Tweets On A Plane

[alexandraerin]

I had a post about Amanda Fucking-Palmer of the Boston Fucking-Palmers that I was working on the other day, which I accidentally closed out (and then bungled the "restore saved draft") thing. It was all about a blog post of hers that ephant tipped me to, where she reproduced an email she sent someone about her experiences using Twitter to interact directly with her fans... and how she's made more money doing this than she made off her celebrity-produced studio-backed album.

(Her blog post is here, but you have to scroll way down to find the relevant passage.)

I don't follow Amanda Palmer's career that closely... I'm only one state away from Neil Gaiman and I can hear him just fine from here. But it really is amazing what she's done for herself.

At the moment I'm writing this, she's answering randomly tweeted questions to kill time while in flight to the west coast. Warren Ellis, observing the goings-on, had this to say:

The level of determination @amandapalmer shows to engage directly with her audience is fascinating me. Post-Mystique Pop Life.

That's a brilliant phrase. "Post-Mystique Pop Life". It's been a while since I bothered to engage with anyone who really feels this way, but I used to argue with people who had what my dad called the "High Priest" mentality about the writing and publishing industry... they wanted the mystique, they wanted the separation between author and audience, because layers of insulation come with the barriers to entry they had to surmount and the golden gates they had to gain admittance through in order to get where they are today.

Amanda Palmer had this to say, possibly intended as a response to Warren's tweet (and working well as a response even if that wasn't her intent):

... it's safer to run into it. like turning and accelerating into a curve when drag-racing. your audience should be a friend, not a foe.

De-mystification puts a lot of high priests out of jobs. It opens a lot of doors. It doesn't mean that everybody gets to be famous and successful but it means that anybody can be... it means that nobodies could be.

Amanda F. Palmer is somebody. She was able to make a relative killing on Twitter in a few hours selling t-shirts spontaneously because she's got a huge following as a result of her music. That's not a feat that could be easily replicated. Not everyone could just jump on the internet and do the same thing... but then, neither could Amanda have done so. She had to put in the work to get to where she is.

But I think a lot of her career has been driven by the following she gains through the internet, via word-of-mouth and word-of-mouse. I don't believe it's necessarily true that you have to have the record deal (or the book deal, or whatever) first and then you can go on the internet and start using your fans to make magic happen. I think you can find your fans that way in the first place.

It's not necessarily easy and it's not necessarily instantaneous, but achieving success never is.

Comments

[cernael.livejournal.com]

"via word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth"

One of those supposed to be "word-of-mouse"?