Tom Slee’s Self-Assessment

I admire the courage to make such an assessment public. Also, deeply surprised that the book sold so few copies. Buying it now.

If it’s out of print at the publisher and Slee holds the copyright, there are multiple avenues for self-publishing the ebook; I’d be delighted to hand over actual money in return for a pdf or epub rather than purchasing a used student copy (as offered by Powells) with nothing going to the author.

The source text for this situation is John Emerson, Les Erudits Maudits.

“Historically culture-producers were monks, gentlemen of leisure, military aristocrats, lackeys and retainers of the aristocracy and the church, and déclassé riffraff. Only in the nineteenth century did scholarship come to be defined as a job at a university […] Vestiges of the bohemian tradition still remain among poets and novelists, so that all that is required is for this model to be extended to nonfiction writing about history, philosophy, and literature.”

Tom Slee’s dream is recognizably a general dream that died. Look back at, say, the first post in The Valve all the way back in 2005. Then look at Adam Roberts’ farewell post in 2012. “If the sort of thing I write is worth paying for then I’m a mug to give it away for free; and if it isn’t worth paying for (of course a great deal of online writing isn’t) then I’m wasting everyone’s time, including my own, carrying on.” I think of all of the Valve publishing projects in which people rediscovered that, even with contemporary technology, publishing is work, publicizing is work, and that space didn’t open up when the Internet let its magically distributive powers go to work.

I haven’t regularly read Tom Slee’s blog because I am not that interested in technology issues, which is mainly what he writes about. I have less of an excuse for not having read his Walmart book, however, since I gather that is more along the lines of critique-of-contemporary-corporate-capitalism than it is about technology per se.

I read his self-assessment and I tend to think he is overestimating the importance of credentials, if by that he means academic credentials. Having advanced degrees is not, by itself, necessarily going to get his writing a bigger audience, I wouldn’t think. The possession of a PhD, esp. if without an academic job to go along with it, is unlikely to impress all that many people (which is one reason I don’t frequently publicize my own degree on my blog). Hundreds of thousands of people, indeed probably millions by this time, have PhDs or other comparable advanced degrees. It’s no longer, by itself, that much of a distinction. I suppose in certain cases it could make some difference on the margins in terms of book sales or blog traffic, but I’m skeptical.

As for self-promotion in blogging, it’s a tricky issue I think, partly because there are trade-offs involved re time etc. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook, for example, unlike many bloggers who use those platforms to try to drum up interest in what they write. I’m just not willing, so far, to spend the time that that would entail. But I’m a bit surprised that Slee, who blogs under his full name, has a clear focus of interest, and a clear reason for writing (i.e., to have a practical impact on specific issues) hasn’t developed a somewhat bigger audience. Part of it, perhaps, is what he says about his style and pace of writing; I’m not sure. (For the record, I’ll add that his 100 hits a day is *considerably* more traffic than my own blog receives, but that’s neither here nor there.)

The book looks like a prime candidate for a self-distributed ebook to me. This could be worthwhile financially for Tom Slee as well as serve a reader pool that appears to be not attractive enough for commercial presses.

‘Obtaining qualifications’ for your hard-gained expertise matters if you’re in Tom Slee’s situation not just for the sake of becoming credentialed as such, but because it is through the door barred to the uncredentialled that there lies the prospect of a university’s patronage in the form of employment – the lovely secure kind of employment where you are paid to be something rather than to do something, in a narrowly-defined, payment-by-results kind of a way. At least in Europe you don’t have to worry about health insurance, while you try to be an untenured intellectual.

“None of those things is likely to change. If anything, the effort has emphasized to me the importance of credentials”

I flipped on Meet the Press for the first time in years after giving up on it and whose enormous head do I find bloviating on important matters on my TV?

Newt F**king Gingrich.

Jesus.

@Francis Spufford

I don’t know Tom Slee personally and I certainly don’t know enough about his situation to make a judgment — perhaps, given his already acquired expertise, getting credentialled would indeed give him “the lovely…kind of employment” to which you refer.

What I do know however is that possessing such a credential is no guarantee of such employment, at least in the field(s) I am familiar with and in the country I most familiar with, and moreover that the “barred door” is not so barred once someone becomes well-known enough. (At least in the U.S., there are plenty of examples of well-known writers and journalists who have university affiliations of one sort or another without possessing advanced degrees, but “well known” or “famous” is a key here.)

