The Artisan Age

The convergence of consumers who want higher quality and artists who want to produce it.

Recently I announced that I was stepping down as CEO of BookSweeps—a move that I think some might think bizarre, given that I’d only spent four months in the role. I had my reasons, and I believe firmly that leaving is what is best not only for me but for the company and for the authors it serves. There are no hard feelings there. Just a realization that my intentions for the direction of the business didn’t gel with the intentions of the founder. We’re cool.

In my statement, however, I also shared that I thought we are all entering a new era—what I’m calling “The Artisan Age.” And in this I see entangled with the spirit of the age a shift, both in the public and in the artists and creators who serve them. I’m seeing a trend toward “analog,” I said. Readers who want physical books. Viewers who want to own movies and televisions shows on physical media. Listeners who want something tangible, touchable, handleable that they can play when they want, without the bother or the limitation of having to rely on a subscription.

It’s about more than merely owning physical media, I think. Though that is increasingly more attractive in an era where everything is digital and intangible. But I believe it has more to do with a need for grounding. A need, really, for an experience that we can count on to be real, to have the quality of existence.

One response to my idea, that we’re all shifting back to wanting more physical media, including books, was a response from a reader who assured me that she will be sticking to ebooks. Mostly because, who has the space for all those paperbacks and hardcovers? Shelves cost money, and wall space.

And me being me, I replied with, “I’ll be keeping my ebooks, too. Because it’s incredibly hard on the back to lug a backpack filed with 10,000 paperbacks onto an airplane.”

I don’t see digital media going anywhere.

Though it’s true that people are starting to drive away from a purely digital landscape. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story entitled Americans Are Canceling More of Their Streaming Services , which reported that Hulu, Netflix, and other popular streaming services were seeing a dramatic dip in subscriptions. Premier streaming apps such as Disney+ have taken hits as well, as subscribers cancel the services among rising subscription rates and perceived drops in quality—many of the shows that Disney+ premiered over 2023 came with production price tags in the hundreds of millions, but failed to earn out after release. Some of these shows received virtually no audience at all, even in franchises that have traditionally proven to be money-printing machines.

Imagine, just five years ago, suggesting that a Star Wars or Marvel show or film would get so little viewership that it would fail to earn its way into the black. Absurd!

It would be easy enough to blame the ever-increasing costs of subscriptions for the exodus from streaming, but there may be a more impactful cause underlying things. Put simply, consumers are becoming increasingly tired of purchasing media that, frankly, they don’t actually own.

As an example, a number of streaming services have recently removed movies and television shows from hosting on their sites due to losing the licensing rights for those programs, and in doing so they were eliminated even for customers who “bought” these items. A recent editorial from LifeHacker.com  details the issues behind the ordeal. But the gist is this: When you purchase a digital video, you don’t actually “own” it. If you can’t download it to your own storage, then it’s subject to be taken away at any time. No refunds.

The same is true for books, music, even art. Anything you’ve purchased that lives on some remote server is living on borrowed time. A license is revoked, a server crashes, a company folds, and all that media stored in their part of the cloud goes away with them, leaving you with no recourse.

So that’s fueling some of the trend toward a more “analog” relationship between consumers and their media. But the second half of the equation appears to be “experience.”

I like a good virtual environment as much as the next guy, but eventually the pixels and faux ambience just can’t cut it. I can get by for a long while with the sounds of a café playing from a track on YouTube—I can feel like I’m not stuck in my home office for weeks at a time. But inevitably what I really want and crave can’t come to me through a digital representation. I need the tactile, visceral, real world. I need the rude and insensitive reality of being in a place where people aren’t practicing good manners or being mindful that not everyone in the room wants in on your Zoom call. I need the feeling that the room is too hot or too cold, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I need to contend with the sound of coffee grinding, with the smell of someone’s breakfast reminding me that I haven’t eaten yet, with the anxiety of watching my laptop battery dip into the red with no open outlets anywhere.

If all that sounds awful, it just means you haven’t spent enough time locked in a home office trying to fake it with YouTube. But there are good things out in the three-dimensional world, too. Out here, we can order a croissant with our coffee, or meet a new friend when they wonder if they can plug in to the outlet next to our knee. We get to look up from our work to see coffee shop art, or we discover a new book to love in the “Little Lending Library.” Perks come when you live in the real world.

All of this is somehow meshed and tangled up in what I’m calling the Artisan Age, but for writers (and anyone creative, especially if they’re hoping to make a living at it) this new era goes deeper. It affects our work at a soul level.

For the better part of a decade now, there’s been a “common wisdom” among independent writers, that the key to success is “rapid release.” In other words, write as many books as you can, as fast as you can, and release them as quickly as you can.

To be completely fair here, nearly all writers who take this path will tell you that you cannot, should not, must not sacrifice the quality of the book in the name of rapid release. They advocate editing, hiring professionals for that work and for cover design and more. And a lot of these writers have found systems for getting a book ready for prime time while still keeping to a clip of producing a book per month, sometimes more.

I have played in these waters. For a time, a book per month was child’s play. Give me a tougher one. And I did, making myself write a book in 10 days, and then five days, and then one day. And I think, arguably, these were all good books. All above a certain bar of quality.

