Make a Nerdy Living
Page 1
FOR KATRINA, WHO MAKES MY
NERDY LIFE WORTH NERDY LIVING
STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
Text © 2018 Alex Langley
Cover and illustrations © 2018 Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4549-3243-7
For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.
sterlingpublishing.com
Interior design by Gavin Motnyk
Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan
Illustrations by Creees Lee
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE LIFE YOU’RE LIVING
CHAPTER ONE:
BLOGGING
CHAPTER TWO:
VIDEO
CHAPTER THREE:
COSPLAY
CHAPTER FOUR:
CRAFTING
CHAPTER FIVE:
GAMING
CHAPTER SIX:
BRINGING NERDINESS TO CONVENTIONAL CAREERS
CHAPTER SEVEN:
PODCASTING
CHAPTER EIGHT:
ART AND COMICS
CHAPTER NINE:
WRITING BOOKS
CONCLUSION:
WE STAND TOGETHER AS NERDS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION
THE LIFE YOU’RE LIVING
Like any kid, my idea of growing up involved never really growing up. I wanted to keep playing video games ’til dawn, to write something more interesting than the answers to my homework, to make and think and create without having to be interrupted by tasks of the mundane variety. I wanted what we all want—to take what I love and do it for a living.
Today, somehow, I’ve found a way to do exactly that, and you can, too.
We nerds are passionate when it comes to what we love. Video nerds obsess over putting together cinematic masterpieces or videos of cats reacting to other videos. Crafting nerds obsess over building the perfect props, clothes, gadgets, and gizmos. Writing nerds obsess over making sure every word, every letter, is in exactly the right place to build the perfect story or fanfiction or scathing blog-post review of the newest cinematic chum-bucket. Though making a career out of obsessions such as these used to be a pipe dream, today anyone has the chance to take their passion and make it a profession.
“How can I make a living at this?” is the question many a nerd asks while doing the things they love. Make a Nerdy Living is the answer.
This book will explore the myriad ways in which eager nerds can get paid to live their passions and self-start the careers they yearn for. If you’ve ever watched professional streamers in envy as they rake in cash for playing video games, if you’ve ever marveled at the skills and artistry of a professional cosplayer, if you’ve got a half-finished novel or blog post you wish you could complete and get paid for, if you’ve ever hungered to do something a little bit more fulfilling, then this book is for you. Make a Nerdy Living is for nerds at every stage in their careers. In these pages are general tips for newcomers, in-depth advice for those with some experience points under their belts, and everything else in between.
Through forbidden arcane rituals, I’ve melded research, anecdotes, personal experience, and interviews with working nerds to create this frothing tome of intellectual goodness. So if you’re bold enough, dear reader, then lock the doors, settle in, and buckle those sweet buns up while I show you some ways you can level up your life and career into the nerdy living you deserve.
CHAPTER ONE
BLOGGING
Blogs create thoughtful conversations, distribute information, and tell us about the Top Ten Most OMG Moments from Game of Thrones. Blogs exist everywhere and cover every topic. Their ubiquitousness and versatility stem from the format’s simplicity, requiring only a computer and an Internet connection from both creator and participant. Hence, many folks choose the blog as their first foray into the world of professional nerddom. Blogs are, to put it succinctly, the cybernetic spine running up and down the Internet’s titanium endoskeleton.
Though the term is today often used interchangeably with website, blogs* are sites that focus on producing content with a personal, conversational voice to it. Sometimes a blog will be laser-focused on a specific individual, like a mom in Detroit writing about the trials and tribulations of raising triplets or a California deep-sea diver discussing the latest gear, techniques, and diving spots. Sometimes a blog will focus on a small group with a theme, such as a band of pun-obsessed chemists or a quintet of would-be League of Legends champions climbing its way through the ranks despite the group’s chronic halitosis and general suckiness. Sometimes a blog is a whole lotta people posting a whole lotta things vaguely organized around a similar theme, expanding until the theme gets lost and the blog turns generic and grows out of control and we have to call in the US military/Jeff Goldblum to destroy it. Ideally, though, blogs can be about whatever you want—so long as you’re honest and passionate and you strive to improve.
THE EARLY HISTORY OF BLOGS
In the stone age of the Internet,* blogging took place through platforms such as Usenet, Bulletin Board Systems, and even e-mail lists. As technology advanced and the Internet grew in power and popularity, the rise of forums gave bloggers a platform they could use to reach others. One of the earliest pioneers of blogging was Justin Hall, who created Justin’s Links from the Underground. Hall’s site offered readers a tour of his life, offering intimate details in a way few had done online, along with a helping of Internet tips ’n’ tricks that may seem bizarre and archaic to modern readers.†
Dave Winer, another “forefather of blogging,”1 created Scripting News, a site described as the “longest-running Web Log on the Internet.”2 Winer’s blog talks tech, movies, social networking—anything and everything on the mind of this forward-thinking entrepreneur. Winer found a readership in his early days by pioneering the relaxed, almost diary-esque, blogging style that is common today.
