Podcasting “So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me”

On the joys of writing to find your people, rather than pleasing a hypothetical audience.

This week on my podcast, I read “So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me,” my Medium describing the joys of writing to attract the audience of people who want to read what you want to write.

https://doctorow.medium.com/so-youve-decided-to-unfollow-me-7452c96b4772

I’ve been blogging for more than 20 years, but I’ve been writing for publication for even longer than that, so I can remember the emergence of blogging and what it meant for magazine writers. The point of magazines, broadly, was to identify a demographic that advertisers wanted to reach and hire writers who’d produce material to entice those people to become readers.

By contrast, the point of blogging was to produce the idiosyncratic, personal mix of topics, formats and styles that the writer enjoyed, in hopes of attracting readers whose preferences overlapped with the writer’s. Blogging wasn’t just about becoming widely read — it was about finding your people.

When advertising came to blogging, it was grounded in this ethos: “Here is a writer who has attracted an audience who share a sensibility and a collection of interests that are otherwise hard to reach; if…