🔴 The best possible time to be a writer

Today’s guest is Leigh Stein, six-time author, cultural critic, creator of the newsletter Attention Economy, and book publishing coach. As she puts it, in her cultural criticism, she “makes fun of what the internet is doing to us.”

In this issue:

• ✍️ A useful distinction between “writing” and “content”

• 🤔 Finding and figuring out how to play to your unique advantages

• 🎬️ Approach side projects like a limited series for more effective results

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Leigh or watch it on YouTube.

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Do you want to publish a book? Maybe six? First, be 17. Be active on LiveJournal. Drop out of high school. Go to community college, then acting school. Move to New Mexico. Don’t get an MFA. Done? Great: publish your first book; you’ve done it. You’ll soon publish your second. This coming summer, you will publish your sixth.

This has been Leigh Stein’s path. She’s a largely self-taught writer who built a career using the internet and, along the way, has helped other writers do the same. Engaging with a community on LiveJournal in the early 2000s opened her eyes to ways of making a living as a writer, and today, she still feels like her “mission is to help other writers do something similar, to circumvent the gatekeepers by figuring out how to create content and build your own audience.”

Leigh makes a living through four different income streams:

1. Coaching: This is her “anchor business” and represents 60–80% of her income in any given year. Her services, oriented around helping writers progress their careers, include one-on-one sessions, editorial feedback, and influencer outreach, and more. A recent success: helping 64-year-old literary agent Betsy Lerner go viral on TikTok reading her college diaries, resulting in coverage in The New York Times and on CBS.

2. Teaching: This represents 10% of her income. Throughout the year, Leigh offers several courses, including one on memoir writing.

3. Newsletter: This represents another 10% of her income. After seven years writing her newsletter, Leigh only began offering a paid subscription last summer. “It's a newsletter about the internet side of book publishing.”

4. Writing: “It’s just hard to assign a percentage to writing,” Leigh says. There are years where she sells a book and years where she doesn’t; “I've had a year where I made six figures as a writer, and I've had a year where I've made $0 as a writer.”

Attention Economy, Leigh’s newsletter, has around 11,000 subscribers, 400 of whom pay for the privilege for a total of around $2,000 per month.

Writing vs. content

In one of her most popular newsletter issues, from last summer, Leigh urges her readers to “start differentiating between writing and creating content.” She described the newsletter audience she wrote that line to as people interested in her classes and coaching services, which is to say, professional writers and people working in the publishing industry; when she says “writing,” in this context, she’s specifically referring to writing meant for physical publication.

One distinction Leigh draws between her writing and her content is effort; her writing is “always professionally edited,” whereas her newsletter has no editor and is written quickly in 1–2 hours. Another important distinction is how the two forms generate income:

Leigh’s distinctions are useful and should be used as a model for any writer or creator, but depending on your preferred creative media, you may need to tweak the distinction. If you’re a YouTuber whose primary product is 30-minute monthly videos monetized through both YouTube Adsense and your own advertising partners, that’s your “writing,” and your “content” might be short-form videos across other platforms that funnel viewers back to your YouTube channel.

Attention is earned

Attention is a limited resource; there are only so many people with so much time in the day to read a book, watch a video, or read a newsletter.

The internet has made publishing any form of writing or video to distributed audiences easier. For a brief window, when fewer people were publishing on the internet, it was extremely easy to get your content in front of others. It’s harder now than it used to be, but still true in the infancy of any platform with built-in discoverability; many of the most successful writers on Substack were early adopters, and now it’s harder to build an audience there; the same is already true of Bluesky.

It’s still easy to get your work in front of other people, even at scale, but doing so requires more specialist knowledge than it used to; posting blindly into the ether used to be more effective than it is now. To survive in the creator economy, you have to become a good marketer. Leigh spoke about the volume of people in the creative writing world who have come through MFA programs, saying that these people aren’t necessarily advantaged. She did not get an MFA; she has published soon-to-be six books.

Content as joy, not chore

Content is a dialogue — this is another strong differentiation Leigh gives between writing (or “art,” as she said) and content.

Content is fluid and malleable; art is something you finish and can no longer edit. I don’t entirely agree with the second half of that statement, but I do think it’s a useful distinction for creators. You have to know when to stop working on something, whether that’s a book, a painting, or a long YouTube video; part of the craft is knowing when the piece is done.

Making content is a chore if all you want to do is write — in the sense that Leigh speaks about writing. The trick, I find, is in reframing those two things. The internet requires us to be full-spectrum communicators, not just to be good at writing, but to be good at crystallizing ideas, at understanding (by actively discovering) what audiences respond to, and at understanding different media as a quiver. You must find joy in sharpening different arrowheads and stocking the quiver.

Sure, we can’t all be as great at writing as we are at making TikTok videos, shooting photographs, or writing tweets. (Rearrange the order of those outputs to your own ability). But that’s why people like Leigh hang their shingles on the internet: if you’re an incredible novelist looking for someone to help you break into BookTok, she’s your person. Just not quite yet — she’s still wrapping up work on her next book.

Connect with Leigh on Instagram or TikTok.
Read and subscribe to Attention Economy.

🎙️ This was an excellent conversation. It was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:

• 00:00 Leigh's prolific content output

• 01:43 Is now the best time to be a writer?

• 04:38 Defining writing vs. content

• 08:47 The art is the product

• 16:45 Does form come before content?

• 20:25 TikTok’s instability and the importance of BookTok

• 23:09 Leigh's journey through the literary world

• 27:25 We're influencing, not influencers

• 34:54 Writing Attention Economy

• 40:52 How to make your content shareable

• 42:54 Destroying the stigma of self-publishing

• 45:55 The magical portal to likeminded people

• 48:54 Leigh's upcoming projects

• 52:27 Advice for other creators

If you prefer to listen on your favorite podcast platform, click here.

I love a limited series. Some TV shows can go on for five, six, 30 seasons … most can’t. Give me a beginning, but give me an end, and tell me it’s in sight. Limits benefit creativity. To that point, Leigh had some great advice. This won’t be the first time you’ve heard this sentiment, nor should it be the last.

Three easy rules:

1. Pick a length of time. One month should be the minimum for most projects.

2. Pick a collaborator. If you can do you, you do you. But if you need a second party to keep you accountable, it’s easier to get someone involved for a temporary project than an endless project.

3. Actually follow through. 

Leigh pulled off a great side project — really more of a bit — at the start of 2024, promoting her book "Self Care.” She explained the whole thing in her newsletter far better than I could, but the point is it worked. The shortest way I can describe it is she made up a fake job working for a fake company (from her book), pretended she’d quit book publishing to work there, then pretended she’d been fired from her pretend job. The bit went on for about eight weeks.

• One of her posts got 1 million views

• She was invited on multiple podcasts to talk about it

• It drove a significant spike in book sales

• It was “the most fun” she’d had “in a long time” — this is important and should be a primary goal for any good side project; break the monotony

The lesson here is to run side projects either separately or within your main projects and treat them like a limited series. Set rules. It’s easier to complete a challenge when you know where it ends.