Tournament Profession

The famous Freakonomics professor, Steven Levitt, in his famous analysis of drug dealers, used the term “tournament profession” to describe any line of work in which only a very small number of people actually succeed, while an infinitely larger number of people underneath them toil for little or no reward. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about “self-publishing” being such a profession. That’s hard to dispute. 

Here is a partial list of the things which I’ve done to promote myself and my book, Machines of Kali. I’m having fun, but it’s a little appalling. Without even trying too hard, I’ve already established four separate Internet presences.

I have a website which is hosted by my domain name provider. This website is itself pointed to by several other domain names which I own, and I have at least one email account associated with it. This website consists of a splash page, an illustrative cover page, a plot synopsis, a chapter sample, an artist bio, and a link to my book’s Amazon page. I concocted the entire website myself, but only because I’ve had so much experience doing this in the real world, it would have been silly to outsource it. 

I’m already on my book’s 2^nd book cover, both of which I conceived and executed. I could have paid someone else to do this. Many authors do just that. With all due modesty, though, I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who was better at art direction. Doing a cover, however, required some basic leg/grunt work. I bought a font collection from my local computer store, asked my printer to scan some pictures for me, learned GIMP from scratch, acquired several images from IStockPhoto, and so on.

I opened a Blogspot account, which you are reading. I actually enjoy writing this stuff. It’s not heavy lifting or anything. The only cumbersome aspect is dealing with a 3^rd party, but I know that I don’t want to host my own blogging site.

I opened a Twitter account. This was especially weird for me, because I don’t yet grok Twitter. However, I’m starting to see its charm. It’s like any other strange new application – difficult to grasp at first, but indispensable over time. It was the same way with Lotus 1-2-3 back in the 80s, just as it was with Mosaic in the 90s. (FYI: those were, respectively, the first popular spreadsheet and the first proper Internet browser.) 

Naturally, I had to update my Amazon author page with everything listed here, including my email, website, Twitter handle, etc.. There are so many other little bullet items, but I’m only scratching the surface. It’s just a lot of stuff, and that's the tournament profession.