 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube and also sell via Amazon. They have ripped off a lot of people who could have just legally listened for free.

Before taking it down from YouTube, my fan music video had around 65,000 views (and other ones I had edited had slightly lower view counts). I never gained many subscribers, mind, because people were clearly just watching the video as part of searching for and finding a rather obscure song by an artist they’d discovered. However, the reason Maus’ work became suddenly internet famous was because he was present at the January 6th United States Capitol attack/ insurrection and – possibly more significantly – did not denounce or openly regret his involvement in alt-right edgelord comedian Sam Hyde’s Adult Swim show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace (2016). When I discovered Maus was donating money to the Trump campaign and an anti-abortion organisation, I took down my videos because I didn’t want to be adding even a small amount of money to either. In recent times Maus has denounced Trump – though possibly not his Accelerationist ideology – and so I’ve readded the videos, no longer especially concerned that he’s going to be putting my money in places I would rather it not go. I’m still interested in enjoying music, art and stories by people I politically disagree with (even people who I think have personally engaged in shitty behaviour) and I think it is healthy to do so… but I don’t necessarily want to financially support them if they’re actively engaged in making the world, in my view, a shittier place.

By contrast, my self-published book of horror stories has received barely any downloads (indeed, Matthew Holness even firmly declined a copy I had painstakingly laminated!) and my Choose-Your-Own-Edgar-Allan-Poe hypertext game had barely any players, despite the pair representing hundreds of hours of work and far greater originality than the aforementioned Librivox recording or fan music video. Likewise, when performing stand-up I used to find that the jokes I’d crafted and laboured over for hours (and which I knew were interesting and sophisticated dammit!) would receive a lukewarm reception compared to cruder, off-the-cuff remarks that played to the lowest audience standards.

My friend, the cutesy but cynical (and incredibly prolific) writer of English language visual novels ebi-hime is one of the only people I know in real life who makes a living from her writing. However, she often laments how to get readers she often needs to write towards tropes and themes she knows will gain traction, with her more thematically complex and richly developed works often falling by the wayside. On her Bsky she has remarked that while a handful of her games have received many thousands of downloads, most have received a lot less. When asked how a game gets on loads of Steam wishlists (and thus a lot of downloads/purchases) she replied: “Post funny memes on Twitter and Tiktok”. In terms of gaining followers, social media clout comes first, quality of work second.

But, again, you already knew that. If you really cared about having thousands of followers, you would work your social media feeds (including TikTok, Twitter, Bsky, Substack Notes, etc. etc.) day and night. You would also adopt the common technique, recommended to my students by an old filmmaker friend, of following lots of other accounts, but unfollowing them in a few days if and when they don’t follow you back.

I also knew genuinely nice YouTuber Tom Scott back at university who would never let the opportunity to exploit a memeable gimmick get in the way of a good idea (or vice versa?) Back in the day he even campaigned for (and won) the position of Student Union President while dressed up as a pirate.

More cynically, using tactics not used by the decent, talented folks I’ve just mentioned:- start beef, state provocative (but not too provocative) opinions, join in with the in-crowd against anyone who is being dogpiled upon (especially if you can be witty while also acting outraged) and flaut any sexual attractiveness that you have!

But, again, you already knew that. I’m not even against flaunting one’s sexual attractiveness if you have it to work with! Some dogpiles are legitimately justified!

My point is, most of us actually already know the rules of the game, we just choose to not engage with them, whether from self-perceived integrity, stubbornness or simply disinterest or laziness.

On arguably their most cynical album, Gingerbread Man (1995), the Residents have a track called ‘The Sold-Out Artist’ on which the Singing Resident proclaims: “Sooner or later, everyone does… Everybody feeds the fat boy”. Similarly, Momus (one of the aforementioned problematic musicians I listen to) sings in ‘How to Get - and Stay - Famous’:

And Lord, what will it take, what will it take to get me to be and to stay famous?
Am I going to have to sell my soul to the stylists and the tailors of this world
If I’m not to go down in history as one of the failures?
Lord, teach me the boy band dance routines
Above all teach me to be tame, bland, blind and blameless
Cos that’s the hardest thing of all, to be aggressive and yet remain harmless
To edit out my impure thoughts when you know so well, Lord, that I’m shameless
Principled, amoral, provocative, confrontational and shameless

Now, neither Momus nor the Residents have been completely immune to the temptations of selling out. Since the death of Hardy Fox, the band’s primary composer, Homer Flynn, has been merrily hocking his late collaborator’s half-formed demo tracks and sketches on reissued versions on their albums (as an obsessive fan I am not complaining) and he’s not been beneath selling his own bed at an exorbitant price! Momus produced an entire album of songs individually commissioned for $1000 a piece. It was his thirteenth studio album and for my money his first duff one.

However, neither artist can be accused of sanding down their rough edges to make themselves more commercially palatable. They have remained defiantly, awkwardly weird and high-concept even though it must have significant limited their commercial success.

If you are talented and singular enough you may be able to make your creative work your full time job, even if you stubbornly remain an odd duck. Sam Kriss has never seemed to have any interest in making himself appear more likeable, even after his attempted ‘‘cancellation’’ in 2017 (which struck me as simultaneously understandable and motivated by bad faith power play by the anti-Corbyn left) and clearly hasn’t reigned in his obscuranist interests and tendencies, but only further indulges them with age. However, he is also an astonishingly skilled essayist. Still, his blog only ranks around number 29 on the ‘culture’ chart. Equally spiky (though softer and more accessible) cultural critic Freddie deBoer currently ranks a little higher at 21. Can anyone convincingly argue that Konstantin Kisin (number 10 with Francis Foster), Jessica Reed Kraus (number 3) or Niall Harbinson (number 5) are better prose stylists or have more idiosyncratic ideas than Kriss or deBoer? They play the game better though. Kisin, Foster and Kraus know people still glom onto anti-woke discourse. Harbinson knows people like pictures of cute doggos. This is not necessarily cynicism. I ideologically differ massively from Kraus, but I think she is a true believer. Harbinson is engaged in the noble business of rescuing dogs. They may use certain tricks or techniques to gain followers, but I think their underlying motivations are idealistic.

If you have a tenth of the talent or skill of a deBoer or a Kriss but lack (or refuse to exploit) the hooks used by the likes of Kraus or Harbinson, how do you (or I) hope to gain lots of followers?

I mean, I called my book of short stories Bib and the Scarecrow Made of Mice! I probably could have come up with a slightly less stupid-sounding and repellent name. I called my band Gout Pony and insisted on singing in the most irritating voices I could. That does not reflect a realistic or sane understanding of artistic integrity.

Because ultimately – if I’m honest with myself – I enjoy indulging whatever daft creative whims I have more than I care about successfully communicating with others through my writing or even making money (which I should probably care about a little more at the moment).

—

I’ve been listening to Mike Muncer’s brilliant horror podcast The Evolution of Horror since around when it started; over the last seven or eight years I have watched it grow into the UK’s largest horror podcast, reaching a level of success that has allowed Mike to leave his job and live off his podcasting. Inspired by Mike’s podcast, some seven years back I too began a podcast (on children’s horror) with my friend Ren. In this time we have amassed about six reviews and a few hundred downloads. We are very much not the UK’s largest horror podcast. I suspect we might not even be the largest podcast that focuses exclusively on children’s horror.

Mike orders each of his seasons around a horror sub-genre, working systematically through the iconic and influential greats, whether they be slashers, zombie movies or home invasion films. Ren and I randomly choose a half-remembered spooky educational game or unearth a dog-eared copy of a Robert Swindells book or discuss a film that was released on Netflix some two or three years previous.

Mike befriends writers and journalists who are notable within horror fandom, encouraging them to guest on his show. Ren and I ask on people we like who have special interests in standing stones or Welsh mythology or what have you and then we indulge ourselves in jokes deriving from long-standing friendships that will be confusing or even off-putting to many listeners.

Mike regularly posts on social media. I very occasionally update a Letterboxd account while Ren posts collages inspired by the book/s, film/s or game/s we have covered that episode onto Instagram.

Mike posts a new episode of his podcast every week. Ren and I generally manage one every two months.

Mike adheres closely to the same format every episode, using the same phrases and reliably speaking about how pleasurable it has been to have the guest on the show, almost always agreeing warmly with their opinions and ideas. Ren and I improvise a different tune for our “Texture of the Week” segment each week, which falls randomly towards the start, middle or ending of the episode. We change how we introduce ourselves and how we end each episode, with odd and mildly incoherent sign-offs.

Mike makes sure he covers the classics of the genre: The Shining (1980), The Exorcist (1973), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), etc. that he knows will get people tuning in. We have not even bothered/ managed to cover Coraline (2009) or Hocus Pocus (1993) yet.

Mike makes accessible jokes related to moments from the films he covers or mainstream pop culture and in doing so often uses Millenial internet slang and references. Ren and I repeatedly reference obscure 1990s television series This Morning with Richard Not Judy and indulge our curious, potentially alienating comedic fancies, making each other laugh but not necessarily the listener.

Mike always remembers to ask listeners sincerely to review his podcast, using exactly the same script when asking them to that he has used now for many years. Ren and I forget to ask for reviews and when I do remember I tend to sound desperate, pathetic or unhinged.

Mike is focused and streamlined, with episodes coming in at around the same length. Ren and I are digressive and occasionally rambly, with inconsistent episode lengths.

etc. etc. etc.

If you want to produce a successful and popular podcast, do like Mike, not like me.

Clearly I know what I could do to produce a more successful – and probably even better – podcast. Yet for year after year I have not done so. Why? Do I like feeling like an underdog that much?

Maybe. The aforementioned Freddie deBoer is often claiming that folks love to be the underdog. But I think more to the point is the fact that I enjoy making the self-indulgent, silly podcast that I make. Clearly, I’d like more listeners because having people engage with your work can make it seems more worthwhile, but I don’t actually care deeply enough about external recognition to be disciplined enough to make the changes I would need to make to get more listeners.

Because it is not just about recognising the rules of the game. It is about sticking to them with discipline. Kriss, deBoer and ebi-hime all write a lot. They pursue their quirky or esoteric interests and fancies, but they’re also not afraid to play the hits. They’re also not afraid to stretch themselves and become better writers. These are not things to be ashamed or scared of if you’re able to keep the work fun… but it will be work.

You don’t have to compromise (though it might help) but you will have to sacrifice. You know what. How much is up to you.