Rejection is par for the course for working writers, more so for non-working writers.
This is a direct lift from my latest rejection:
“Although I like your writing and appreciate your sense of humor, I’m afraid I cannot offer my representation at this time. In the current competitive market, publishers will not even consider nonfiction projects by writers with a platform of less than 100,000 followers.”
For scale, that’s like the combined population of every sentient being in Novato and Petaluma. But convincing them, or anyone, to do anything en masse short of watching Netflix in athleisure wear is a fool’s errand.
The agent’s rejection letter continued: “I suggest that you start building your platform and feel free to reach out to me again when you have a big enough following.”
Dude, if I could muster that kind of influence, I wouldn’t be looking for a new agent; I’d be running a TikTok crypto cult fueled by feel-good bromides and saucy dance routines. My 15 minutes of fame would turn into 15 minutes of blame for breaking the Internet.
Social media gurus talk about “engagement” but never disengagement, which has been the key metric of my social media marketing strategy. My followers may be finite, but my non-followers are infinite—they’re legion, and they’re loyal (to the fact that they will never know who I am).
The social professionals have polite terms for punters like me—“micro-influencer,” “niche-influencer” and “irrelevant non-entity,” but I’ve never claimed to be an influencer. I’m more like an under-the-influencer, but only on payday, which is twice a month if the planets align. Then I raise a glass to the invisible masses and say, “Without you, I’m nobody, and with you, I’m still nobody—here’s to consistency and always never being there.”
Thus far, adding up all of my followers, across all of my social media platforms, I can just scrape the bottom of 10,000. And most of those are Russian bots. I can tell because every so often, I get an email from Kollektiv Robotov that reads, “пожалуйста, прекрати,” which translates to “please stop.”
So, follow me, comrades. I’ll be here, shouting into the void and pretending the echo is applause. Who needs 100,000 followers when I can have the undivided attention of a dozen mildly interested strangers?
I may never go viral, but obscurity? That’s a niche I can dominate.
Follow me at instagram.com/daedalushowell.
