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Today on the show, what it's like to be a creator in a creator's market.

Rob Walker is a journalist who's written for the New York Times and Slate among many other places.

Now he's one of many independent writers with a subscription based newsletter on Substack.

Rob recently spoke with Peter Kafka on the recode media podcast about what it takes to strike it out on your own as an independent writer plus the highs and lows of the Substack hustle.

You can listen to the full conversation over on the recode media feed. Here's Peter and Rob.

So as you mentioned in one of your newsletters, you're sort of in the creator economy now, which is kind of funny because by one version of it, you've been in the creator economy pretty much your entire life, right?

You make things and sell them and do different gigs.

And I'm interested in your thoughts about it because I on the one hand think all right, the creator economy is something Rob Walker's been doing all most of his life.

And on the other hand, it seems like a very cynical way to talk about exploiting teenagers for a couple of minutes on TikTok or selling, you know, we're crypto projects.

But on the other hand, the idea that the internet can allow people to make a living doing stuff they're interested in by reaching an audience they couldn't reach on their own without the internet is pretty appealing.

And I'm wondering, do you think this is a real different version of what you've been doing in the past or is this sort of a natural progression and this just goes along with book writing and teaching and magazine article writing that you've been doing pretty much all your life.

Well, I think what first of all, so I've my context that I'm coming to this is both as a some longtime freelance writer, but also someone who's written a number of stories about like I wrote some of the early stuff about Kickstarter and Etsy and.

I've written about YouTubers and and all that stuff, so it's been a subject of interest to me professionally for a long time and everything you said is true and like it's sort of all of the above it's always all the above there are there are real success stories.

So what it comes down to and what it comes down to with me what I think is somewhat different is just the control, you know, when you are a freelance writer, even if you have a call I have had stretches of my life where I had calm for the New York Times and another one for the New York Times magazine.

And what happens is like you know they the editor changes and they bring in their own people like if I could wave a magic wand and recapture the audience that I had around consumed the column I was doing for the Times magazine.

I would love to be able to have that audience still in my hand because I hear from people all the time to this day that column ended like a decade ago.

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