Margaret Talbot writes another article about John Green. I’ve read four or five articles about the dude, but I’m still interested.
The neat thing about Green is that he made YouTube videos, wrote books, and did website stuff and then tied everything together to snowball his success. It’s like equivalent of the J.Lo singing (sort of) pop songs, marketing perfumes, and selling t-shirts at Kohl’s.
I suppose that writers are artists and aren’t supposed to be carefully packaging themselves like this, but they do.
Apt. 11d 
I see no shame at all in using social media and other means to get your work in front of the people who will like it.
Tree falling in the forest, etc.
No matter your medium, you create your work AND figure out where your audience “lives”. Then you make sue that your audience sees your work.
Creating and then waiting to be “picked” is like wanting a relationship and expecting the person to fall through the ceiling of your living room.
And like anything, if the work is poor quality, it won’t work. If the promotion is smarmy, it won’t work either. Creating good work AND building relationships with your audience takes time – there are no short cuts.
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I’ve noticed a slight trend towards the need to market/package among scientists recently — I don’t like it, partly for purely personal reasons (it’s not a strength of many, and particularly, it’s not a strength of many scientific personalities) but also for what it might mean in the long run for the science. There’s the problem that those who don’t market well, but were good scientists were able to find niches, which become more difficult to find when the marketing is a necessary adjunct to the substantive work. And, there’s the problem that certain kinds of work becomes privileged over others.
No moral judgment — I think people who publicize their work well *and* do good work are just doing the extra job of making sure that people hear about the good work. And perpetual marketing is just not going to attract my attention. There are blogs that start to feel like that, blogs that only see any creative content when there’s also something to sell, or where the push is too strong, and I don’t read those regularly, even if they stay in my feed.
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Same here – there were blogs that I used to enjoy but no longer read. There was a point in time where they switched to being either too generic or pushing too hard or generally lost what made them special, usually when they attracted a lot of sponsors, etc.
The ones who can do both are gold.
Curious – how did the best research become known before? I think that one of the benefits of social media for more introverted people (me included) is that you can moderate the level of your interaction. I think if the mindset is more “get my work in front of those who will appreciate it” rather than “sell, sell, sell”, there are more opportunities today to get your work out there. Fewer gatekeepers.
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Well social media doesn’t particularly contribute to knowing about the best research now. I’d say that in the old days, the best research got known by word of mouth by those in the field as well as personal knowledge of the work. Then, the main intermediary would be the journals.
A few researchers are now running media sites, now, with the ability to sign up for mailing lists. That broadens their reach, and provides access to those not in the loop (Mazur, an education research at Harvard, for example). That’s all good. On the other hand, there was a group that tried to crowdfund a research project, and that plan was quite iffy, not the least because the group was planning research that involved humans without being vetted by institutional research committees. 23&me, the direct genetic testing company ran afoul of FDA regulation, both in testing and in research and is now marketing themselves as a genealogy/genetic ancestry firm.
It’s a changing world, and we do need to learn how to cope with the changes. But, I’m not sure how each individual change is going to play out — when there are no middlemen, and science is being sold directly to the public, when publishers disappear and authors have to market themselves directly tot he public, and no middlemen for cab’s (Laura’s tweet link on the economics of Uber) and direct car-passenger interactions? I can see both the bad and the good. The main bad I see (and that economics is apparent in article Laura linked to about Uber) is that everyone is trying to pay for only the added cost of a service (the Uber article tries to incorporate the “free” car into the value for Uber drivers, for books, and blogs, the sheer joy of writing is supposed to be part of the value, for adjunct teaching, teaching itself). No one wants to pay for the infrastructure (oh, even for the electrical grid, generate your own solar power, and push the costs of the grid infrastructure to others).
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I was thinking about it in terms of extending the audience beyond who already learns of it through the means that you mention.
The middleman is still needed – the rigorous vetting, etc. The arts are a different kettle of fish than academic research. So much research is important but not understandable to most of the public. Academic research funding shouldn’t be a “beauty” contest like how charitable giving can be – kids’ causes/diseases are an easy “sell” but more obscure, icky diseases less so.
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