A few years later, more specialized blogs began to appear. Harry Knowles created Ain’t It Cool News, a film-geek site known for its boisterous fanboyishness and inside info on the movie biz. After suffering a debilitating accident in 1994, Knowles began finding respite online, joining newsgroups and e-mail newsletters about film gossip, and eventually created the site to act as a home base for all such discussions.‡
Under the nom de plume§ “Belle de Jour,” Dr. Brooke Magnanti created Diary of a London Call Girl, a blog chronicling the time she spent as a high-end escort after she submitted her PhD thesis in forensic pathology. Thanks to her smart writing and the salacious mystery behind her true identity, Dr. Magnanti’s blog exploded in popularity. Since then, she has gone on to become a respected academic, authoring numerous books on science and sex, and inspiring the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl.3
In 1993, scientist and skeptic Phil Plait established Bad Astronomy to clear up common misconceptions and myths about the science of all things spacey.* Plait breaks down the science of things such as the ill-likelihood of a Planet X cataclysm wiping out life on Earth, why equinoxes and solstices have no special power over eggs, and why the moon landing “hoax” is wrong, wrong, wrong. Thanks, in no small part, to his blog, Phil has appeared on shows like The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Penn & Teller’s BS!, and Crash Course Astronomy; he’s also netted
book deals and become a staple contributor to several websites in need of someone with a healthy dose of brains and skepticism.
Bethany Keeley’s “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks achieved fame through its simple premise: pictures of signs with “quotation” marks that are not “only” unnecessary but often “imply” the opposite of what the presumed writers were “trying” to “imply.”4 The site is a little less article-focused than most blogs, illustrating the flexibility of blogs as a medium.
MY GOD, IT’S GETTING BIGGER
As the millennium neared its end, blogs’ popularity exploded with the force of a thousand flying-toaster screensavers. Geocities, Open Diary, Live Journal, and even MySpace made it easier than ever for the not-so-tech-savvy to get their voices heard. Today, blogs are everywhere. Anyone with an inclination toward writing tends to have one, even if it’s merely as a supplement to their true passion of doing webcomics, painting ceramic mugs that look like Star Wars characters, or posting long-winded video essays about My Little Pony.
Creating a web log is easier than ever before, whether you’re the most cybernetically enhanced futurist or a grandparent who doesn’t know their ISP from their ASS. This is a double-edged sword† for blogging hopefuls, however, as the path to blogging success is much more crowded than it was a scant handful of years ago. Don’t despair, dear reader! For you have an edge on the posers and wannabes—you’ve got enough determination to make a nerdy living that you’re now reading a book on how to make a nerdy living.
STARTING POINT: BLOGGING
A blog is arguably the easiest career to start among the many mentioned in this book. Your supply list is pretty straightforward:
Access to a computer
Access to the Internet
A hosting platform, i.e., the virtual landlord to the virtual lot on which you’ll build your blog
That’s it! Blogging is so accessible, it can be done for free, through publicly available computers at your local library, on a free hosting platform. It’s not recommended you do that, however, as public computers are a trifle insecure, both in terms of password safety and their emotional states, and the last thing you want is for your burgeoning blog to get taken over by Russian hackers or your computer rambling about its mommy issues.
So, if possible, keep the blogging at home. If your computer’s old, no biggie. It doesn’t take a lot of computer power to get a blog chugging along, so grab a keyboard and get to clacking!
PICK A PREMISE
Your blog can be about whatever you want—no matter how niche it may seem, there will be others with the same niche interest. After you’ve chosen a topic, don’t feel like you’ve sold your soul to a dark deity and bound yourself to said subject for the rest of your life.* If you start off with a fantasy-sports blog and find yourself talking more about games in general than fantasy sports, that’s fine.
Conversely, fully abandoning your primary premise comes at a cost. If you start a blog about meat-smoking techniques, then begin filling it with more and more rambling posts about the state of British politics, you’re likely to drive your current readers off. Try to find a way to naturally integrate your evolving tastes into your current format without abandoning your primary premise. However, if you really and truly know your heart isn’t into your original premise anymore, you may want to get the potential hit in readership over with and swap topics now before the sunk cost fallacy* drags you in too deep. Blogs with broader focuses will likely have a harder time drawing in initial crowds but easier times during these kinds of transitions, so keep that in mind.
FOCUS AND DIVERSIFY
Next, decide whether you want your blog to be your main focus or a supplement to the thing you’re actually trying to do—and it’s okay to change your mind later on! There are plenty of people who start a blog as a companion to their YouTube channel only to find far more readers flocking to their writing than to their videos. Make your nerdy living however you want, and don’t limit yourself to trying to make it just one way. While the Paris Hilton/Nicole Richie reality series The Simple Life wasn’t exactly loved by the critics, it made enough money that Fox felt comfortable making three seasons of Arrested Development, which was critically beloved but didn’t manage to reach a broad audience in its initial run. If your videos are helping you gain traction online, keep at them even if the thing you’re most interested in is writing your blog (or vice versa). Once you’ve established a foothold online, you will have more flexibility toward building the career you want.
