Short-form videos (including TikTok, YouTube shorts, etc.) are the new ultra-processed food of the attention space. Bite-sized, super-engaging, effortless to consume, short-form videos melt your brain like artificially flavored bright-orange cheese puffs melt in your mouth. Zero nutritional value, and you’re left wanting more. Might as well eat the whole bag.
The first analogy I thought of was crack cocaine, but short-form video isn’t quite that addictive, and doesn’t ruin lives. It’s just another entertainment medium. And for some, it’s potentially useful. If you’re a DIY creator (author, illustrator, musician, dancer, whatever), you can use short-form video to promote your work with great effectiveness. If you’re willing and able to consistently create consistent content (there’s a reason for the two “consistents”), there’s a good chance you can leverage a zero-dollar marketing budget into massive exposure.
But one does not simply “make short form video.” There’s an art to it, like anything. To fit expectations and get views, the content needs to be engaging (funny, surprising or shocking, generally clickbaity) and presented in narrow bandwidth of narrative formats. You don’t need much equipment beyond a smartphone to get started, but you do need at least a rudimentary understanding of lighting, focus, framing, depth of field, editing, and other film-making concepts. And of course it helps if you’re young and/or good-looking and/or affable and/or funny, and enjoy being in front of the camera.
And you’re going to need ideas. Lots of ideas. But the ideas can’t be that different from one another. For the various algorithms to pick up your content and share it widely, your short-form videos will need to appeal to a narrow demographic. They should all be produced on a similar topic with a similar style, the narrower the better. Thus the second “consistent” above.
Does all this sound like great fun, an intriguing challenge? If so, you may be a great candidate for creating and sharing short-form video content to promote your work (or whatever other reason appeals to you). The more power to you!
But to me, and I’m guessing you (since you clicked on this post), it sounds like a huge pain in the ass. It sounds like a whole lot of work with potentially zero payoff. Who has time for all that? We’d rather invest our precious free time into making good (and maybe great) art, right?
The Harsh Reality of Art as a Market Product
Any kind of creative endeavor is both difficult and rewarding. The difficult part is making anything halfway decent, something that doesn’t make you cringe when the object of your creation impacts your physical senses. You have great taste (or at least great enthusiasm) for art; that’s why you started to make your own in the first place. But when you compare your own early efforts to the masters and geniuses you admire, you quickly realize that your own work sucks. So you persist and hone your skills, for years or even decades, and eventually reach a point when you’ve created something you’re proud of. You’re on top of the world!
What now?
Friends or family might suggest that you sell your work, or at least “put it out there.” Submit it, publish it, promote it. If you follow that advice, even a little bit, then your art is now a market product. Gatekeepers will accept or reject it. Consumers will buy it, or not. Tastemakers will pay attention to your work and talk about it, or not. Your work will be judged, commented on, and reviewed, sometimes harshly. Or worse, totally ignored.
It’s valid to create just for the sake of creating. Don’t turn your hobby into a job, they say, and it’s good advice. Expressing yourself creatively is usually good for your mental health, and you can simply share your work with your family and friends, completely safe from market forces and the opinions of strangers.
It’s also valid to put your work out there, to release it in some way, and then basically just hope for the best. No marketing, no hustle. Hope that somebody influential comes across your work and promotes it for you. That can actually work! That happened to me early in my music career, and it changed my life. John Digweed found a used Jondi & Spesh vinyl record at a record store in Berkeley, started playing it out, and eventually put it on his compilation that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. That break gave us the clout to release music on dozens of respected labels, to make music for video games and advertisements, to license our music to TV shows, and to start our own record label.
But in this day and age, there are millions of both traditionally and self-published releases every day. It’s more likely than ever that your work will be ignored and buried by the onslaught of newer releases if you don’t have an effective marketing plan.
You know all this. That’s why you’ve been considering making short form videos, and are perhaps dreading the prospect.
What’s the Alternative?
I’ve been experimenting with marketing for years. Mostly in the music space, through our record label. I’ve thrown plenty of money down the drain and learned a great deal about what doesn’t work. When we do have success with a release, at times it feels random. It’s easy to get discouraged and give up on marketing efforts altogether.
But I’ve persisted in trying to learn more about the space. It’s a fascinating problem, and if we can solve it, we can potentially make a living via our art. Or at least turn our creative endeavor into a lucrative side hustle.
So in terms of marketing, what works, and what doesn’t?
There’s no easy answer. The question is too big. It’s equivalent to “What’s the best way to earn money?” It depends on your skill set, the economy, your health and energy, and so many other factors.
But generally, it’s good advice to choose a marketing medium that you don’t hate. Just like you wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) choose a career that you hate, even if it paid well.
One useful metric is “Do you think about it in the shower?” If short-form video ideas spring to mind when hot water is pounding on your back, then maybe you should be posting on TikTok. That definitely doesn’t happen to me. But sometimes I do think of blog posts in shower. So this blog is my main “social media” channel.
What do you obsess on? What kind of promotional medium matches your natural wellspring of ideas?
Do that.
The Three Consistencies
I’ve had releases or projects get wildly popular a few times. Sometimes it’s pure luck–like a world-famous DJ finding my track in the used bin.
But in every case this “luck” has been preceded by three factors:
- Consistent quality
- Consistent content (staying within genre/topic/niche)
- Consistent release schedule
Easier said than done. Personally, I feel that I’m decent at quality control, pretty bad at staying within genre/topic, and mediocre at regular releases.
But times when I’ve managed to wrangle all three have been magic. This blog, for example, when I was writing consistently about health topics, posting multiple times a week. I was getting thousand of daily views, interview requests, and even a TV appearance for one of my 30-day experiments. It was a good run. Eventually I started to feel uncomfortable writing about health topics, given my complete lack of medical credentials. So I mostly stopped posting about health, and readership quickly fell off. But the formula worked.
Back in the late nineties my music and business partner Spesh started to host a weekly electronic music happy hour at an art gallery. I thought it would probably lose money as a project, but reluctantly hopped on board when his other partner dropped out. Week after week, we hosted this small party, curating music at 111 Minna from 5-9pm every Wednesday. Within a few years we had lines around the block and were written up in European guidebooks, “what to do in San Francisco.” The party ran for nearly fifteen years and was a wild success. Part of that was that the vibe of our party matched the zeitgeist of the time, when electronic music felt cutting edge, the internet was new, and San Francisco was experiencing its first “dot-com” boom. But the other part of the success was the three consistencies.
I’d love to be able to provide an example with my fiction writing. But being only traditionally published, I’ve never had much control over my release schedule, and its never been consistent. Which is one reason why I probably need to establish a self-publishing pipeline at some point to complement traditionally published releases. While it’s always possible for a one-off or debut release to become a massive hit, when I look around the author marketplace and see who is succeeding massively, they’re all consistent in terms of quality, topic/genre, and regular releases.
But wait, weren’t we talking about marketing efforts? Well, the same principles apply. If you’re publishing a newsletter to promote your books, it should be consistently good, with a consistent format, published at consistent intervals. With that formula, it’s impossible to NOT build an audience.
It’s simple. but it’s not easy. Consistency requires effort and planning. And it doesn’t guarantee success. But triple consistency does guarantee the best chance of your work connecting with its compatible and interested audience, if that audience exists.
Next up: Why You Shouldn’t Promote to Your Family and Friends
