Thank you for this piece. I vividly remember the controversy around Amanda Palmer not paying her bandmates and you've beautifully expressed a connection I haven't seen anyone else make. Clearly they both felt their fame entitled them to anything their fans could give.
The inability to market books was predicted by the late culture critic Mark Fisher. He saw the beginning of the parabola that we are all riding the sharp curve of.
A lot of his criticism was in praise of “pop modernism”, culture that appealed to mainstream audiences while challenging easy understanding. This has gradually been replaced by the kind of garbage culture that leaves us in a state of what he called “depressive hedonia”, not a lack of pleasure, but I kind of lotus eating which prevents us from engaging in anything other than the pleasure principle.
I think that it’s hard for original writers and thinkers to have a voice on the internet. Whenever a new app attempts to impose order on what used to be controlled by editors and artists, something like Substack, it’s undermined by an algorithm that promotes horrible content. Rather than a place where intellectuals are privileged, the internet becomes a places where they are shoved into a crowd of idiots and paid content.
I think all of this is very true but I think Amanda Palmer & Neil Gaiman cultivated their parasocial fanbase before the algorithm took over so much of social life. Sandman has been around for a long time - and in the 1990’s he also sort of had this famous friendship with Tori Amos where they would reference each other all the time in their work (undoubtedly where some of his female fanbase took root as well), etc. Amanda Palmer did indeed have roots in a “DIY theater kid” kind of independent scene, as well. She was the kind of artist who toured liberal arts college towns and was on college radio a lot. The algorithm of Twitter and social media definitely helped with making them visible and “accessible” to their fans, but they had both been operating that way for a while - it’s part of how Palmer justified her exploitation of her fans and claimed there was no delineation between fans and friends. It’s not unusual for touring indie & punk bands to crash with fans on that circuit - it’s just that most of the time these are not artists with the money & influence of Amanda Palmer or Neil Gaiman!
I do think there’s something worth considering about how she brought the social protocols of that intimate, less commercial, smaller, “DIY” subculture into the much more celebrity-driven and powerful dynamic she and her husband were able to exert over others in their relationship, though. It’s one of many things that makes me think about her fanbase a lot - and how easy they were for she and Gaiman to take advantage of.
I think what resonates most with me is that it indeed feels like creators are supposed to supply the audience as an advance to the publisher instead of through the work.
The point of a publisher should be to shine a light and give it a platform, not chase a light someone else is shining.
It makes them functionally meaningless and the result is that a lot of savvy creators have TRICKED publishers into giving them a platform and then taken that audience to more fairly compensating indie and self-published waters. This also puts publishers in a bind as they lack the tools to negotiate (their media overlords certainly won't give ununionized freelancers their due) and so they end up essentially giving everything they have to a handful of personalities and then rely on part-time Hollywooders for the rest, who attract a small audience that can't be grown without a publisher that knows how to market people and their work.
Rather than simply capitalizing on existing personalities and their brand.
Another necessary and brilliant essay!! I read each bit of it gasping at how true Jessa’s points were, and also feeling aggravated at how most lit community folk have no idea that all this shit is going on. A personal possibly irrelevant footnote: My husband was in Rio back in 2008 signing his book Lush Life while Gaiman was signing at same time. Gaiman’s line went on forever, and my husband’s was super short. He recalled how the Gaiman line was all super young women. Grooming doesn’t even begin to cover what G was up to.
I have a lot of thoughts about Amanda Palmer's fanbase. Her "beer and hugs" tour came where I lived and when a music critic friend wrote kind of critically about that for a local rag - and how she just completely eschewed the idea of hiring local musicians to open for her with, yknow, money - a lot of her, uh, annoying fans really came after my friend. It didn't really matter that Palmer was exploiting people, they just wanted to be near her, and how dare we nobodies criticize their feminist queen?
I think its tempting to apply certain labels to Amanda Palmer - to say she's a "white feminist" or a just a bourgeois woman exploiting other women - and certainly all of this would be accurate, but what always made her get under my skin, personally, is that unlike a Lena Dunham or some other problematic woman in the public eye who seemed to constantly be putting her foot in her mouth, she had this rabid fanbase that defended every single thing she did! Not quite Taylor Swift or Beyhive level - a much smaller scale than that - but the parasocial feeling her fans felt for her, and to some extent her husband and the fact of their relationship - really did work as a bubble to protect her from criticism even though she wasn't the kind of star who was making lots of people a lot of money.
I also think the simple fact of being married to Palmer, who announced herself repeated and very publicly as a feminist, and who cultivated a fanbase of women who did the same, also in a strange roundabout way worked to insulate and protect Neil Gaiman from being exposed or confronted about his treatment of female fans. Like, "of course" Gaiman had a large female readership and fanbase - so many of his characters were women, he worked in genres (supernatural romance, gothic fiction) popular with women and children, women make up a huge chunk of the publishing consumer demo, women made up a huge chunk of his wife's fanbase, and he was very vocal about causes a lot of women care about. What is shocking is not simply that a very wealthy and popular publishing industry figure got away with abuse for so long, but that his private actions were so completely unaligned with his public persona - and that all of this seemed to be hiding in plain sight!
