Dan Luu
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My style vs. monetization
🕑 Added 2021-12-21 20:14:50 +0000 UTCI've been thinking about whether not it's plausible that I could make "serious money" (say, 1/5th of what I'd make as a full-time programmer) by writing.
One major strike against this is how much time I spend fact checking things. One example of this is there's a post I wanted to write on training intuition, where I wanted to use the story in https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1468426115362418691 as an illustrative example.
Unfortunately, the story appears to be quite bogus and it took me a couple hours to figure out what happened and how this story got passed around. The story is told in David Eagleman's pop-sci book, Incognito and is quoted verbatim in Kathy Sierra's pop-tech book Badass.
It's a nice story, the kind of thing that people would pass around as an insightful nugget after reading it, which is how I ended up hearing about it. I'm guessing that neither of the people who wrote up the incorrect story in books read the paper Eagleman cited as a reference for the story. The people who wrote it up were actually better off for not having done any serious research into the topic since that would've taken a couple of hours and someone can not do the research and write up the story in a minute or two. The real story isn't really more likely to be viral than the story they told. If anything, it's harder to write up the real story and have it go viral since the real story has less contrarian appeal.
In the case of the post for that story, I think there's a good chance I'll still write up some version of the post someday, but I frequently end up abandoning the post when I realize there's nothing interesting to write if the story or fact I heard is actually false.
Although I seem to write pretty quickly compared to most people when it comes to the time it takes to write up an idea that I've had, I often take much more time trying to figure out if my idea is solid than I do writing it up, especially if you include the amortized cost of posts that I work on but then abandon. I think most prolific writers who've monetized writing about a wide variety of topics don't do this and get a lot of mileage out of writing things that have a lot of errors, e.g., https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1254720673592688641 .
If we're talking about how viral something will be or how monetizable it is, spending time fact checking has very little value, possibly even negative value, and has a very large opportunity cost.
Some people monetize writing that isn't bogus by sticking to a small set of areas where they have expertise. In principle, I could do that with programming, but when I write about programming, I frequently want to write up posts that discuss technical details (e.g., https://danluu.com/cgroup-throttling/ , or the posts programming posts referenced in https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/ , as opposed to something like https://danluu.com/culture/ ), and those posts tend to be time consuming. The posts that involve technical details often involve a programming or research phase that takes over an order of magnitude more time than the writing.
If even half of my programming-related posts discuss technical details, the time spent making sure the technical details are right will end up completely dominating writing time. If I look at who's effectively monetized writing tech-related stuff, it's overwhelmingly people who don't do writing about technical details, which makes sense in that that takes so much more time to do that there aren't really enough hours in the day to do it and keep up with the volume that people who don't write about technical details produce. I don't think there's anything wrong with not writing technically detailed posts, but I don't think I'd personally want to switch to a model where I don't write technically detailed posts.
Something I wonder about is if I might be able to get large sponsors, which would reduce the need to monetize by getting a lot of exposure. I don't know how to evaluate the odds of getting large sponsors, but I would guess that it's pretty low. The people who are in tech who've been successful that I know of (like Evan You) have gotten corporate sponsors for doing work that corporations use. Some people seem to have gotten large sponsors, e.g., in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant , Scott Alexander notes that some of his funding has come from "Unsolicited gifts from rich patrons", but everyone I know of who has large sponsors / patrons puts out material with a level of fact checking that I wouldn't for myself. The people I know of who write freely publicly available things I generally consider sound (e.g., Jeff Kauffman, Ben Kuhn, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, Jamie Brandon, etc.) don't appear to have the audience size or composition that would lead to them getting "unsolicited gifts from rich patrons".
I've been talking about this with Jamie Brandon, who's been giving living off of writing donations a shot via https://github.com/sponsors/jamii and he has a similar feeling, that the kind of writing he wants to do isn't really suitable to make a "serious money" and may not even produce the equivalent of minimum wage and a 2000 hour work year.
His tentative solution to that is to fund himself by contracting and do the kind of writing he wants to do without changing his style to monetize better. While that definitely seems workable, and has other benefits (like not getting too disconnected from problems in industry after a long time away), I wonder if there's something else that would work well for him that wouldn't involve major changes to his style, and likewise for me.
Comments
I've also been trying to write long-form technical content for quite a while (i.e. 5000+ words for a guide) - also tried to sell those directly trough my own channels. It's tough. My newest guide is essentially a deep-dive on Git's merge/rebase/cherry-pick internals, but written in a way that people do benefit from it in their day-to-day work-life. Which is also the feedback I have been getting from people who bought it. But that doesn't help if I haven't quite managed to sell a hundred copies yet. I suppose one issue being that people think they completely grok Git and don't really need understanding, but then when you watch them during the day, there's plenty of "why"? moments, over and over again. And digging into the internals (books, Git mailing list, trying out stuff myself), making sure everything is technically sound and then re-phrase all that stuff pedagogically, took me 2+ months, in addition to my day job. As you said, all the research basically takes up most of your time. It's a bit frustrating, because I actually do love digging deep into tech topics, challenging conventional wisdoms and habits, and helping people do a better job, but it doesn't work out in terms of effort vs return.
That’s quite the challenge. I feel like somebody who is pursuing an interesting pathway in a similar but also very different vein is Kyle Kingsbury. He focused on one particular topic and redefined what it meant to write and think about testing of guarantees of distributed systems, so much so that he effectively started selling something like his public seal of approval, which came to have real world value. I don’t know how long term successful that has been for him, but it it certainly seemed remunerative at the time. So, maybe one way of finding something money making for you writing wise would be to focus on the topic you feel is under discussed that you could and would want to write about. One such avenue could be getting paid to offer your evaluations of companies upcoming technical challenges publicly in return for posting a long in depth article about it on your blog with a link to a job post. I think you would find a lot of interesting stuff out that way, it’s what I would want to read more of from you and companies would get very targeted recruiting from it, assuming there’s a market and enough of them want to play. My gut says focusing on something overly specific for a while and seeing what works and doesn’t would be a fruitful exercise, even if it isn’t particularly lucrative short term.
