How Creatives Might Survive and Thrive in a Post-Productivity World

And how the conversation around productivity might evolve in the coming years

Note: We are now at Day 10 of my Digital Advent Calendar event and still going strong! I’m dropping one resource in full from my catalog every day onto my Substack! These resources require a paid subscription. You can get a yearly subscription here (20% off!) or if you want a smaller commitment, you can get a month-to-month subscription here. I’m enjoying dropping related resources in chunks, so we’re back to some more traditional productivity implementation books:

• Day 7 was The 8-Minute Writing Habit

• Day 8 was Write Better, Faster

• Day 9 was Dictate Your Book

• Day 10 is this article

• Day 11 will be the Write Better, Faster mini-course

Again, you can get a yearly subscription here (20% off!) or if you want a smaller commitment, you can get a month-to-month subscription here.

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It’s December 2024 when I’m writing this and I’m dwelling on the fact that ten years ago, I had no books on writing. All I had was an article on Medium that is still available here: https://medium.com/the-productive-novelist/how-to-consistently-write-3500-4000-words-per-hour-db59505859db

When I look at this article published in 2014, I’m really overwhelmed.

I can’t actually believe I’ve been doing this for ten years, or that my books on productivity are ten years old. The first version of Write Better, Faster came out in March 2015. My other two books on writing fast, The 8-Minute Writing Habit and Dictate Your Book, came out later that year, based on questions I got from the first book. They went on to become more popular than Write Better, Faster, which was a wild business lesson for me.

My Productive Novelist series and brand started with this article ten years ago. I still can’t believe I turned it into all of this. 🥲

I’ve been asking myself for the last few years, are these books even relevant anymore?

But, they still sell. And from what I can tell, there are tons of people who are interested in streamlining their processes around writing.

And so I thought it might be worth writing about whether we need productivity books on writing faster in a post-productivity world. After all, generative AI can produce endless words, and even if it couldn’t, our “competition” (other writers, dead and living) can or have produced more words and posts and books than any of us could read in 500 lifetimes.

Why is Productivity Still Relevant?

Over time, I’ve come to realize that while many people think they are looking for productivity and specifically, speed, what they are really looking for is something else:

• Process - Finding a repeatable, personalized process for tackling a huge project like a book (or another large writing project) is a big deal. People want to bring order to chaos. We want to know how to make our dreams come true. We want to plan.

• Creativity - A lot of creatives see productivity and creativity at odds, but in truth being able to do creative work faster is the most likely way the creative work will get done. Learning to work faster has only made me more creative because I can do more. It wasn’t ultimately about the speed (though that was the hook for me as a new author). It was instead about the skill-building, the professionalism, and the practice.

• Money - I don’t know a ton of creatives who truly want to create more for more’s sake. Most just want to have money handled so they can keep doing the creative work they are doing. Many want that money to be a receipt of appreciation and validation for the creative work they’ve done. I teach all of the above, and The Productive Novelist series espouses this journey. These books contain a piece of the puzzle for most creatives.

These books remain a strong part of my story on becoming a successful creative, because learning how to write fast was the thing that opened up writing to me and made it more realistic to pursue. I was able to get projects done in less time, which meant I could finish them before my energy gave way to me abandoning them instead. I hear from writers all the time who are happy to get started, but can’t find the motivation to get over the middle hump of the project. For me, speed was the answer—and maybe it is for you too.

More than anything, I think the next iteration of these books (probably not anytime soon) will be to update them to include generative AI tools as part of the process. I’m hearing from more and more writers that AI tools are part of their process:

• Part of their brainstorming, outlining, writing, or editing process

• Part of their dictation or transcription process

• Part of their marketing process to get their work onto more platforms

• Part of their process to get their work into more formats

As our discussions around productivity evolve, I’ll be there to meet the needs.

Productivity is Not Going Away—But Our Understanding of it is Evolving

Examining these books got me thinking about what productivity even is. For the past decade, we have mostly equated productivity with:

• Quantity

• Speed

• Efficiency

• Automation

• Money

• Success

• Hard Work

And we see it in direct opposition to:

• Quality

• Creativity

• Joy

• Leisure

• Play

• Doing it by hand

• Failure

• Laziness

• Procrastination

But when productivity as we know it today, in all it’s “more more more” glory, is no longer an advantage in the marketplace…

What next?

What Will Change in a Post-Productivity Creative World

I do think we’re entering an era of post-productivity, where “faster” and “more” will need to give way to a new kind of “better.” That “better” is…

#1 - We are swinging into a Forest-Aquatic era in Publishing

Having a fanbase is going to be everything moving forward in publishing, at least for the foreseeable future. It will not be enough to have readers. Do those readers move in sync? Do they buy more from us, more repeatedly, and at higher prices? Do they follow the author from platform to platform and format to format?

The best way to develop fanbases are to adopt Forest and Aquatic strategies around, branding, experiences, community, relationships, engagement, and shared languages. Forests and Aquatics intuitively understand this already, but the rest of us are able to learn too!

I purposely used the word “swinging” to describe this shift, because honestly, I think there’s a good chance it will swing back in 5-15 years.

