The Browser - Going Public

Welcome to No Complaints, a now-monthly newsletter by Browser editor-in-chief Caroline Crampton. Correspondence is always welcome: reply to this email or contact caroline@carolinecrampton.com. If you would prefer not to hear from me but stay on the list for other Browser emails, update your email preferences in your account menu.

In this edition: thinking aloud about how much the personal should have to bleed into the professional.

The last two months have been the most public of my life, I think. I published a non-fiction book in April that contains a portion of personal memoir, and somewhat to my surprise almost all of the interviews, op-eds, serialisations and reviews have focused on this aspect of it. Not that I mind this focus — I would not have included those sections in the book if I did. I intended for them to be read. I just found it a little startling for me, the person, to be such an object of interest, and to have editors and producers seek out my "personal angle" so determinedly when the book contains so much other material that is, in my view, more interesting and original.

Because, you see, I had analysed this effect in the book, this relentless hunt for individual narrative when we think about illness and the constant desire for simple metaphor. Personal stories of triumph or tragedy, with a neat ending either way. Battles against cancer won or lost. Susan Sontag laid this all out so eloquently in 1978 in Illness As Metaphor, while keeping her own personal story out of the frame. In my take, I updated her paradigm to incorporate the churn of the so-called "First-Person Industrial Complex" brought on by the internet media economy of the early 2010s. Perhaps naively, I did not then expect to have this effect practised upon myself in 2024, this relentless discarding of anything that is not couched in the first person. I did not foresee how those sections of the book would become a pre-emptive commentary on how the book was covered.

The nature of being "in public" when a book comes out has changed too. Five years had elapsed between the publication of this book and my previous one; four of them were shaped by Covid, to a greater or lesser extent. Publication day in 2019 was spent mostly in a taxi in London, zipping between in-person interviews and events — opportunities that, it was made clear, were not available unless I went into each studio in person. The equivalent day in 2024 involved an ordinary day of work at home in Merseyside punctuated by a few virtual interviews, with an in-person talk at a local independent bookshop that I had organised myself in the evening because it felt wrong to go nowhere at all.

As I have reflected on this process over past few weeks, I have found myself uncomfortable with the kind of "being in public" that it has involved. I think this is because so little of it involves being physically in the presence of others, with the opportunity to hear back from them. Rather, it is a lonely sort of one-way exposure through a screen; I sit alone and am invisibly consumed by those I cannot see or hear. I think this is a consequence of how rapidly both the publishing industry and our consumption habits are changing, and I have noticed a few trends to this.

Publishing relies more and more on external marketing. Authors are expected to come to the process of book publication with their own channels to an existing audience ready to use, rather than a readership being something a publisher will help to nurture over the course of months or years. This is partly a function of the ongoing influx of celebrities from other fields writing books — who generally come with a built-in fanbase requiring no development — and partly because of how diffuse readers' consumption habits are now.

A simple ad in a literary weekly or specialist publication no longer reaches very many people, and a multimedia, multi-platform campaign is an expense reserved only for those books that are already pretty much guaranteed to sell well. This can feel like an unsurmountable constraint, as a non-celebrity author: in order to sell well, you need to sell well. As a reader, the best thing you can do to ensure that you know when your favourite artists or writers have new work available to enjoy is to seek out their personal channels (ideally ones unmediated by algorithms) and subscribe to them, whether that's an email mailing list, a Patreon, a fan club or whatever.

You certainly can't rely on the publishing machine to consistently surface the things you want to see to you. The personal pressure on the author to make all of yourself public in the hope of catching potential readers' attention, therefore, is huge. Ironically, the age of algorithmic personalisation seems to have resulted in ever-greater homogeneity, with the same books staying on bestseller lists for weeks on end and the same titles piled up on the tables of chain retailers.

Live arts events are struggling post pandemic. Between 2020 and early 2023, I think lots of organisers were excited by the possibilities offered by virtual and hybrid events. The pandemic had forced us to try these formats and many attendees had found it surprisingly enjoyable. The increased flexibility and accessibility a virtual component added to a previously in-person only event seemed to have no downsides. Except, as we have now discovered, people tire quickly of attending never-ending Zoom events, and don't want to pay in-person ticket prices for them. And as cinema is finding, cash-strapped ticket-buyers have become more wary and less likely to take a chance on something they're not already sure they will enjoy.