RESIST THE DARK CALL OF CONTENT THEFT
It starts out innocuously enough. At first, you’ve got a gaming blog with rich, detailed articles full of witticisms and analyses. Then, as you grow busier, you start supplementing the site with listicles full of Top Tens and the like. You try to make your titles clear and straightforward, but after a cleverly misleading title gets you some extra hits, you find yourself leaning more and more on titles like “Princess Peach Is Pregnant—and You Won’t Believe Who the Dad Is!” or “Get Ready for the Feels, True Believers, With This Amazing Gamer Proposal!” or “Your Puny Human Mind Will Melt When Trying to Comprehend the Cuteness of These 22 Pikachu Pics!” Then you’re adding in slideshows full of gaming memes and articles that are just screencaps of other people’s tweets about games, and pretty soon you’re not actually writing anything, merely copying and pasting other people’s material and taking credit for it. Your beautiful gaming blog is a gaming blog no more; it’s a digital van of stolen goods and you’re the creep in an Iron Maiden T-shirt trying to sell to middle-schoolers.
Plagiarism is a real thing, people, and it’s one of the worst offenses a writer can commit. Stealing someone else’s material, whether maliciously or not, is just that—stealing. We writers live by our words, and when you take those words, you’re taking someone else’s livelihood. The Internet may be a little bit Wild West when it comes to plagiarism and copyright; you still shouldn’t go black hat and take what you please. A single plagiarization now could cost you the job of your dreams in the future.
ALSO RESIST THE DARK CALL OF TOPIC HOMOGENIZATION
It’s all too easy to let your blog become a sprawling thing devoid of any real content. Video-game blog Kotaku may post a wide variety of articles, but they generally tie back to the over-arcing topic of video games. At the other end of the spectrum we have College Humor, a site once devoted to the art of comedy (generally with a college-oriented twist to it), which is now a generic news site full of articles like “Seven Shows Where the Main Character Is the Worst Character”5 and “Five Love Songs Not Actually About Love.”6 Both humor and college have long since left the haunted ruins of that once-mirthful site. It’s not alone—other sites have been desiccated down into zombified shells of potential entertainment because of the corruptive touch of topic homogenization. Never lose focus on the true essence of your site, whatever it might be.
PICK A GOOD WEB ADDRESS
ChloeMatthewsWorldOfCatsAndCrochet.com is a descriptive URL. It’s also as long as hell and no one is going to remember it. Brevity is the soul of wit7 and the soul of web addresses. ChloeCrochetsCats.com makes for a far pithier address while giving a cheeky hint as to what your site is about. The easier a URL is to remember, the easier it will be for people to remember to visit.
BLOG RESPONSIBLY
As the Internet has expanded, the battle for the ever-elusive clicks has grown fiercer. Two issues that became epidemic problems circa 2010 were clickbait and journalistic integrity.
Clickbait refers to deliberately attention-grabbing, often misleading article titles that are more focused on getting people to click the article and generate ad revenue than in providing information of substance. This technique originated in print journalism; the clickbait of decades past was referred to as yellow journalism and used the same techniques as modern clickbait to exploit curiosity. Tabloids used it to a humorous intent with stories like “Garden of Eden Found!” or “Elvis is Alive—and Running for Preside
nt!” or “Bat Boy Leads Cops on 3-State Chase!”8 Others created sensationalistic headlines about celebrities, politics, and health, trying to badger readers into picking up a copy by using their fears and curiosity against them.
While the format has changed, the tactics haven’t. Today’s journalists are in a faster race than ever to be the first to post big news, and things like journalistic integrity can get left by the wayside. Thanks to the Internet’s instantaneous information-spreading powers, the time it takes for a story to break and to become old news is virtually nil. In the race to be the first, many writers don’t have time to check facts or sources, instead contenting themselves to course-correct misinformation with nothing more than the word update added to the headline and a blurb at the bottom of their article explaining the whole thing was false. Others don’t even go that far, counting on the rabble of the Internet to wash over the fact they were wrong.
If you want to become a professional blogger, the urge to clickbait and write without fact-checking may gnaw at you from time to time. Be better. It’s fine to write attention-catching headlines; connect them to articles of substance and don’t trick people into clicking to up your number of views. Do your best to get the scoop on news while checking with multiple sources before posting unless you’ve got a direct source—e.g., you’re the first to post about the new Spider-Man re-re-re-reboot because you have an archived video clip of Stan Lee talking about his cameo as Unus the Untouchable’s cousin, Anus the Antagonistic.
USE A PSEUDONYM IF YOU WANT
Some bloggers choose to use pseudonyms; others don’t. The choice is entirely up to you. The Internet can be a fun place. It can also be a scary, unforgiving place full of stalkers and hackers. If you’re planning on blogging about incendiary topics such as politics, racial strife, or which MST3K host is the best,* using a pseudonym (literally, “fake name”) may help save you from some pain down the line. If you do, claim your pen name across every social media platform to ensure uniformity for your brand.