Thank you for this piece. I vividly remember the controversy around Amanda Palmer not paying her bandmates and you've beautifully expressed a connection I haven't seen anyone else make. Clearly they both felt their fame entitled them to anything their fans could give.
The inability to market books was predicted by the late culture critic Mark Fisher. He saw the beginning of the parabola that we are all riding the sharp curve of.
A lot of his criticism was in praise of “pop modernism”, culture that appealed to mainstream audiences while challenging easy understanding. This has gradually been replaced by the kind of garbage culture that leaves us in a state of what he called “depressive hedonia”, not a lack of pleasure, but I kind of lotus eating which prevents us from engaging in anything other than the pleasure principle.
I think that it’s hard for original writers and thinkers to have a voice on the internet. Whenever a new app attempts to impose order on what used to be controlled by editors and artists, something like Substack, it’s undermined by an algorithm that promotes horrible content. Rather than a place where intellectuals are privileged, the internet becomes a places where they are shoved into a crowd of idiots and paid content.
I think all of this is very true but I think Amanda Palmer & Neil Gaiman cultivated their parasocial fanbase before the algorithm took over so much of social life. Sandman has been around for a long time - and in the 1990’s he also sort of had this famous friendship with Tori Amos where they would reference each other all the time in their work (undoubtedly where some of his female fanbase took root as well), etc. Amanda Palmer did indeed have roots in a “DIY theater kid” kind of independent scene, as well. She was the kind of artist who toured liberal arts college towns and was on college radio a lot. The algorithm of Twitter and social media definitely helped with making them visible and “accessible” to their fans, but they had both been operating that way for a while - it’s part of how Palmer justified her exploitation of her fans and claimed there was no delineation between fans and friends. It’s not unusual for touring indie & punk bands to crash with fans on that circuit - it’s just that most of the time these are not artists with the money & influence of Amanda Palmer or Neil Gaiman!
I do think there’s something worth considering about how she brought the social protocols of that intimate, less commercial, smaller, “DIY” subculture into the much more celebrity-driven and powerful dynamic she and her husband were able to exert over others in their relationship, though. It’s one of many things that makes me think about her fanbase a lot - and how easy they were for she and Gaiman to take advantage of.
I think what resonates most with me is that it indeed feels like creators are supposed to supply the audience as an advance to the publisher instead of through the work.
The point of a publisher should be to shine a light and give it a platform, not chase a light someone else is shining.
It makes them functionally meaningless and the result is that a lot of savvy creators have TRICKED publishers into giving them a platform and then taken that audience to more fairly compensating indie and self-published waters. This also puts publishers in a bind as they lack the tools to negotiate (their media overlords certainly won't give ununionized freelancers their due) and so they end up essentially giving everything they have to a handful of personalities and then rely on part-time Hollywooders for the rest, who attract a small audience that can't be grown without a publisher that knows how to market people and their work.
Rather than simply capitalizing on existing personalities and their brand.
Another necessary and brilliant essay!! I read each bit of it gasping at how true Jessa’s points were, and also feeling aggravated at how most lit community folk have no idea that all this shit is going on. A personal possibly irrelevant footnote: My husband was in Rio back in 2008 signing his book Lush Life while Gaiman was signing at same time. Gaiman’s line went on forever, and my husband’s was super short. He recalled how the Gaiman line was all super young women. Grooming doesn’t even begin to cover what G was up to.
one really has to wonder how many enablers he had in publishing or the university where he taught, who knew and hid things. it went on for so long!
I have a lot of thoughts about Amanda Palmer's fanbase. Her "beer and hugs" tour came where I lived and when a music critic friend wrote kind of critically about that for a local rag - and how she just completely eschewed the idea of hiring local musicians to open for her with, yknow, money - a lot of her, uh, annoying fans really came after my friend. It didn't really matter that Palmer was exploiting people, they just wanted to be near her, and how dare we nobodies criticize their feminist queen?
I think its tempting to apply certain labels to Amanda Palmer - to say she's a "white feminist" or a just a bourgeois woman exploiting other women - and certainly all of this would be accurate, but what always made her get under my skin, personally, is that unlike a Lena Dunham or some other problematic woman in the public eye who seemed to constantly be putting her foot in her mouth, she had this rabid fanbase that defended every single thing she did! Not quite Taylor Swift or Beyhive level - a much smaller scale than that - but the parasocial feeling her fans felt for her, and to some extent her husband and the fact of their relationship - really did work as a bubble to protect her from criticism even though she wasn't the kind of star who was making lots of people a lot of money.
I also think the simple fact of being married to Palmer, who announced herself repeated and very publicly as a feminist, and who cultivated a fanbase of women who did the same, also in a strange roundabout way worked to insulate and protect Neil Gaiman from being exposed or confronted about his treatment of female fans. Like, "of course" Gaiman had a large female readership and fanbase - so many of his characters were women, he worked in genres (supernatural romance, gothic fiction) popular with women and children, women make up a huge chunk of the publishing consumer demo, women made up a huge chunk of his wife's fanbase, and he was very vocal about causes a lot of women care about. What is shocking is not simply that a very wealthy and popular publishing industry figure got away with abuse for so long, but that his private actions were so completely unaligned with his public persona - and that all of this seemed to be hiding in plain sight!