the outlier

drawing maps

hello,

It’s been an extraordinary week or so and I’m still pondering it.

One unalloyed excellent time was the Sunday LIVE for paid subscribers. We had a wide-ranging chat about writing and publishing books, I answered questions on structuring your writing and how to pursue traditional and self-publishing at the same time. It was great fun to do and we ended up chatting for about 90 minutes.

You can see the whole thing here, including a transcript and some useful links relating to self-publishing.

book project AMA

I’ll definitely do more of these types of sessions. If there’s anything specific you’d like covered then as ever, let me know. I’ll probably enlist some smart chums at some point too. Subscribe to watch this one and be a part of future events.

And before we continue, a small bit of substack hygiene courtesy of Poorna Bell.

Liking these newsletters helps them show up in the general melee and declare themselves to new readers so if you do like them, like them!

the books📖

I’ve met a lot of interesting people this week, several of which I found at TikTok HQ. The global marketing team got a bunch of us content creators in for a panel discussion and hammered us with largely well-intentioned questions for an hour or so. It was very cool to meet everyone and to consider TikTok from other angles than my own. More on this below.

for your interest

drawing maps

drawing maps

Nicolaus Germanus's 1467 Latin world map according to Ptolemy's 2nd projection

I’ve been thinking a lot about maps.

This adventurousness has been partly prompted by one of my fellow writerbois Ranjit Saimbi who said, in his piece on abstractions,

Whenever the rug is pulled out from under our collective understanding, a period of disruption ensues.

The US Election is the obvious example. If you’ve been on Twitter over the past few months, the result is no surprise at all. If you’ve been watching traditional news, you might be shocked. I’ve been shocked at the discrepancy between the two. It seems that even with all its flaws and extremities, Twitter maps reality closer than the news. You might not like it but as historian and podcaster Dominic Sandbrook said on election night, you’re probably looking at the wrong map.

2016 was not an aberration. All those people who said at the time: “This is not America”... This is America.

Sandbrook hosts the very good and extraordinarily popular The Rest Is History podcast and given they’ve been selling out shows at The Royal Albert Hall, alternative media is clearly here. The number of people listening to podcasts has tripled over the last decade, Joe Rogan's regular podcast audience is about 28x larger (14m v. 500k) than CNN's primetime audience, and individual Substack writers might reach one million inboxes on their own. Spencer Kornhaber from The Atlantic says of new media that ‘to label it alternative seems ridiculous’. At this point our map of whose voices actually matter is way off.

To come back to another alternative media and discuss TikTok, we were asked for our thoughts on the platform and how we think about what we’re building on there. 5 of us were sat in a room and all being totally different, we’d probably never seen each other’s work before. I talk about books, one girl makes comedy skits raising awareness of women’s health issues, one guy was just hilarious, another girl covers film, tv and fashion and another shares interior design tips and sells her own line of head wraps. TikTok is its own undiscovered country where it turns out you’re living on a tiny island in a long, cloudy archipelago of untracked places.

It’s actually pretty hard to articulate what TikTok is, something I discovered when I was asked how I explain it to other people by the global head of marketing. It’s relatively new, pretty weird and still popularly associated with dancing. My answer, partly to wind people up but partly in absolute seriousness, is that these platforms are what you make of them. if you want to dance you can dance. If you want to be super racist then you can probably do that. If you want to find great books to read you can do that too. It’s certainly a fantastic place to find recipes.

I then said that the great skill of right now is shaping your algorithmic environment. What you see on these platforms is your responsibility, the algorithms so attuned to what you do that they will give you more of what you seek out, deliberately or not. You have to consciously train your tools to get the best from them, drawing your own map as you go. If you won’t or can’t do that, it’s probably best to put them down and perhaps that’s not the worst idea anyway.

We were asked about how we measure our own success on TikTok and I had two answers. Firstly, there are the obvious numbers of views and followers. Then I think that these social networks are in themselves, new media that are yet to reach their full expression. I’m not sure if anyone has made a piece of art that truly belongs to TikTok or Instagram or wherever else. If they have, I’d like to see it.

Our new Booker Prize winner, Bath-based author Samantha Harvey also practises sculpture and teaches creative writing. When she was asked what advice do you give to students, she replied,

Something I come back to is how you can allow the form of a novel to say something that can’t be put into words.

I wonder if someone will make the most of one of these new forms, take us off the map in some way, expand the territory to somewhere we don’t know exists yet. It’s something I think about quite a bit.

It’s been a very strange week in all sorts of ways. Listening to someone read out a introductory paragraph about me was bizarre, all the variety and detail that described me exactly while getting nowhere near containing me and who I am now, who I will be in future.

Ranjit quoted Borges to close his piece and I’m going to quote Rebecca Solnit. A Field Guide To Getting Lost has remained with me in the years since I read it.

Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an out-grown garment. And some people travel far more than others.

various getting losts

to read

Read Orbital by Samatha Harvey. It’s beautiful and strange and low key and lovely (amazon / independents).

I finished Dark Age, the fifth Red Rising Book. It’s shockingly violent but I still want to know what’s next in the increasingly complex story. I’ll read the next one but not right away. If you have a bloodthirsty, action-oriented person to buy books for Christmas, you could do worse than get them the box set.

I wrote a quick snippet on the power of a nemesis the other week and I’ve found a better one by Wolfish author Erica Berry.

a quote

in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things

– from Orbital by Samantha Harvey

lastly

Thanks for reading! My work is made possible by you so if you’d like to support me you can buy my books, hire me to do something or you can become a paid subscriber using the button below.

If you want to help me out for free, you can share this letter with someone who might enjoy it, either on social media or by directly sending it to them using the button.

I’ll see you next time.

---