In the past, if I were to launch a Substack, I might’ve launched one with the following premise: I will write elegant, humorous reflections about my daily life as a creative. I will be ironic and clever and self-effacing. I will not make any controversial opinions. I will include photos of my dogs.
People will love it!
Ok, it’s not entirely accurate to say “might’ve.”
I actually did have a blog (and newsletter) like that. It was too long ago to have been a Substack, but it was a thing, and I did it.
But I no longer have any creative supply for that type of endeavor. Which is fine, because I would wager there is very little demand for it.
Today, I am launching a Substack, though, and you are reading the inaugural post (Stack?) now. And it is called “Supply and Demand: A Trader’s Perspective on the Economics of a Writing Life.”
This is what I have the supply to produce at the moment. Content about the intersection of money and writing and art. It’s what I’m obsessed with. And to paraphrase Jane Friedman, obsessions make for good Substacks. Hopefully this will prove true.
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Wait, Who Are You, Again?
Right. First, let me introduce you to me, or at least the “me” I’ve been professionally, and explain what I think qualifies me to write a Substack about trading, the economy, the “writing life,” and publishing a literary magazine.
The Janitorial and Bartending Years
I’ve worn many different hats career-wise, and many of them had unsightly sweat rings stained into them. In high school, I worked nights and weekends as a janitor. As a college student, I was “in maintenance,” which meant I was still basically a janitor, but one who sometimes also painted walls, patched leaky roofs with tar, and demolished the interior of 150-year-old buildings on the campus of one of the oldest colleges in the United States, inhaling modern chemical fumes and historic American dust for minimum wage.
As a college grad with a fresh head full of English literature and existential philosophy, I did the only thing that made sense to me as I sought to live up to my high GPA and manage my student debt: I went into bartending. I did that for a number of years and, until fairly recently, it was probably the highest income per hour worked I’ve made, using a formula of Units of Fun multiplied by US dollars over Hours Worked. (The UoF x USD/HW ratio.)
But then I got married and sought a more 9-5 lifestyle, and so I became a web developer at a national non-profit. Building web sites, I discovered, also scratched an itch (leftover from working on my college literary magazine and my high-school newspaper) to play with text and layout.
I fell in love with it.
Through all of this, I still felt a strong desire to write. I discovered blogging — this fantastic (downright magical, in 1999) new ability to publish our words immediately for the entire world to read on the Internet.
Building web sites (and blogging) turned out to be a really good training ground for managing an online literary magazine. Print lit mags dripped slowly (and somewhat begrudgingly) into the online world during the 2000s, then sentiment shifted and it was more of an all-out enthusiastic flood in the 2010s. I started managing Atticus Review in 2016 and became the Owner and Publisher in 2017. Around that same time, I also had a collection of essays published in book form.
I’ll just pause here to say that, as far as things I have produced in this lifetime, I am probably most proud of these two: my book and the Atticus Review Literary magazine between 2016 and 2020. And it’s deeply relevant to the theme of this Substack to point out that neither of these two productions generated much of an income at all for me, much less anything that could be considered a “living wage.”
Nevertheless, I had the luxury of that not mattering very much to me, because my spouse brought in a high-paying corporate salary. I like to joke that Atticus Review was basically funded by Verizon during those years I managed it. Sometimes naked truths make the best jokes. Between 2016 and 2020, the nation’s largest telecom company helped hundreds of budding writers get published and they don’t even know it.
Post-Divorce and Pivot to Trading
The circumstances of my life changed in 2020 when I got divorced. I needed to think about making a living wage again and I knew it wasn’t going to be from writing or publishing a literary magazine. I’d always been interested in trading the markets, but I guess I didn’t think it fit with my, eh-hem, “creative sensibilities.” It turns out trading can be quite creative, though. There’s no one way to trade the market, and over time you begin to develop a style that works for you (that is, if you survive blowing up your account a few times).
Because Covid was going on and the world was “on hiatus,” I had the free time to take several courses which taught me the mechanics of trading different vehicles (equities, commodities, options, futures) and strategies. I also learned a lot more than I ever thought I would about money and the economy in general.
Studying market behavior is, at its core, a great way to study human behavior, which really appeals to me as a writer. Observing the movements in price of a given market is like watching raw emotions unfold in real time, with fear and greed being the main ones. Also FOMO. Disappointment. Elation. Panic. Exuberance. Jealousy.
Speaking of emotion, this period of my life marked the second time I fell in love with a career decision, though I will admit it did have some rocky moments.
I’ve been trading for the last six years. It’s my primary income and I really do love it. Could it be that I actually just love gambling and taking risk? Or the challenge of trying to control the uncontrollable? Maybe. And these are things I have discussed with my therapist.
But either way, I’ve spent thousands of hours studying markets and one thing I’ve learned is that I will never stop being a student of them because they are constantly teaching me new things, and I love that.
