Blogs and Books are Focused

I’m not forcing to invite my audience here. I’m trying to keep it focused on my interests. I feel that I don’t have to worry about boring 90 percent of the audience—because [the audience for my blog] self-selected themselves as wanting to read this, I can be much more authentic and much more liberated to talk about what I really want to talk about, rather than trying to anticipate the needs of a scattered, diverse audience like a magazine has.

By the way, I find blogging ruins me for magazine writing. It’s difficult to write for magazines right now, which is ironic given that I’m a magazine editor. It’s difficult because magazines are a kind of one-size-fits-all product, and the audience is large, with differing interests. You have to write something that tries to satisfy all of [your readers] or many of them, whereas a blog is very self-selecting. If you’re interested in what I have to say, fine. If you’re not, that’s great—go somewhere else.

The book is also self-selecting. If you’re not interested in the concepts in the book, don’t buy it. If you are, I’m going to go deep, and that’s great. But books—and blogs—are focused, whereas magazines are not.