I’m guessing about Mr Slee’s situation myself, quite possibly wrongly. And I do know about the possibilities for slipping through said doorway on the basis of reputation rather than credentials – I have a fractional academic job myself in London, on exactly that basis – but there is all the same a problem I recognise in the gaining, at cost, of knowledge which you then don’t possess in a credential-shaped package. It isn’t convertible the way that a doctorate is, unless you’re lucky.

the lovely secure kind of employment where you are paid to be something rather than to do something, in a narrowly-defined, payment-by-results kind of a way

I’ve been a freelance writer & an hourly-paid lecturer, and am now on a permanent (albeit fractional) academic contract, so I do know what you mean. But bear in mind that the “something” you’re being paid to be isn’t necessarily “scholar” – it’s more likely to be “teacher of what needs teaching this year”.

I feel a lot of sympathy with Tom, as well as a lot of respect – his Long Tail series parallelled a blogging idea I had early on, except that he did it ten times better – and, I confess, a touch of envy. I too have a slowish, longish-form blog; over the Christmas break I wrote about two academic papers’ worth of posts on my current interest, legal theory (don’t all rush at once). I think I write some pretty good stuff on there; the traffic it gets is minimal, micro-milli-minimal, nano-minimal. (14 views today.) I’ve made a bigger splash, in terms of reader numbers, by starting a separate blog about beer. I too have a book out, for generous values of ‘out’; it was reviewed on CT, as it happens. It’s an academic hardback and I don’t think it’s sold as many as 200. (Contact me about conference rates, if you think you may have seen me at a conference in the last few years.) And I too feel the lack of recognition, citations, invitations to do stuff.

What I can do from my academic perch is read academic journals and get conference attendance fees paid, which gives me a head start in terms of putting myself about on the academic scene. But you can be putting yourself out on the academic scene for an awful long time before you earn as much respect as Tom has – or get your work in front of as many people as have copies of No one makes you shop at Wal-Mart.

Apart from that, I think Hidari @14 nails it. Poetry used to be the only field with more writers than readers – now journalism has gone the same way, taking essays and belles lettres with it.

For heaven’s sake, there should be an ebook. Take it from a publisher (a very small publisher, but a publisher); any book of smallish readership and international interest will get a bigger audience if it’s available as an ebook, because international shipping is so bloody expensive.

Yeah, I just emailed the publisher about ebook availability. I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry about “Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide,” just to list the most egregious example, being published in paperback format only.

” Notably, he gets a lot of respect from people whom he has sharp disagreements with, and who strongly disagree with him (e.g. Clay Shirky and Steven Berlin Johnson, whose basic take appears to be that if the critics they had to engage with with were all as intelligent as Tom, they would be in a far happier world)”

I just want to second this from a first-person perspective: there are several people, such as Nick Carr, on that list, but Slee is primus inter pares (and I’ll heartily second the value of the Wal-Mart book as well.)

But if he had worked on getting his credentials first, by the end of that credentialing process, would he still have had any ideas worth sharing?

I think the short answer to those struggling to find the book is bookbutler.com – apparently even WHSmiths stock it.

Like others, I really enjoyed the Walmart book. I’m also very surprised by the low sales figures, though I do wonder if the title puts off some potential readers – especially those outside of the States – who might think it is a book about the evils of Walmart.

I do wonder if the title puts off some potential readers – especially those outside of the States – who might think it is a book about the evils of Walmart.

Or indeed read the title literally and think it’s a Libertarian screed in defence of Wal-Mart (as a friend who saw it on my desk did once).

Book titles are hard – at least, they’re easy to get wrong. The title and the jacket image of my book are both unusual, memorable and directly relevant to what’s inside. Unfortunately, the title doesn’t relate to the jacket image; neither the title nor the image is referred to in the table of contents, so the reader effectively has to read the entire book to find out what they refer to; and (most relevantly to Tom’s example) the title on its own is an enormous downer, the kind of idea you instinctively don’t want in your head. Looking at my publisher’s catalogue now, I’m quite struck by how many authors have given their academic monographs titles with inspiring, upbeat overtones: “Days of wonder”, “Chords of freedom”, “Architects of the resurrection”. “Days of wonder” or “More work! Less pay!” – it’s not a tough choice.

There is a link to a book related to this phrase on tslee, but not the slightest explanation for why, what it has to do with Tom Slee and his book. That reminds me uncomfortably about certain SEO spammers who buy up expired domains, re-host the content that was there but add links to their own stuff to boost their Google ranking.