Literary and arts festivals, faced with rising operational costs and cautious audiences, are increasingly seeking to programme events they are certain will sell out — which once again brings us back to, you guessed it, celebrities with a built in audience from another field. Even if the book they are there to promote is mediocre, organisers can feel sure that ticket sales will be strong for someone attendees already know from films/television/podcasts/Instagram. In 2019, as a debut non-fiction author with no fame to my name, I spent a whole summer bouncing between small festivals in towns and cities around the UK, meeting interested readers wherever I went. In 2024, most of these events don't exist anymore (one actually had its funding pulled after I had signed on to appear this time) and those that do are focusing almost exclusively on Big Names. The book tour is increasingly the preserve of top tier authors only.

Which is not to say that everyone else doesn't get a chance to meet their readers, but without the skills of professional events organisers behind you, you have to regard it more as a lottery than a tour. In the same week in April, I spoke at an event for which the haphazard hosts had sold only six tickets and one that was so full that latecomers stood for a whole hour outside the door as there was no more available floor space in the venue. An experience worth having on both occasions, but in aggregate not something upon which a career can be reliably sustained.

To sell your work successfully, you have to be always on. As the writer, the artist, the musician in this situation, you can choose to pick up the slack. You can organise your own tour, market your own work, pitch yourself to every outlet, make whatever videos the TikTok algorithm is currently favouring, and more besides. You can write umpteen op-eds that point back to your book, although as Tajja Isen has astutely pointed out, those pieces probably won't sell many copies. Inordinate effort can be put into becoming a trusted expert in your field. You can hustle, and keep hustling forever because there will never be a finish line. Nobody will ever tell you "you did it, you can move onto the next thing now".

I started this year fully intending to do this. And I did, for a few months — I showed up on social media, I made videos about my life for the first time and started getting thousands of views for each one, and I said yes to every opportunity to write a promotional piece that I was offered. But as I got more and more tired, and closer to burn out, a question kept plaguing me: what did all of this even have to do with writing a book? As I edited dozens of video clips together to make a 60-second TikTok with enough jump cuts in it that viewers wouldn't instantly scroll away, my doubts grew further.

I don't write books because I want to be a video editor, my viability entirely subject to the whims of a vast unknowable algorithm. I do it because writing is how I think, and because the process of researching a subject and knitting it together into an original structure for others to consume is intellectually satisfying to me. I'm in the early stages of honing an idea for a new book, and I would like to share some of that process with interested readers, but my tired brain recoils from the idea of trying once more to package my thoughts into digestible, attention-grabbing morsels.

So I'm not going to. I will write about what I'm doing, as writing, in my own space, unmediated by other forces. I stopped writing a personal email newsletter several years ago when newslettering became my dream job at The Browser, but now I want to bring that practice back into my days. I want to write about my work to people who have chosen to hear from me and nobody else, with no external forces shaping what I say, how I say it or whether they are able read it. Perhaps I will be leaving potential sales on the table if I retreat from the conventional book promotion hustle like this, but with some reflection I have decided that should that be the case, it will have been a worthwhile sacrifice. That's what I learned from this intense period of publicity: I cannot take part in it while also making work that is worth publicising.

What does this mean in practice? You are receiving this because you are interested in and care about The Browser, not necessarily about my other work. I will write to you here once a month in my capacity as editor-in-chief, keeping these monthly letters henceforth connected to the work I do here. I'll discuss article curation, consider ideas arising from what I've been reading recently, delve into books that resonate with the mission of this publication, and more.

If, however, you would like more updates about me, my work, my state of mind and what I'm writing next, you'll find that now over on my personal newsletter. I'm building that list from scratch, because I only want to write to people who definitely want to hear from me. If you've ever been signed up for a newsletter from me, you will need to sign up again. I'll be sending out the first bulletin later this week, and then whenever I feel like it after that. I hope to see you there, and to hear from you about how you are staying in touch with the makers of work you like to consume.

If you are not a paying subscriber to The Browser, and enjoy this letter, please do become a paying subscriber to The Browser, because that is how we are able to publish this and everything else that we do.