Being The Boss
Back when I worked at The Onion and The Dissolve I was told that the people who ran the company, the folks at the top of the masthead on the business side, did not like me. I was told that they did not care for me personally and didn’t see my value as a writer or my worth as a contributor to the company. That made me feel like my livelihood was precarious and terrifyingly fragile long before I was let go from the Dissolve shortly before it closed in 2015.
I grew up poor and vulnerable so I wanted very much for everybody to like me. I certainly thought of myself as likable, honest and dependable. I tried my damnedest to be liked and accepted but it did not seem to make any difference. Part of the reason I did not pursue salaried employment as a pop culture writer post-2015 is because I wasn’t sure if my aging psyche could handle dedicating my life to a third company run by folks who didn’t like me.
That’s why I pivoted to self-publishing and crowd-funding after my career as a staff writer for places like The A.V Club and The Dissolve came to an end in 2015, and My World of Flops was unceremoniously cancelled after a decade long run in 2017.
I don’t want my future, and my family’s future, in the hands of semi-strangers who don’t know me and don’t understand me and are forced to make brutal decisions on a regular basis because pop culture media in 2020 is a heartless business when it’s not also an impossible one.
That’s why Patreon made sense to me. I’ll be honest, though: with Patreon it was partially a matter of inspiration and partially a matter of desperation. I didn’t have any other options, really. It wasn’t like I could choose between becoming a film critic for The New York Times or relying on the kindness and generosity of readers to keep a precarious website and podcast and publishing business afloat: it was crowd-funding or look for a new line of business.
I never set out to be the Boss. I never set out to be my own editor. I certainly never set out to be my own publisher. Back when I was being published by Scribner, that would have felt like failure but I think about things differently now. Life has a way of humbling of you, of showing you how ridiculous your arrogance and delusions are, and what’s really important.
So even though I never set out to be The Boss, I’ve discovered that it has its advantages. For starters, the money can be a whole lot better. When I sold a book through Scribner, for example, I did so with the understanding that due to the nature of publishing I would never receive a dime in royalties unless my book really broke through and sold like gangbusters.
It’s a much different situation with The Weird Accordion to Al. I get something like 7 to 10 dollars out of every book sold. The margins are even higher for the books I pre-sold through Kickstarter. So all I really need to do is keep selling about 10 books a day and I’ll make as much from book royalties as the Patreon for a website that takes up 60 to 70 hours of my time every week.
Then again, it could certainly be argued that the real bosses of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place and my podcast and my publishing company are the kind-hearted patrons and book buyers whose generosity makes it possible for me to continue doing what I love with independence and autonomy and freedom after my industry has imploded.
That’s why it’s scary when my monthly Patreon haul and pledge numbers decline; it feels like my bosses are losing faith in me all over again, and when your bosses are a self-selected group composed solely of living Saints who use their hard-earned money to fund your career, that can be disheartening. But it sure is better than the alternative.
Being my own boss has also given me some sympathy for what my old bosses went through. Falling page-views and declining revenue aren’t just abstract phantoms anymore affecting my life and work in intense but hard to pin down ways anymore: they’re things I live with, and wrestle with, everyday. I now know firsthand how fickle readers can be.
As the editor-in-chief, head writer, publicist, CEO, intern and more or less the entirety of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place and Declan-Haven Books I live with a lot of insecurity and uncertainty but also with a lot of joy and creative satisfaction. That’s the cost, as well as the glory, it seems, of being the Boss.
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place and get sweet merch by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
AND of course you CAN, and certainly SHOULD #BuyMyBook over at https://amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews