I thought I’d never say it, but it looks like my favourite cybergogic transhuman yogi has, somehow, fallen in with someone that actually seems to know what they’re talking about. In his most recent post, Bogue interviews Thom [sic] Chambers, who publishes a magazine¹ called In Treehouses, and they discuss the future of publishing. For whatever reason — perhaps Chambers acts as a moderating influence on Bogue? — the conversation remains pretty sensible, and covers some decent stuff.

The really interesting part comes about halfway through:

The lack of gatekeepers online means that we’re living in the age of the amateur. It’s great that you don’t need anyone’s permission to create or to publish anymore, but the unspoken consequence of this is that there’s a lot of low quality stuff out there.

That’s not necessarily the creator’s fault, either — now you need to be your own writer, editor, designer, publisher, marketer, promoter, customer services department, PR department, and all the rest. It’s rare for anyone to be capable at all those things.

Chambers is absolutely spot-on here, and in his other comments regarding curation and the boutique approach. He elucidates in a very clear, concise fashion the problem of writing for an online audience: how do you ensure you don’t get lost in the background noise?²

The answer, says Chambers, is to curate to the highest possible standard, and to apply a boutique mentality to your work. And he’s absolutely right.

Striking out on your own, as a writer publishing online, is the most delicate of balancing acts: you have to write about things you deeply care about, to the highest possible standard, and never just settle for “good enough” whilst simultaneously avoiding falling victim to perfectionism.³ No matter how you look at it, to do it right is fucking hard work.

He also talks about the “craft-stall” mentality that (negatively) affects a lot of online writing: the kind of mindset that makes it okay to produce stuff that’s “not particularly pretty or grammatically correct or anything, but I’m only one person so that’s okay. As long as I’m ‘myself’ then people will forgive me”. The import of this is, of course, totally lost on Bogue, who’s a practitioner of exactly this kind of “fuck it; it has ‘personality’ ” writing,⁴ but the point stands: your writing has to stand or fall on its merits as a piece of writing, and not as something that “has character”. If you fall into the trap of relying on charisma to cover your failings with words, you’ve truly screwed the pooch.

Chambers, to his credit, seems to relish the challenge, and embraces the hard work required to succeed and stand out from the crowd. His magazine, which I haven’t done more than skim so far, is well put together and looks like a real magazine — definitely more a product of the boutique approach than the craft-stall mentality.

And Chambers is right when he notes that if “you’re sharing all this average stuff, why should we listen to you when you say you’ve found something remarkable?” It’s true when you’re just linking to something on Facebook or Twitter, but it’s doubly true when you’re writing yourself. If you’re mass-producing tasteless, low-grade beef burgers all the time, nobody’s going to be hungry when you do occasionally make an delicious filet mignon — you’ve already ruined their tastebuds.

To succeed as a writer — and to build a worthwhile, profitable audience, if that’s your goal — you need to become your own gatekeeper; your own agent, editor, copywriter, and harshest critic. You need to ruthlessly push yourself to produce something you’d be proud to show to all the people who think you’re a failure and a waste of skin, not just your mother and your friends who’ll lie to save your feelings.

You need to do this because your writing deserves it, and because if you spend the time creating something for publication, your audience deserves it too. And if you don’t think you can do all this yourself, don’t be afraid to ask someone for help.