I have been online for a long time and watched a similar swing from Forest/Aquatic to Desert/Grassland to Forest/Aquatic with blogs. The blogging community started as disconnected, self-hosted personal blogs (and rose up from the Xanga/Livejournal/MySpace days) and then people realized they could succeed by posting more often. Teams of bloggers overtook SEO rankings using established sites, which then made it difficult to get any significant traffic with a personal blog, and it fell out of style for the most part.

Don’t get me wrong—lots of people kept blogging, but the hierarchy collapsed and the money dried up in many ways. Blogging has now found a new home on Substack, where people can be as Forest-y as their little hearts desire.

But…The hierarchy could form again, and any ranked order or leaderboard system brings Desert and Grassland strategies back to the forefront. Medium tried to keep this from happening, but it’s become a strongly Desert-focused platform now. Substack has done some work to prevent this on their platform, but we’ll see if they can maintain it and keep the beast from shifting back!

In publishing, I think we’ll see a lot of this play out on retailers and pretty quickly, within the next year or two (the evidence has already been building for years around it).

It has also played out quickly in direct sales, with most of the advertising strategies that got quick results initially not working as well anymore. I spent most of 2023 cautioning the industry against going all in on one-click website sales strategies and building proper social, email, and ad funnels…I cautioned authors not to jump on a pricey Shopify solution like it’s a magic bullet, when it wasn’t going to work for most people.

None of my opinions have changed on any of that.

What I see in the industry is a lot of Deserts pivoting and searching for that arbitrage through new platforms, but there are so many Deserts doing this that the arbitrage is flooded fairly immediately.

The antidote is to adopt the Forest and Aquatic strategies which are largely around maximizing instead of optimizing. These archetypes are not trying to find the best or the biggest, they are trying to make the most of the people who they can find.

#2 - Top of funnel (ToFu) content is out

AI can create all the generic listicles and whatever else has been topping Buzzfeed and corporate-owned blogs for the last decade. If you’re a content creator, people instead want:

• Deep content - Analysis, worldbuilding, longevity, larger story arcs, interpretation

• Personalized content - Implementation, accountability, specificity

• Connective content - Embodiment, authenticity, influence, inspiration, experience

• Innovative content - Novelty, insight, imagination, futuristic

Basically, audiences want what the Forest and Aquatic can offer the best. They don’t have enough attention to get excited about everything and everyone, but they do want to get excited about something.

#3 - AI content alone won't get flagged, but generic content will

If we ever are able to write books with the press of a button, those books will probably get flagged pretty quickly! It won’t be much different than an unedited AI image or an AI-read audiobook. If it’s easy for humans to detect with the naked eye, it will be easy for programs to detect it too.

If we are using AI skillfully, as a tool that is part of the creation process, the human elements and injections are going to mask all of the AI parts.

I’ve said for a long time that AI is coming for creators…But it’s coming for the bottom tiers and raising the bar to entry for a successful career.

The bottom tiers are usually either people getting started, people who don’t work on delivering higher and higher quality as their career continues, and people who got in during the early days, saw some success, and didn’t evolve when competition joined them. (You see this in publishing too.)

The middle and top tiers of creators will survive by continuing to evolve with AI. It doesn’t mean using AI if that’s not what you want to do. I do generally believe that the creatives who use AI will have an easier time as we transition to it, but I also think there is a path for those who say… “Well, if AI can flood the market with books, I better keep leveling up my craft and nurturing my readership.” AI is here to stay and is only getting better right now, and those who accept the environment we are creating in will have a much better time going forward.

As a reminder, there is a TON of content that AI will never produce well. Some off the top of my head:

• Special knowledge or insider content - This why my publishing analysis will never be replicated by AI—I know many the key players of this industry and hear tons of stuff that isn’t public knowledge. I have a strong, broad view of independent publishing. I probably wouldn’t enter any non-fiction space where I didn’t have this advantage or the next one, or both.

• Time-sensitive content - AI is currently much better at generating evergreen content, so if knowing something sooner or within a timeframe is helpful, this is another area where humans still have the advantage.

• Opinion and analysis content - I watch a lot of LEGO influencer videos which do have some of these elements, but they also have something more: influence. I don’t want to know about a LEGO product’s specs or how-to, I want to know how the influencer is using or thinking about LEGO. I want to know the mods they are making and how they are displaying a particular set, and what they think of the set in terms of having fun building it and value for the experience. There’s endless content like this on YouTube, and I’ve also seen a bunch of data that AI is training disproportionately on educational videos on YouTube.

• Authentic and branded content - AI will also never be able to be human or create an authentic brand. Like, Star Wars is Star Wars…AI can create the next Star Wars or it can create a knock off of Star Wars, but it can’t create Star Wars as it is today.

I think there’s a huge fear that “content” will be devalued and “creators” will be wiped out, but it’s really only a certain type of content and a certain type of creator. To survive and thrive, think of how your business can shift away from those replicable elements and into unique elements that only you can deliver.

#4 - Algorithms will better know how to surface our content

As creatives, we no longer will need to maintain different accounts for different projects online. I don’t actually think we’ll have the energy to do so anyway!

