Your Audience Isn't a "Market," They Are Your Community

How thinking about community can change us for the better

Sometimes the timing works out so well that it makes one believe in the supernatural.

I outlined this piece, which is about thinking of “audience” as “community,” and as I sat down to flesh it out, I passed the 100 subscriber mark! I kind of think of 100 as the Mendoza Line for Substacking, so this milestone is a real honor for me. Thanks so much for signing up. Please reach out and let me know what would make this better for you. (Also consider using ridiculous amounts of peer pressure to get your friends to subscribe!).

“A man addressing an friendly audience.” Generated by Substack’s apparently new AI image generation feature. Something I just discovered and decided to use on a whim. Thoughts?

One fear I have is that I may come across as someone who is often bitter or dismissive about his own profession. If so, then I am guilty of poor communication. I actually love my job (I teach English at an amazing Sisters of Mercy school, Mt. Aloysius College in central PA). I consider myself to be embarrassingly lucky to have stumble into this job and I love what I do and where I do it. Any complaints I have about the work I do are almost always aimed at systemic forces in the larger institution of higher education. Please let me be clear that I do love my work.

I love it so much, in fact that I still try to get better at it. To that end, I’ve been taking an online course called “Teaching Writing With AI” by the great John Warner, who writes

The Biblioracle Recommends

, and who I’ve mentioned here before. Warner captures my vision for education better than any single-living person, so when he offered his online class, I gobbled up some professional development funds and signed up.

The class is great. First of all, it’s been kind of a relief because he frames education and the teaching of writing in a way I’ve been trying to for years; things that garner sideways looks from the “but they don’t know APA” crowd. Taking the class has made me feel like I’m not crazy. Which is nice.

Another thing I’m enjoying about the course is the frequent reflective prompts it engages me in. This week, I was prompted to reflect on the evolution of my writing practice. The exercise led me to think about the last six months of writing for this newsletter, which has had a pretty profound impact on my writing habits and, I believe, the quality of my writing.

Deadlines, Commitments

On a very basic level, having a deadline is the best antidote to writer’s block. And while no one would hold me accountable for missing a week (perhaps some are even grateful!), I have committed to putting something out at least once a week. To facilitate this, I’ve quickly learned that I’m best able to keep up with this if I start early and chip away at it throughout the week.

I’ve already accumulated a list of ideas and beginnings that I can pull from. If all goes well, I can start the outlining or freewriting process on one of those on, say, Tuesday, then chip away at it through the week, leaving the weekend for fleshing out, revising, and polishing. All in time for a Monday morning submission.

There is a sense of accomplishment in following this system of habits, but I have noticed that I’ve been much more productive in generating text for projects outside this Substack as well. I suppose this is a result of what some behaviorists call “habit stacking,” the act of adding onto an existing ritual, increasing one’s capacity or productivity.

Let Me Once Again Inform You That Life Is With People

In my last post, I referred to a book about Jewish shtetl life called Life is With People. In that piece I focused on the communal nature of life and why it’s important to talk to other people.

The concept is relevant here as well. After all, what good are deadlines and commitments if they aren’t developed in service of people?

As someone who teaches writing (and I think Warner would agree with me here), the absolute first consideration any writer must make is an evaluation of their audience. “Who am I writing for?” is the central question from which all other writing decisions derive. The course I’m taking makes quite a big deal of this because it is a key factor that distinguishes writing done by human beings from writing compiled by AI language model algorithms.

Knowing that there is someone out there reading what I write (over 100 now! Won’t you join them?) has been fundamental to the evolution of my writing practice these past six months. This identifiable, engaged audience is something that Substack offers that academic writing categorically did not, at least for me.

Each week, I receive actual feedback. A lot of the feedback I get comes in the form of conversations that take place in the comments section of each piece (do that more, please!) and sometimes in private emails I get from readers. I really love these conversations. One of the things I want to achieve by writing this newsletter is to feel a little less lonely. This feedback really helps.

But some of the feedback available to me is also numerical; I can tell which posts get read more and which ones get read less. And this numerical feedback influences what I write about here. For instance, with the exception of my scathing criticism of Glass Onion (people do like provocation; it’s undeniable), the pieces I’ve written that focus on single works of art, new movies or old, don’t get the numbers that other, more broad and conceptual essays do.

It’s important to note that this has changed me. My experience with an audience has changed me. When I began this project, I expected my main focus to be enthusiastic engagement with under-appreciated works of art. I will still do this, but I’ve learned that putting the artwork into the foreground is less effective for my actual audience. When I do want to focus on a movie that I’m just really into — see my recent pop-up post about John Carpenter’s The Fog, for example, I will just know that it will have a limited audience and hope I don’t lose subscribers over it.

Here’s an example of the evolution of my writing practice in real time:

My original instinct was to focus this essay around the appreciation of a Fratellis song, “Acid Jazz Singer.”

But then I paused and said the following to myself: “your audience probably will never get as excited about this song as you are. Perhaps this is a mistake. If you want to do this, make the essay about a larger concept and use the song as an example.”

This is a real life example of how engaging with an audience on a regular basis informs my writing practice.

But That Song! It’s Very Wise, Really

Like all Fratellis songs, this one is really fun, witty, and a bit wild. But at its heart, it’s a story about a gaining a certain kind of wisdom, and there is a real wisdom here; a wisdom that directly relates to the importance of audience.

The singer condenses some of this wisdom into the following observations:

“Nothing comes easy/ Oh, it just comes free.

You could sing it better/ If you sing it for me, oh sister”

Think about that for a moment. Implied in this line is that the quality of what you do is directly tied to who you are doing it for. If you are singing for your own satisfaction, that’s fine, but think about how much better you could sing if you were singing for an audience. There is perhaps no line in popular music that has a better grasp of rhetoric than this one.

And I’ve found it to be true. This is of course subjective and I’m sure my style isn’t for everyone, but I absolutely believe that I have become a better writer because Substack has made me more attuned to my audience by writing for them on a regular basis. It’s a dialectical process that has given my readers a form and a shape. Someone to sing for.

This perspective about audience also has the potential to interfere (in a good way) with the temptation to constantly “brand” oneself. So much internet writing, including social media persona-building, has to do with marketing an image to, well, a market. In this environment, the audience is reduced to little more than a kind of consumer, when they could be oh so much more than that.

How much better is it to think of your audience less as a “market” and more as a community that you are serving? Now go listen to the Fratellis and let me know what you think.