Would You Rather Be a Best-Seller or Critically Acclaimed?

My hunch is we'd all say critically acclaimed until we're actually in the situation where we're trying to build a career. Then, it gets tricky. It's a subject close to home, because while my book is selling pretty well, the reviews, letters and feedback are much better. Like any metrics, I tend to get sucked in to looking to them for validation, and have to keep reminding myself why I wrote it: To tell an important story right and inspire and educate would be entrepreneurs. Not the ego of seeing my name on a best-seller list.

There's a legitimate reason to want best-seller instead of critically acclaimed that doesn't have to do with ego or money. Numbers are like votes, so when something is a mass hit, it's an quantitative analysis that you did something good. Reviews, letters, articles -- even effusive ones-- are all qualitative, and somehow hard to trust. Less scientific somehow.

That's thinking many a Web entreprenuer gets sucked into as well: You start it for the love, then the numbers get seductive. It's so easy to think of them as an objective, rational calculation of your worth...until they stagnate or fall.

 

But the truth is it can't be a rational calculation of worth, if we all know endless examples of indie hits-- be it movies, music, whatever-- that were better than blockbuster hits. I've been having a similar thoughts about this re: this blog. On the days I blog heavily, traffic goes way up. Especially if I weigh in on the Valley obsession of the day. It's seductive to just do that everyday. But is that really adding value and building something different? Maybe not. I recently read something from Michael Arrington addressing how TechCrunch's "community" had changed. (Sorry....can't find the link this second.) He essentially said as an audience grows it inevitably gets diluted and the trolls, spammers etc come in. I really love my blog audience. I get great comments from people I know and don't know. Occasional shocking comment from Fake Steve Jobs aside, my comments tend to be interesting, relevant conversations. I already write for two mass properties in BusinessWeek and TechTicker...suddenly I'm seeing the beauty in staying small. I'm not at a point where I'm trying to monetize this blog, but I wonder if a smaller community ever has an endemic value over sheer size of a mass community? I'm not talking about a niche-- because niches can still be mass when there are more than 1 billion people online.

And in my third random association of the day on this topic, my husband surprised me with tickets to see Liz Phair last night. She sang her one truly great album, Exile in Guyville, from start to finish. This was the absolute listen-to-after-every-bad-day-at-work-slash-bad-date anthem of my early 20s. Sadly, Ms. Phair never put out another album as good, and in a bid to become the big commercial hit she never was her last two (Or maybe one? I stopped paying attention after a while) just veered horribly off course, IMHO. So maybe she was never as commercially successful as she'd hoped. But judging by the room of swooning early-to-late women in their 30s who knew every word to Exile, she'd clearly created something people loved-- and still loved 15 years later.

Of course, that's no excuse for not blogging more, or for blogging lazily. But not having internet access in my new house for much of last week is.