If it is something like that, I suppose it shows that even Google has a way to go with this “allocating attention fairly” thing.

It’s possible I’m on a wild goose chase here, and there’s a perfectly sensible reason why the N-oMYS@W page has a link to this author. If so, I’m sorry about that! But it seems really strange to me.

That probably came out as more snippy than I meant it to. I’m certainly not saying Phil is to blame for the pricing MUP decided upon for his book, any more than Tom Slee is for the lack of an ebook; both cases, however, demonstrate little ways in which the broader ecosystem for getting knowledge out there once it has been produced fail, and fail badly. As it happens, I’ve just requested a copy of MW!LP! to be sent to me via InterLibraryLoan, across a state border, a mountain range, and 550 miles, but it would have been nice to be able to just pay MUP $10 for a pdf or epub file.

There’s no tragedy in my not reading Phil’s book, especially since I don’t actually contribute in any meaningful way to the broader public sphere, but it is a problem that those who do are also extremely unlikely to encounter it. When the serious writing that ought to be getting serious attention is hard to find and expensive, while the carelessly written fluff is ubiquitous and cheap, the public as a whole suffers.

Tom Slee should set up or join a group blog of reasonably like-minded peers, at least one of whom should like one-liners. To keep readers, you need a new post every day. This is difficult for an individual who holds a day job, and impossible for one who likes to write long pieces. The blog that lets me post for it has about 3,000 readers a day. My writing is certainly not 30 times better than his.

” It’s particularly difficult to communicate this on CT, because the supposed leftism of people here tends to be blinded by their meritocratic success within a limited sphere”.

It can’t be pointed out enough that when Micheal Young created that word he meant it as a bad thing. Obviously we don’t live in a meritocracy or anything like it. But that’s not the point. It’s not even anything to aim at.

Not to be too presumptuous, but I’m curious as to why someone like Slee was never invited to CT. Seems he would have fitted in well.

“Good for those six or seven, bad for everyone else.”

Sure it’s only a personal opinion, like a best books of 2012 list or what not. I only had two (idiot) regulars at my old blog, and was happy for them. Didnt make it on Henrys national treasures list either, but what can you do?

Far be it from me to pay attention to your rhetoric, or to the suggested range of solutions here. As usual, you feel free to insult people who disagree with you while threatening to ban them if they reply in kind.

Rich Puchalsky:
the supposed leftism of people here tends to be blinded by their meritocratic success within a limited sphere
I wouldn’t make assumptions about people you don’t know. You don’t know me and therefore don’t know whether I’ve had any “meritocratic success” or not. And your suggestion that society should pay anyone who wants to write to do so seems rather unhelpfully, yes, utopian, esp. in the context of this thread, though if someone wanted to pay me to blog I would happily accept the money, of course.

Then there’s James Wimberley @39, simultaneously condescending and naive:

Tom Slee should set up or join a group blog of reasonably like-minded peers, at least one of whom should like one-liners. To keep readers, you need a new post every day. … The blog that lets me post for it has about 3,000 readers a day. My writing is certainly not 30 times better than his.

First, the self-assured, imperative phrasing is offensive: Slee should do such-and-such. I know Wimberly means to make what he sees as a helpful suggestion but it comes across as a command. Second, the assertion that to keep readers you need a new post every day is at best only half-true. Crooked Timber keeps readers and it doesn’t have a new post every day. Once a blog has an established audience it doesn’t matter what it does b.c people come to the blog to interact and talk with each other as much as with the posters. CT maintains a pretty high quality of posts but if it didn’t its audience would continue to be large b.c the commenters would just come to talk to each other. A poster at LGM can put up a two-line post and get 100 comments, b.c. the blog has an established readership. So the statement that you need a new post every day to keep readers is at best a half-truth and at worst displays ignorance of the ecology of the blogosphere.

