[Weekly Newsletter] Making a Living as a Creator
A new video, the morals of paid work philosophy and my third table
The future stretches out infinitely before me because I’ve taken off time to just just figure out what I want to do with my life and somehow it seems like all I really want to do is sit at my desk writing fiction all day long.
I feel restless and I know that I want to do more things. Sometimes the urge to start woodworking comes but I don’t take action on most of these urges. I do a bit of sewing and this hobby is really good for me. I talk a lot about how doing something physical with my hands while listening to a podcast helps me focus.
The Philosophy of Whether to Make Money
I got an invitation to make a video for 15minutes.ai and that motivated me to film & edit a short video in two days. I’m rather conflicted about this because it was semi-affiliate marketing and I feel like I don’t really want to do these videos because they’re not really going to make me money, but they’re going to decrease the trust my audience have in me.
So these videos don’t really make me money because you are essentially making an ad for this company and if there are people who click on the link and Actually buy a subscription, you get a share of what they are paying, but I don’t think anyone’s really going to click on this one because I didn’t really promote it that hard in my video. I went “there are alternative ways you could do this.”
This is how small creators get deals. It feels like selling out, but if you look at celebrities endorsing products, this is normal. Because even celebrities need a way to make money. I’m not even really being paid but I did get a free trial of their product, to test, and later as a video bonus. So there’s arguably something of value being given to me, but do I use this product? And if I don’t use a product, isn’t it kind of a sham to recommend it?
I did actually like the website experience where I could get a summary of a book read to me and I could take that summary and put it into AI for an even better concise summary. It did help me in my process of trying to read this books that were recommended by other creators and I really wanted to finish reading but I struggle with my attention span and I couldn’t really finish reading it.
Part of why I made this videos is that I finally have a video idea that I can somewhat commit to and that really helps me actually make videos instead of just floundering in the sea of ideas that I have that I never actually execute on.
I want to do more creative things and I want to engage my mind more to think through these things.
Creator’s Eternal Conflict
I feel like the internal conflict of the creator, is very much on the dilemna of monetizing.
Option A: Reject it all
The most correct option feels like I should reject all affiliate deals because it biases your thinking if you accept free products. But on the other side of things, if you want to evaluate These products properly, you need to try a range of them, which is why it’s not economically feasible for a creator to just use their own money to buy these And try them all out. There is a reason people don’t do that because it’s costly. And the costs of switching are not just monetary but also the amount of time you have to invest to learn it. So the creator that is investing time to learn these things is already paying a cost.
Another part of this problem is what I want my writing to be about because I want to develop intellectually and writing is the way I do this. So I don’t really want my writing to be corrupted by the need to cater to readers and try to garner attention. Or monetize because it feels like I am not aligned towards this main objective when I get sidetracked by the objective of making income.
The problem is that I do actually need income if I want to sustain this. I love to take notes on philosophy and I would do it for free because this is what I am doing for myself, but would I share it for free?
I don’t really enjoy going out of my way to make content, like dressing up, putting on makeup, finding a good angle to shoot from. After spending a near year, fully focusing on content creation and recovering from burnout, I feel like I want to get a job next year because I want to see what it’s like to have a job compared to being a research PhD.
It is very stressful to be an entrepreneur. When you have a job, all those worries are shifted to another person. There is less financial stability if you consider how you can’t be retrenched at any time, but I’m not the only person in this economy who needs to make money in order to live in the society that doesn’t have ample public resources for us to claim (In the olden days, people could encircle a piece of land, start farming on it, and then claim that as their property. This is not how anything works now. Housing is so expensive that I don’t think I’ll be buying a house in this life.)
Option B: Creator Way
I did watch a few podcasts from creators that were talking about their stances on affiliate deals.
Celebrities do this too. It is only Youtubers that have to declare so much. But we can follow old TV regulations instead of re-inventing the wheel.
Tom Buck’s pretty ethical stance - Ethics — Tom Buck I really love this one.
The only problem is that I don’t feel that settled. I don’t necessarily except all affiliate deals, but it’s more because I cannot be bothered to make a video or I just don’t see how this product is useful to me in any way, rather than a firm moral objection against advertisement.
One of the reasons I stopped making videos three years ago was because I got an semi-affiliate deal with Scrintal, the same kind of if your audience takes the deal, then you get some sort of prize if you get enough of them. (It was a very bad deal. They were basically giving out meh prizes) I really liked the product (At the time I don’t really like it now ‘cause they have wrecked the usability for the sake of adding more features) But the stress of trying to make a video that was good enough that it could possibly be monetized was so bad that I filmed the video. I edited half of it and then I just couldn’t do this anymore.
