Good Writing Isn’t a Strategy Anymore

Being a good artist has never really been enough. That’s the quiet joke history keeps playing on us. We like to imagine that, once upon a time, genius alone carried people to the world’s doorstep: a manuscript finished, a painting unveiled, a song sung in some candlelit room — and then, magically, an audience appeared. But for as long as there’s been art, there’s been infrastructure: patrons, printers, merchants, impresarios, labels, platforms. Commerce has been mixed into art from the start; what’s changed is how visible and demanding that mix has become.

In the oldest stories, we talk about “great artists” as if they rose in a vacuum. Look closer and you see the business model. Medieval painters worked for the Church and guilds, filling cathedrals with frescoes that doubled as religious propaganda and civic branding. Renaissance masters depended on wealthy families — Medici, Sforza, the royal courts — who commissioned works to consolidate power, display taste, and launder reputation. The same paintings we now treat as pure expressions of human genius were also deliverables on a contract. The artist needed not only skill but access: to patrons, to networks, to those rooms where money and influence met.

The invention of the printing press didn’t just free literature; it commercialized it. Suddenly, manuscripts could become products. Printers had to decide what was worth the cost of paper and ink. They needed buyers, so the earliest “marketing” was choosing what would sell — religious texts, almanacs, sensational tales — and building the channels to move them: bookstalls, fairs, catalogs. For every “great author,” there were publishers and distributors quietly turning words into a business. The gatekeepers were few, but they were powerful.

By the nineteenth century, art and commerce had become openly entangled. Painters relied on salons and academies, where juries decided what was “serious” enough for wall space. Acceptance meant exposure and buyers; rejection meant obscurity. Novelists worked with magazines and serial publications, writing in installments to keep subscribers hooked. Composers needed theaters, orchestras, and wealthy patrons to stage their work. In each case, the artist’s success depended not only on their craft, but on institutions with their own priorities: taste, status, politics, profit.

You can see the cost of that dependency written in the lives of the people we now claim to love. Phillis Wheatley, the first Black American to publish a book of poetry, was celebrated in her moment and still died poor, unable to find a publisher for her second book. Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, disappeared into decades of obscurity, and ended his career as a customs inspector while his masterpiece sat out of print. Edgar Allan Poe kept producing work that would eventually define entire genres and still couldn’t secure financial stability. Zora Neale Hurston, central voice of the Harlem Renaissance, died in near-anonymity, her grave unmarked. William Blake engraved his visions and sold almost nothing, dismissed as a crank.

The canon is crowded with people who were not just misunderstood but underpaid, unsupported, or outright broke. Being great did not guarantee them a living; without the right patron, publisher, or market, their genius had nowhere to go.

Visual art tells the same story.

Vincent van Gogh painted at a pace that feels almost impossible and sold practically nothing, dependent on his brother’s support while his work was ignored or mocked. Modigliani died young, ill, and poor in Paris; the portraits that now sell for tens of millions were just bohemian clutter in his lifetime. Even someone like Monet, now shorthand for luxury and stability, spent years in desperate financial straits, rejected by official institutions and scrambling for commissions. If you laid all those lives side by side — Wheatley, Melville, Poe, Hurston, Blake, Van Gogh, Modigliani — you’d see the same pattern repeating in different costumes: the work is strong, the reception is weak, the infrastructure is indifferent or hostile.

The twentieth century didn’t fix this so much as industrialize it.

Hollywood built the studio system, where actors, directors, and writers were bound into contracts with companies that controlled production, marketing, and distribution from end to end. Record labels did the same for music, deciding whose voices were recorded, pressed, promoted to radio, and shipped to stores. Visual artists relied on galleries, agents, and critics to place work in front of collectors. The business of art became more sophisticated: press tours, movie posters, radio singles, billboards, TV spots. Promotion wasn’t a side note; it was an engine. For a while the trade-off was clear: you handed a huge piece of your power and ownership to the industry, and in return the industry handled the work of getting you seen.

Then the internet arrived and cracked that apparatus open.