The bit where you suggested that I was one of the “pansies” and “whiners” “who present every policy disagreement as if it is about traffic tickets”? The terms had been used by another commenter already, but are certainly tolerably insulting (your earlier crack in the same thread about my “incredible, laughable self-flattery” that I was a “a free thinker, capable of appreciating wisdom wherever it may be found” seem to me to be roughly equivalent to my crack above). If we banned people for this level of offensiveness, you’d have gotten the bum’s rush a long time ago. When you did get a 72 hour suspension was when you tried to derail a thread by suggesting that a guest-poster’s job was literally to figure out justifications for war. You’ve been left alone e.g. when you got onto your No-One Who Wasn’t There Like Me Is Entitled To Say Anything About Occupy, And Boy, The Things I’d Say About My Fellow Commenters If Only I Wasn’t Likely To Be Censored By The Man Here At CT hobbyhorse a few weeks ago. We’re prepared to tolerate some degree of obnoxiousness (although you do certainly push it a bit), and you do seem to thrive on publicly suggesting that you’re being persecuted.

And if you want to get into the merits as you suggest, your argument is my bum. I happen to think that Tom Slee is an excellent and under-rated writer, one whom I disagree with about lots of things, but one who I always learn from reading. Therefore, I suggest to readers that they should read him, editors that they should look at his stuff and so on. If suggesting that I like someone’s work, and people should (if they want to) see if they like his stuff too, and want to buy it or (if they’re in that position) publish it, is an argument stinking of dubious politics, then we’re in a sad old world altogether, and it’s hard to see how it could ever get any better, except through quite radical measures indeed. Book reviewers who have the impudence to suggest in print that they like this book, but that one, not so much: to the tumbrils with ’em! Scientific journals, with editors who use their cultural capital to accept some manuscripts and reject others, on the basis of their apparent merits as reported through peer review: off with their heads! Perhaps Citizen Puchalsky might care to expand on how this draconian regime will apply to closet meritocrats who tell their mates that Bridesmaids 3 wasn’t great, and they should really save their money …

I posted my 54 before seeing Henry’s 53.

The Internet supposedly lowers the barriers to entry for people who want to write new works, but it also can lead to a winner-take-all situation in which the people at the top get rewarded lavishly and the others not at all.

So much Twilight fan fiction, but only one Fifty Shades of Gray……

@56:”The problem comes when attention translates into success for a living person as opposed to a work — not artistic success, but the kind of success that determines whether someone can continue to write or not.”

Everyone: Stop giving attention to anyone living. Now.

I’m trying to find an alternate way to support Tom Slee — and other people like him — that doesn’t require that he, and everyone else, win the attention sweepstakes.

That doesn’t mean that people can’t recommend living people, no. It does mean that a way should be found to support people without having to make a case that they’re one of the best.

I have more to say about community support, probably a bit later.

“Rich, this may be a question that’s too broad to answer in this context, but I’m unable to picture the improvement to society that you’re proposing here.”

You might want to look at Tom Slee’s Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche. A quote: “Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.” Yes, even the activity that Henry presents as the most natural and most harmless apolitical thing in the world.

One way to protect these niches — if you decide that that is what you want to do — is to appeal to a community model of support rather than a meritocratic one. Actually there’s a whole lot of this that goes on already. If you want to get a grant from the local arts council, you have to live in the town or the state, and no one makes any pretense that you’re a better artist than all of the people living elsewhere. Within universities, the sciences try to keep up the idea that only the most promising research gets funded, no matter where it’s from, but most departments, including the humanities, more or less have a large entrance-to-the-community requirement after which you get funded no matter what. Even within areas dominated by the market, such as pop music, there’s often an attempt to appeal to people who like a local sound.

politicalfootball, you write that “I enjoy reading CT and comment here every now and then, but I don’t really identify myself as part of a “CT community”.” I suggest that there’s some aspect of your own behavior that doesn’t really fit. You’re clearly not on a hunt for the best stuff written, ever: if so, no one would read any blog. Perhaps there’s some aspect of topical chat that you’re interested in that doesn’t come under the same category as reading the best works ever? Sure, but in that case, it’s a preference that you’ve had for many years — at least, I remember comments of yours from years back — so you have an interest in “the kinds of things discussed at CT”, perhaps “in the manner discussed at CT”. How many years does this go before you say, hey, maybe I’m in a community? However defined.

Ideally, I’d like for everyone to get a guaranteed minimum wage, pretty much no matter what they do. This is nowhere near as utopian, outside the U.S., as prevailing U.S. opinion would make it seem. Then people could choose to write whatever they want if they could live on that minimum and not have to be concerned with winning the market. Failing that, I think an appeal to community support will sometimes work better than an appeal to meritocratic judgement. But this is getting too long now.

Or indeed read the title literally and think it’s a Libertarian screed in defence of Wal-Mart

FWIW, I had done exactly that until this thread.