To Monetize or not
I struggle with the idea of not monetizing this hobby at all because,
There is a pressure to make hobbies into monetizable side hustles. We think a lot about the need for people to be able to make an income off something that they like. It is in the messaging all around us. (For example, family asking, how much did that make you? / What is your job?)
Devs need to eat → I really like how @Kepano (the obsidian dev) has this firm stance of “It is okay to want to make money because you can’t just give everything for free. You do need a way to sustain your own activities of making this product too.” It is a bit conflicting. Obsidian is such a good piece of software because there is this community of people willing to make free content, free themes and free plugins. And it would not be the same experience without the plugins. That is why I am here. The full experience.
On the otherside,
It is really scary to be without a job for so long because you start to wonder if it affects your resume, what the job market is actually like and there is too much uncertainty. I still struggle with the idea of working for really long hours every day, but I might be able to find a job where it isn’t that harsh and hopefully something like Daniel Priestly’s 6-6-7 apprenticeship. I just need the experience of a regular job.
I do still want to make digital products, but I’m not sure if people would want a setup Zettelkasten vault, or if you can even sell one because the plugins are under different licenses. I think of it as having a Minecraft modpack setup for you so you can just play instead of fiddling for months, while the process of fiddling does teach you a lot, it gets in the way of the thinking work.
Weekly Newsletter Tidbits
You have made it to the TLDR section:
Wins of the Week
I finally managed to let go of my inner perfectionist to publish my new video “How to read books with a short attention span” within 2 days. I did very quick filming and I did the main cut right after when the context was still fresh. I even did extra little bits of filming as I was editting. The next day I looked over everything. I added sound effects. I added graphics and I played with color correction. Published on second day! This is a win because it used to take me a month to make a video - I also finally discovered a bunch of amazing plugins :D and ohhh mah paper sound effects!
I have finally got back into the mood of automating my workflow again.
I set up a new workflow to send voice memos from my Apple Watch to Mac whisper to transcribe for me and then to append it to my daily note in obsidian (Because MacWisper has a better transcription model than Apple Dictate, And because I had issues with Drafts not taking down all my text so I wanted the audio recording saved)
I got an Alfred command that gathers all my journal entries from the week + my weekly zettelkasten log so I can use AI to process my weekly review (I still want to use AI in my personal workflows more, to help me summarize, clean up text and generate character portraits when writing my novel.)
I’ve been consuming a lot of content. Highlights are:
Brandon Sanderson’s writing course (I love it so far)
Visual sense-making from Sketch Your Mind Conference
Da Vinci Resolve Animation Fanciness (Tutorials) - I did not realize that you could code DaVinci Resolve animations like this.
I’ve set up a new PayPal.me link for anyone who wants to support my work directly. In my entire experience as a creator, nobody ever donates, but I even have a Kofi and a Gumroad account. I plan to do downloads from Kofi side soon.
Idea of the Week
Limiting your choices helps you make choices instead of always choosing the default of postponing the choice. Procrastination is a choice in itself. It is the worst of all choices, but it is what we default to when intimidated with too many options.
Cool Discoveries
Excalidraw-claymate: A tool based on Excalidraw to create stop motion animations and slides.
Simple Clear Explanation of How to Color Grade in Da Vinci Resolve
HTX Studio continues to impress with their infinite budget
Insights from the little miseries of the week
Adjustable desks can be very wobbly. I set up a third desk in my room this week because I wanted to work near the window, without a monitor blocking the light. I ended up using some cheap electric desk legs because I didn’t want to buy the expensive ones that I got last round, but these made for a desk that just shook when I tried to write on it. → Sometimes it’s better just to spend money instead of being cheap. I couldn’t really tell if it was all OEM products.
Cooking takes a lot of time. I rarely cook for myself. I ended up spending an entire day trying to to cook breakfast because I got too fancy and I decided to render my own beef tallow (it takes hours) to use to fry up my vegetables. I have done huge sessions of cooking before, but this Sunday was a reminder of how much work it takes, just to live on your own.
Airpods 3 is overrated. Big tech influencers are full of bull. Before buying the AirPods 3, I was carefully looking through all the tech reviews and people were saying that was better than the AirPods 2 in terms of soundproofing and it was incredibly comfortable (you can sleep in them). That is a lie. I got sore ears just from wearing this no matter how I change out the fit of the earbuds because the shape just doesn’t feel right (I did not have this problem with my Nothings 2 Earbuds). The soundproofing is good, but if you want proper soundproofing, you should still go for headphones (my Bose Quiet Comfort are way better).
Here is the research that I did:
Here is the update to that
These are some of the most uncomfortable earpods I have ever tried. Enough said.