The Crier's Hoarse Voice: On the Diminishing Returns of Relentless Promotion
The advice is a drumbeat in the creative world: build your platform, shout your presence from the digital rooftops, and never miss an opportunity to share your work. We are told to be our own tireless heralds, flooding every channel with our latest post, our newest chapter, our freshest thought. The logic seems sound—how will anyone find you if you don’t make noise? But I want to challenge this, to suggest that this constant, frantic promotion is not just exhausting; it is often counterproductive. The act of always crying out can, paradoxically, make the world less likely to listen.
Consider the town crier of old. His power was not in the frequency of his shouts but in their rarity and weight. When he appeared in the square, people stopped. They knew his presence signified something of consequence. Now imagine if that same crier stood on the corner all day, every day, yelling about the minor fluctuations in the price of turnips, the opening of a new shoemaker’s shop, and the fact that he himself was, indeed, still there. His voice would become background noise, a nuisance to be tuned out. His important proclamations would be lost in the cacophony of his own making.
This is the fate of the perpetual promoter. In an effort to be seen, they render themselves invisible through sheer ubiquity. The audience, overwhelmed by the volume of the signal, learns to disregard it. The ‘share’ button becomes a reflex, divorced from any consideration of the value of what is being shared. We end up promoting our minor thoughts with the same fervor as our major ones, diluting our entire body of work into an undifferentiated stream of content. The audience, wisely, begins to question our discernment. If everything is urgent, then nothing is.
The alternative is not silence, but a shift in energy. It is the move from being a crier to being a curator—of both others’ work and, more importantly, your own. It is the difficult, editorial act of holding back. It is publishing less frequently but with more substantial heft. It is allowing a piece to sit and mature before hurling it into the world. It is understanding that the space between announcements is not dead air, but the fertile ground where anticipation and reputation grow.
This approach demands a profound trust: trust that good work, when released with intention, will find its people. It trusts that an audience values being treated with respect more than being treated as a target. It replaces the anxiety of constant output with the quiet confidence of crafted contribution. Your voice, used sparingly, retains its power. When you do speak, it is not another drop in the torrent, but a clear, resonant note that cuts through the noise, precisely because it is so rare, and so considered.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: