- Garden writer starts with a small regional paper
- Moves to a larger city paper
- Writes a book
- Gets an agent
- Gets published several times.
- Wins award for best writing in garden books
- Starts writing online
- Get several more print books published
- Internet bubble takes out publishing companies. Advances shrink (really low if at all.)
- Writer goes all in on Internet and advertising revenue
- Create seven websites – a gardening empire
- Facebook comes along
- Intrepid writer continues
- E-books arrive and writer begins publishing himself.
- Welcomes Facebook.
- Welcomes YouTube.
- Welcomes e-books at Amazon.
- Writer shuts down six of the time sucking, low-income websites.
- Uploads multiple e-books.
- Facebook, YouTube and Google search all have algorithms determining content value
- Writer and garden-expert can’t compete with Facebook’s own internal content, forums etc. Shuts down his membership site and Q&A forums.
- Keeps Amazon ebooks.
- Pretty much stopped Facebook as he refuses to work for free for the biggest and richest content source in the world.
- Youtube is being evaluated for value. (update: video at Facebook is being evaluated as you read this.)
- Writer realizes his gardening experience won’t get passed down unless he gives it all away and finds another way to eat and pay the mortgage.
- Writer takes a deep breath, says, “screw it” and retires from full time garden writing.
- Writer realizes he’s a storyteller at heart, so he switches to fiction.
The story continues…
A few weeks after I wrote this draft, the data came out that video at both Youtube and Facebook were now the preferred way for delivering content on the Net. In other words, video was now more popular than text and the two largest Networks controlled video delivery.
As you might expect, I’ll have more on this in the near future.
(Insert “F” profanity), here we go again.