Recently, I’ve realized that some of the lessons I’ve learned from trading can be helpful when thinking about the business of writing. It’s completely changed how I view the enterprise of running a literary magazine. I no longer want to do that the “old way,” (by which I mean the way of the last 15-20 years). That way makes no sense for writers or for magazines, and probably never did. The Internet turned the literary magazine world into a charity enterprise, devoid of ownership. I believe there is a viable alternative now. I’ll probably get into that a lot more in this Substack.
So that’s my background and why I have found myself obsessed with the intersection of writing, art, music, technology, and the economy. And my intention is to explore those here and hopefully create a dialogue about them.
If any of this resonates with you, then you may enjoy reading this.
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Why “Supply and Demand?”
Many people in the U.S. learn pretty early in school that “supply and demand” is what powers Capitalist markets. It’s one of those concepts that is sort of self-evident. Demand for a product creates the need for more of that product. If there is too little supply, the price will rise. If there is too much supply the price will fall. It seems simple on its surface, but when you start delving into different market theories around price action, you see there’s a lot more to it. Order flow, passive vs aggressive trades, bid-ask spreads, trends, sentiment, momentum, volume-weighted average price. To me, the mechanics are kind of beautiful, Again, it’s a study in human behavior and motivation, even if a lot of it is done by-way of machines.
Don’t worry, I don’t plan on getting into the weeds of trading here. But the basic premise of supply and demand will be brought up again and again here, especially with regard to writing and literary magazines.
Is there too much supply of literary magazines?
Has this led to too much demand for mediocre writing?
Is the market of creative writing entirely based in academia? If so, are the colleges Wall Street?
These are provocative topics in the writing world, and I want to explore them.
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Ok, So What Other Topics Will You Explore?
Concepts of supply and demand have other connotations aside from “economic” ones.
Sometimes you find yourself with “supply” to write and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes the “demand” within yourself to figure out a story or make meaning of an event in your life may be so powerful that suddenly your personal supply of writing goes through the roof. On the other hand, sometimes the demands on your time — or on your pocketbook — can affect your creative supply.
There’s a lot of richness to mine here. Again, it’s the stuff I’m pretty much obsessed with and spend a lot of time thinking about. If you are obsessed with these things too, then maybe we can be obsessed together.
Here are a list of essays I have in mind. Some of them I’ve already started and some of them are just titles. Some of these could end up being several essays, so as to keep them on the shorter side (and more respectful of the demand on people’s time.)
Upcoming Essay Topics:
The Bulls and Bears of the Writing Market: Are You a Buyer or a Seller?
The Lit-Mag Market Players: If the Individual Writer is akin to the Small Retail Trader, Who Is Wall Street?
How a Trader’s “Edge” Is Like a Writer’s “Voice”
Building Your Writing Portfolio Like an Institutional Investor: Make Many Small Bets, Grow Winners, Cut Losers
Literary Magazines are Essentially Markets (and thanks to technology, we can finally treat them that way)
Owning Your Writing vs Being Owned By Your Writing: How Subscriptions Can Kill Originality and Creativity
Are You a Speculator or Investor: You Need to Be a Little of Both
A note about length: Make no mistake, these will be long-form essays. This is where my idealism may override my practical desire to obey the law of supply and demand. I know reading long-form is not practiced nearly as much today. I know writers are not immune to this trend. I know that there are many articles out there talking about the “death of literacy” and, as the author of this particular one asserts, it’s possible that “…the literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.”
I’ve been witnessing first-hand what has been happening to my own brain by not reading enough long-form content. I also see what it has done to my ability to actually write long-form. As Joan Didion and other famous writers have expressed, writing for me is basically synonymous with thinking. I don’t really know what I think until I write it down. Therefore, by not writing long-form, I am not thinking. I am losing my ability to formulate and express complex ideas.
Maybe you feel the same.
Let’s fight back against this, together.
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What Can I Expect if I Subscribe?
You can expect that I will post Stacks once or twice a month and will add a few Notes from time to time, too. I know you should never say never, but I do not have any intention to implement a paywall or pay-only content. If you do happen to become a paid subscriber, you will just be doing so out of the generosity of your heart. I suppose I could imagine situations where I might want to post subscriber-only content, but it probably would be rare and for a certain yet-to-be-realized purpose.
If you have been following what has been happening at Atticus Review, you might know that what I would like to see happen with content production is for platforms to move away from subscription models and to enable a way for people to pay for a single article, a single poem, a single short story. To truly own writing as a unique digital asset and as a way to directly support the writer. This is the approach we’ve been taking with Atticus Review for the last two years, and I’m trying to come up with ways to make this easier to adopt.
Subscriptions aren’t all bad, but not everything should be a subscription, and I tend to believe that creative writing is one of those things.
Tell Me About your Own Supply/Demand Issues
Do you have a supply/demand tension in your creative life? Do you have several? What’s some of yours? Leave them in the comments.
Also, out of the list of possible essays above, which one would you most be interested in reading? Let me know in the comments.
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Right, ok, if you made it this far, maybe we share an obsession.
Now here’s a photo of my dog underneath a Colorado sky. (Old habits die hard.)
