Nothing wrong with small corners
Fascinating thoughtful post by
silveradept on the performativity element of social media.
One of the thoughts I had on this was finding one's niche, and that maybe not everybody wants a massive cadre of followers as opposed to a discriminating and engaged rather smaller number. Some people want to address a rally, and others prefer a cosy salon-type conversation. There's a place for both.
Which resonates for me with a whole lot of thoughts around the Big Popular Success and the Enduring If Perhaps Somewhat Cult. And that it depends what sort of success you want (though one does hears of Big Bestsellers whingeing that they don't get srs critical attention, and Litcrit Darlings wishing they were actually megasellers...). If one looks at those lists of the bestsellers of whatever year there will probably be 1, 2, maybe even 3 titles that one has heard of, and the rest lost in the mists of history. While there will probably be some book published in the same year that was not on those lists but is still in print or at least still read and loved.*
(Contemporaries' predictions were usually wide of the mark, as with whoever it was - can it have been Henry James? - who thought that the works of Hugh Walpole [who he**] were for the ages but PG Wodehouse was ephemeral trivia.)
This latched on, for me, with a piece into today's Guardian Weekend about failure, which evoked the thought that, really, there is gradation and a scale and there is such a thing as modest success and moderate ambition.
My website does not get huge numbers of hits, but it gets a steady stream of interest as one of the go-to sites for the topics it covers. And this is quite enough for me, really. It does what it does.
*Antonia Forest wrote relatively little compared to Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil, and I doubt any of her books were ever massive bestsellers, but we can see from the discussions on trennels that she has a devoted and engaged following who will make significant efforts to get hold of her books.
**I do in fact know who he was, and have even read some of his works - bogged down in The Herries Chronicles when I was 13 and never returned, read Jeremy at Crale - but among his contemporaries he's rather overshadowed. Is anything of his still in print? This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2250158.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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