Pivot to video

Thanks so much for the incredible response to my previous newsletter. People wrote a lot of very kind and thoughtful emails and comments; I think I’ve managed to respond to most of them, and some of them are so insightful that I’ll be spotlighting them in an upcoming edition. So here we are, a week later — using the most flexible possible definition of a week¹ — and, as promised, I have a new newsletter, and an update on what I think the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement will become.

The short version is: I’ve started making video essays.

Here’s a bit more “why.”

I started this project in the hope that cracking the self-improvement code would give me the power to get more stuff made. I wanted to make several kinds of things: fiction; and non-fiction columns, essays and features — the kind of thing I used to write for media. I also wanted to make art, and videos of me making the art. And while it’s true that all that is a redonkulous workload, and probably impossible, it’s also very true that I spent a lot of time avoiding doing any of it, mainly by reading and scrolling life away on my phone.

I have managed to write a lot of self-improvement articles! But that isn’t all I wanted to make. And, on another selfish note, the move away from Substack that I made for personal morality reasons has completely munted my subscriber growth. My subscriber numbers have been static or diminishing slightly for months now. Substack has a semi-decent recommendation engine that was my main source of subs, and while it is flawed — a lot of subs are spammy, and they recommended a Nazi newsletter the other day! — it was something.

I’ve been mentally wrassling with all this for months now. Some time ago whilst scrolling, I came across a timely YouTube video essay which was about why you should make YouTube videos and was set entirely to gameplay footage of Sonic the Hedgehog 1.²

This fascinated me, because the essay was very well written and the visuals — while compelling — were completely tangential to the video.

This last part was the most important. I’d made quite a few art videos in the past, but they were always mostly about the art I was making. I’d found this restrictive as well as time-consuming. Now I realised: I could make art videos that were not actually or only tangentially about the art; where the visuals of painting just served as an interesting backdrop for the content I wanted to make anyway.

Essays like this one.

There’s another factor at play. The event I hinted at in my last newsletter is this: My day job, in the tech industry, is finished. And while I’m actively looking for another job, either in or out of the tech industry³, I would very very very very very much like for a decent proportion of my income — ideally all of it — to come from the art I make, or things related to that art. Yes, this is another lofty goal. But people achieve it all the time! I know a number of full-time, non-starving artists, as well as quite a few who make a living from their newsletters. Why don’t we have both?

Summed up:

• I need income from art/writing stuff
• I can’t have that without a following
• One of the best ways to get a following is to play the content game.

Which brings me to this video that I’ve spent quite a lot of time making. The other half of the project is explained there. I’m calling it “Everybob.” That should make sense once you watch the video.

Astute readers will realise that you have not actually seen this so-far mythical video, or a link to it. Well, if you’ve read this far, chances are you have the attention span for what I’m about to ask. Sneakily, all the text above — in addition to being fascinating — is serving as a gatekeeper for skimmers. And I can’t have readers watching the video for thirty seconds and then clicking away. Can’t embed it here either. The Algorithm will punish me for that. It is a cruel master, but we all serve at its whim. If you want to watch the video — and it’s fine if you don’t, but significantly finer if you do — it would help me enormously if you did the following. Click on the upcoming thumbnail image, which will take you to my channel page, and click/tap on the video to start playing it, then, in diminishing order of importance:

• Watch it all the way through
• Leave a Like
• Leave a comment
• Subscribe to the YouTube channel
• Share the video with at least one friend who you think will like it enough to watch it through to the end, or one enemy who will hate it so much they watch it through to the end.

For all the reverential talk about the Algorithm, it isn’t black magic; fundamentally, it rewards videos that get watched all the way through to the end and that get engaged with. That’s it. The only place luck comes in to it is with the initial crop of people the video gets shown to. If you wonderful people, my real subscribers, can signal to YouTube that people will watch my video, there’s actually a very good chance that the Algorithm picks it up and shows it to many many more.

Whew. Nervous. Here’s the link to my channel page. If you’re keen to help out, watch the video through to the end (important!) and let me know what you reckon in the YouTube comments.

For the avoidance of doubt, here is a ginormous red link that will take you to my YouTube video page

Don’t worry! This isn’t going to become a newsletter where all I do is urge you to watch my videos. If anything, it’s the opposite; the videos exist so hopefully more people will find my writing. Instead of asking viewers to Like and Subscribe in the traditional way to you my video content, I’ll be asking them to Subscribe (For Real) to my newsletter. Think of the videos as another medium, as way of watching or listening to the newsletter content, at your leisure. And subscribers will get early access to the vids, behind-the-scenes content, and they’ll often get to read the actual essays before they become video essays.

Oh, and if you want to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, that would be absolutely mint — not just because paid support is going to be extremely personally helpful, but because I’m finally going to start offering some proper benefits to paid subscribers.

If you’re a paid sub, look for something special in your inbox soon.

Subscribe now – pay whatever amount you want!

There’s a lot more I’ve got planned and ready to go, but that can wait for next time. Thanks, as always, for reading.

And as of now, thanks for watching as well.

Another shout-out: If you have any jobs that need doing, or know of jobs going, just hit reply and let me know. Likewise, if you’d like to commission a or buy a painting (examples of the sort of stuff I can do are in the video!) now would be a really good time to do that — just hit reply. And feel free to get in touch if for no other reason that you feel like it; I like reading your replies.

Also, comments are back! And they’re on a website I own and control so they’re never going away again. You can make a comment right here, just below the footnotes 🙂

1. It’s 11 days later, but we’re still technically in the week following the week where I wrote the last newsletter. Unless you believe that the next week starts on a Sunday, which it absolutely does not. Blame ISO8601 if you don’t like it; I don’t make the rules.
2. It’s well worth a watch!
3. Hit me up if you know of anything going! I’m going to do an online CV kind of thing soon but for now know my skill-set is comms, marketing, and most things relating to those areas.