Decisiveness not being my long suit, I wrote a self assessment as a goad to New Year resolve; an attempt to deliver a needed kick up my own backside while being as realistic as subjectively possible. The gratifying response and concrete suggestions here have been much more effective goads to action. Many thanks to all, and particularly Henry for the post. I will try not to take away the message that whingeing in public is a good way to go.

The interaction between credentials and blogging seems complex. For me, just to clarify, I’m lucky to have a regular job that pays pretty well, so I’m not looking for credentials towards a career, more to gain some “platform” from which to reach wider audience. So I suspect my issues are different from those who have tried to use blogging and public writing as part of an effort to move up the academic ladder. It seems to me that credentials gained outside can translate into blogging audience, but the reverse is more rare because a blog has to be spectacularly successful, and verifiably so, to be something you can point to as an achievement. Aside: in the recent essay collection “The Reputation Society” – about how online reputation systems may make formal systems obsolete – each of the authors listed their formal academic or business credentials in their bio.

Between The Lines have got the digital rights to the book, as of last year, and I believe are moving as quickly as a small outfit can into that side of publishing. I’ve asked them for current purchasing information. I’ll post here if I hear back from them.

Note that Swinburne was nutty, and I hope for a more cheerful worldly strategy for tomslee.

Rich @63:

I recognize the problem that you’re describing here. I’m just unclear on your proposed solution. You’re describing a collective action problem, but you seem to fall prey to it yourself. After all, the post from Tom Slee was interesting and illuminating. Couldn’t you have picked something less effective and more obscure to illustrate your point?*

On other issues:

-The communities you describe are geography-based, and thus exist in the form you describe only because of natural barriers in the physical world. Each of those communities would prefer to have the Museum of Modern Art, but failing that, they still aim for meritocracy as best as they can manage. Midland City still tries to get Rabo Karabekian and Kilgore Trout to come to their arts festival. And let’s face it, Midland City sucks.

You’re clearly not on a hunt for the best stuff written, ever: if so, no one would read any blog.

“Best” is a more complicated concept than you allow here. A peer-reviewed scientific journal is “better” than a popular science tract, but I am often going to get more benefit from the latter. I bet I could easily come up with 10 different axes on which to measure the value of reading material.

Also, I’m not grasping the nature of your beef with Henry, who seems to be doing the exact thing here that you recommend. Surely there are more brilliant works available than Tom Slee’s, and there are definitely more mainstream works. Slee and Henry, however, are a part of the same internet community, and thus Slee’s work comes to Henry’s attention. When Mr. Slee becomes an international sensation, then I think you can lament his stardom. Maybe then you can accuse him of selling out, man, and tell people that you knew him when …**

*I know that reads like snark, but I think I’m being serious.
**Okay, that’s just snark.

I think its important to understand that while pursuing credentials may increase the chance of becoming well-recognized for one’s efforts by a factor of ten, that’s changing the odds from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100.

Like most things on the Internet (and ever more so off), the Power law of popularity and recognition holds sway. If you have 10 regular readers, you’re probably already well above the 50th percentile of blog popularity, 100 puts one easily in the top 1% and probably the top 0.1%. The trouble is that one is not semi-widely recognizable in any real sense until one is part of the top 0.001%

And yes, Tom Slee’s blog is excellent. I’ve added it to my reading list.

Like most things on the Internet (and ever more so off), the Power law of popularity and recognition holds sway.

When I was new to blogging and interested in stats, I started a series of blog posts dedicated to showing that

(a) when you graph blog popularity a power law distribution isn’t actually what you get

(b) or a “long tail” (it’s more of a “gappy fence”)

and more generally
(c) a chart showing a series of values in rank order is an incredibly simplistic representation of data and about the least informative way of doing it – although it does focus lots of attention on the “head” end of the chart, which is good for people who like cheering the winners.

I got about three posts in, then discovered that somebody had already done it better and at much greater length. Somebody being Tom Slee.

uffy @72
That he [Slee] sees an academic post as his only real hope of making “it” work is telling and ominous.

Slee specifically said in his comment at 67 that he is not interested in an academic post, or at least that is not the main reason he is thinking about getting credentialed. Slee wrote at 67: “For me, just to clarify, I’m lucky to have a regular job that pays pretty well, so I’m not looking for credentials towards a career, more to gain some “platform” from which to reach a wider audience.”

@67: respect.

Found it in the local library. Remember them? Private possession is so 2oth century…