At first, it felt like liberation. You could upload a song, a comic, a short film, a story, and theoretically anyone in the world could find it. The cost of distribution dropped to almost zero. Self-publishing became viable. Indie musicians could release albums without labels. YouTubers built audiences without TV networks. Social platforms seemed, briefly, like a meritocracy: the best work would be shared and shared again until it found its people.

But as those spaces filled, it became obvious that “good” isn’t a distribution strategy. The platforms didn’t just host art; they organized it. Algorithmic feeds had to decide whose work appeared at the top of a screen. They optimized for engagement — clicks, likes, watch time — not for difficulty, originality, or staying power. Promotion, marketing, and distribution weren’t handled by a few identifiable gatekeepers anymore; they were handled by a shifting, opaque system of code that rewarded certain behaviors and formats over others.

That’s the ecosystem artists inherit now. It’s not that talent doesn’t matter; it just doesn’t travel by itself. A brilliant album can sit unnoticed on streaming platforms while a forgettable track, packaged into the right meme, travels the world. A beautiful essay can linger unread in a Substack archive while a shallow hot take with the right headline burns across timelines. A painter can make work of staggering depth and still struggle to scrape together a few hundred impressions on an image post. Where Wheatley and Melville were constrained by a handful of human gatekeepers, today’s artist is constrained by an attention economy that never sleeps and never explains itself.

In that world, promotion means learning to speak the dialects of each platform: short-form video, carousels, hooks that land in the first three seconds or the first line of copy. Marketing means not just telling people that your work exists, but turning yourself into a recognizable storyline — your process, your persona, your “brand” — that people can follow over time. Distribution means more than uploading; it means understanding when your audience is online, what they respond to, and how your work moves from one cluster of people to another. None of that matches the romantic image of the artist alone with their craft. It feels like running a small agency out of your own life. You are the creative department and the marketing department and the distribution department, constantly switching hats.

The danger is obvious. When everything becomes content, art starts bending around what performs. You trim the difficult part of a poem to make it fit an image quote. You narrow the wildness of a novel into a misleading tagline because it gets clicks. You begin to measure your worth by numbers that reflect platform preferences more than the actual depth or usefulness of your work. The market has always shaped art; now it shapes it in real time, at the level of how long a line can be and how quickly a scene has to turn.

But there’s also a quieter possibility folded into this mess. If you accept that the business side isn’t separate from the art but an extension of it, you can approach it as part of the craft. The way you talk about your work can be as deliberate as the work itself. The way you invite people into your process — sharing drafts, failures, influences — can be a genuine act of hospitality instead of a performance of desperation. The way you distribute your art — who you partner with, which communities you show up in, what you refuse to do for reach — can become part of your artistic statement.

Reaching people in this ecosystem is hard. But difficulty isn’t the same as impossibility. The same tools that flatten nuance for the masses also allow for small, dense circles of attention: modest but devoted readerships instead of massive, indifferent crowds; communities that grow slowly and stay, rather than viral flashes that burn out. The business of art now is not just about chasing virality. It’s about building channels where your work can arrive with context and care: newsletters, intimate shows, small presses and galleries, collectives, Patreon communities, teaching spaces, local partnerships.

Being a good artist is the floor, not the ceiling. The question underneath “Is being a good artist good enough?” is really: “Am I willing to steward the life of this art beyond its creation?” That means thinking like an artist and a builder, a craftsperson and a communicator. It means admitting, without shame, that Melville and Wheatley and Van Gogh are warnings as much as inspirations — not because they failed, but because their worlds didn’t know how to hold them. Our world isn’t so different. The forms have changed — patrons to publishers to platforms — but the core struggle is the same. You make something fragile and powerful in private, then you have to decide how to carry it into the world without letting the world completely reshape it.

The task now is to learn the mechanics of promotion, marketing, and distribution without mistaking them for the point. The art is the point. The business is the bridge. And in an age where attention is scarce and the ghosts of broke geniuses stand behind us, building that bridge may be one of the most demanding, and most necessary, arts of all.