Right now, most algorithms are so sophisticated that they can show your piece of content to people who will be most interested in it.

It really doesn’t matter if this person follows you, if they have liked your stuff before, or if they know who you are. The algorithms don’t care anymore. They have tons of data on what each profile on their sites will engage with, so they just find similar content and push it that person’s feed.

This is important for several reasons:

1. Followers mean less and less every day. They are not being shown your content anywhere but email anymore—and even that is getting throttled. Both a good thing (if you are starting out) and a bad thing (if you are established).

2. Every piece of content starts at effectively ground zero. Making stickier content is more important than ever. Finding ways to relate that content back to your calls-to-action is also important.

3. Deeper connections with an audience matter. Algorithms are only working for you when they are finding you new audience. They are rarely working for you when you need to connect with your readers and fans. If you have a deeper connection with your audience, than you have humans who will take action even when the algorithms are working against that action.

4. Platforms that build over time are worth more. Any platform that actually shows your work to people who have connected on the platform already are gold. This is why I favor platforms like Kickstarter, Substack, and email in general over many, many other platforms I’ve tried.

5. For all the other platforms, you probably need an optimization or automation tool. For platforms that don’t let you build your audience over time (and actually send your content to that audience), there is usually too much around timing, keywords, trends, virality, and whatever else to manage on your own, manually, for an extended period of time. Some people really enjoy doing that, and they should keep doing it! But for the rest of us, it is helpful to have either an optimization tool or an automation tool (or both!) that does some of that work for us. Because the work is entirely gaming the algorithm, which is usually flooding the algorithm with content and pushing harder for a time when something pops off. One of the things we are looking at for our conferences is to bring more companies that do optimizations or automations for the platforms that we know work better with them.

One reason we may want to separate content is for first impressions and branding with humans. Even then, I think I would be cautious to think through the Eliminate, Simplify, Automate, Delegate framework to attempt to pare your social efforts down. Where could you combine and maximize, rather than optimize?

#5 - Hyper-optimization will rule several retailers

The race to the bottom on optimization has begun. Or you may consider it a race to the top of the rankings and storefronts, depending on how you want to view it. In other words, only the tippy top of the best content will rise to the top at this point. Is your content designed to do so?

Optimization is primarily a Desert strategy, and it is what the Desert does best. This is because most of optimization in the current environment is finding an attention arbitrage—a place where there is lots of attention for a cheaper price than what others are paying.

Retailers have always been set up to work best with Desert strategies, but in the past they could still work okay still for several of the other types. We are moving to a space now where they will work terribly for the other four ecosystem archetypes—Grassland, Tundra, Forest, and Aquatic—and how they make money easiest. And they will even stop working well for the Deserts who are not the most Desert-iest. Breakout hits will still work, but pulp fiction as a whole will have a downswing, and everyone writing pulp-ish or pulp-ajacent fiction will have trouble keeping up.

This has been happening for several years already, and it’s why the other four types have flocked to Writer MBA’s work on Kickstarter, wide, and direct sales.

Even for Deserts on retailers, most are going to see a decline in sales eventually. Part of it is that there is not a ton of arbitrage left to chase, and when there is, the market floods too quickly. I saw it happening on both TikTok and Facebook ads within the last year.

Unless you can go hard on optimization at a retailer (and if you are a Desert, you probably can), you may be better off building strong branding and community primarily off of retailers, and hoping it spills over to retailer sales.

And Deserts will need to lead the way on finding a new thing to optimize once productivity is past the optimization point. The answer is no longer writing faster, having a bigger catalog, writing really similar books to the market, or within the catalog, or spending the most on advertising.

#5 - The philosophy, theme, or movement of your work matters more than the content of it

People are investing in other people right now, not in topics that are related to their goals and what they want to do next.

In other words, very few people are looking for information to get them to the next level. Instead, they are looking for the right people—people who are service providers, coaches, live class teachers, mastermind and event faciliators, and so on—who can help them get to the next level.

For many, they realize that it’s accountability, mindset, and implementation that they need help with.

How does this translate to fiction? Well, people will read your books if they want to follow your characters and if they agree with and find value in your worldviews, which you’ve injected into the books. Kennedy Ryan recently said, “Romance books are a natural place to have difficult worldview conversations because you know it will end happily.” She described her books at Trojan horses, safe enough to let your guard down, but leaving space for intellectual curiosity around something being interrogated.

I’ve always been a theme-first story structure junkie. The Story Symmetry Framework which I put forth in 2015 is my baseline storytelling best practices framework, and it centers theme. Most books written today, and especially pulp fiction books, don’t consciously inject deeper themes into their story, to the detriment of the story.

It makes sense! It’s not optimal in any way to share your deep beliefs about the world online. It doesn’t give you the biggest share of audience. But we are entering an era where those who are willing to double down on theme and stand for something in their artistry will have stronger success in the marketplace.

What Do You Think?

I’d love to know your thoughts on the evolving nature of productivity for creatives. I see so many slow writing and slow productivity movements on the internet these days, and I know lots of people are making a deep peace with the joy of sustainability, especially as 2025 feels uncertain. Let me know in the comments!