But let’s be honest: Most books produced under the rapid release model are not our best work. They could be improved. And a lot of us know it. Many of us want it.

The downsides of rapid release can be pretty dramatic. I was chunking out books at break-neck speed, but there came a point where I was so burnt out I dreaded even looking at the page. And that’s a problem for a writer, but its an even bigger dilemma—a much more existential dilemma—for someone who’s life is the writing. My dream, practically since birth, was to write and publish. And if I was soured on that, I couldn’t even be sure of who I was anymore. I might as well not be.

What I yearned for, and what a lot of my writer friends now yearn for, was the ability to slow down. Decrease the pace, yes. But more than that, I (and my fellows) wanted to take my time with a book, actually craft the book, until it was an accurate and excellent representation of my soul. A good book, certainly. But a book that was more authentically me than simply marketable.

Doing that, however, means that I am not earning as I should. Or must. Without that book per month, my revenue starts to stall. I start to make less and less money. It becomes a problem.

So, I find alternatives. I go back to day jobs. I start paid subscriptions on Substack. I do promotions to bolster sales. I do whatever it takes to buy me the time to actually craft a book. And I’m continue to seek out those buffers, to find a way to keep my bowl filled with oatmeal and the roof over my head while I work toward a brighter ideal with my writing. I have to eat, even if I also have to produce good writing, after all. But even if I’m eating Ramen and restaurant condiments for every meal, the writing must be done.

That’s the Artisan approach. That’s an earmark of the Artisan Era.

Not the poverty. Not the struggle. No one needs be a “starving artist.” But it’s more like the bootstrapping model of a writing career. It’s the commitment to doing the very best work possible, and doing whatever it takes to make sure we can continue that work. It’s driving for Uber or DoorDash so we can paint on canvases in our garage. It’s selling bottles of water at bus stops so we can afford to keep making our movie. It’s working to support our art rather than producing sub-art to support ourselves.

It’s not as dreary as it sounds. It’s actually quite liberating.

Here we are at this crossroads, where the public wants media that is more of an experience than a product, and the creators want to actually put their heart and soul into crafting something that will change someone’s life. Here we are at a point where AI can generate a thousand books a day, but readers are only searching for one. And not just any one, but the one.

And the same for art.

And the same for music.

And the same for television.

And the same for film.

Recent box office failures are trying to push this message to studios—that we, the viewers, are tired of work that has no real story, no real substance. We’re tired of the same warmed-over, second-hand storylines, the “safe” stories that are the only bets that studios are willing to make. We’re tired of sequels that are just repeats of what’s been done before and before and before. And we’re tired of movies and shows that plot around agendas and messages, instead of letting the universal themes come organically through to the surface so we can discover them rather than have them force-fed to us.

We’re looking for original, inspired, authentic, in a world that gives us Marvel Movie Plot Number Seven: Extra Social Agenda.

Subplots have been replaced with subpar, and we’re noticing. And we’re revolting. We’re canceling our subscriptions and skipping out on buying movie tickets. We’re leaving books on the shelves. We’re abandoning our carts.

And we artists and writers and creators—as viewers and readers and listeners ourselves—we are not immune to the call for more. For deeper. For original and authentic and inspired. We yearn for those things, too.

And so we will make them.

That’s what the Artisan Era is, in a nutshell. It’s a bunch of creators and the audiences they serve all agreeing, at once, that enough is enough. It’s time again for hands-on, risky, dangerous, exciting, thrilling, and fun experience to become the rule, instead of the exception.

We are Artisans, and we are crafting a new future.

A NOTE AT THE END

I had a realization, standing in the back of an exhibition hall at a major author conference in Vegas, watching as a new era began and a new idea started to take hold, that somewhere in the throngs of people in that room there was a legend. Someone, among the thousands, was going to create “the Next...”

The next Star Wars. The next Downton Abbey. The next Avengers.

The next era of exciting storytelling had to be standing in that room, at that moment, being inspired. I hoped it was me. And I will do my best to ensure that it is me. But I would be equally happy to discover that it was someone else. The world needs it.

I’m not done exploring the Artisan Age. I’ve got more to say on this topic. And I think others do, too. I’m going to keep talking about this, writing about it, creating content around it, speaking about it. Because, like all those ages that came before—the Iron Age, the Renaissance, the Gilded Age—I can sense that we are on the line of a new evolution for our culture. The stories we tell shape who we are, and we are all due for a better story.

I’m excited to be a part of it. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

If you’d like to help me explore this, and to produce what could be “the next,” I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber to this channel. You don’t have to, and you won’t miss out on anything important if you don’t do it. But your subscription helps me to keep making my own artisan journey.

Even better, you can also help me by buying my books. I have a lot of them, and there are more coming. And if you buy them and tell others about them, it will help me in more ways than merely financial. Knowing that people are reading and loving my work is a better reason to get out of bed each day than any paycheck could equal.

Thank you. I am grateful for your kindness and support.

J. Kevin Tumlinson

Austin, Texas

Friday, 9 February 2024