I’m looking for my thousand true fans… or I’ll be on OnlyFans in a year.

It’s true.

1,000 True Fans (Or: Why I Put an Amazon Link on a Website About My Feelings)

There is a concept — credited to Kevin Kelly, no relation, though I appreciate the nominal solidarity — called 1,000 True Fans. The argument is simple: you don’t need a million followers to sustain a creative life. You need a thousand people who care enough about what you make to actually pay for it. A thousand people who will buy the thing, read the thing, show up for the thing. Not a passive audience of millions. An active one of a manageable size.

I think about this a lot. Specifically, I think about it when I’m deciding whether to put an Amazon link on a blog post about my feelings.

Here’s my honest position on influence and recommendation: I cannot imagine reaching Jeff Bezos in any meaningful way. I can imagine someone reading a post I wrote, wanting the book I mentioned, and clicking a link to get it. Amazon is going to sell that book regardless. If I helped someone find it, and a small percentage of the transaction comes back to me — I don’t see the problem. Books are good. Reading is good. Someone has to suggest them.

What I am more interested in is the trust architecture that makes a recommendation worth anything.

I don’t want recommendations from people performing enthusiasm. I want them from people who are not stupid, who don’t do other things wrong, who have given me good advice before — suggested the right lotion, or whatever it is. For me it’s books. For you it might be something else. The point is that the recommendation is only as good as your trust in the person making it, and that trust is built over time by everything else they say and do.

This is why the influencer economy went sideways. The moment it became purely transactional — the moment someone would endorse anything for any price — the signal collapsed. Tiny, stupid, shitty products in beautiful photographs with no relationship to whether anyone actually used them. We all know what filters are. We all know what a staged flat lay looks like. The problem isn’t the aesthetic. The problem is the divorce between the recommendation and the recommender’s actual experience.

I’m seeking the opposite. People I actually know, or know well enough, whose orbit and mind and shopping cart I trust. Humans whose taste is legible to me because I’ve watched them form opinions about other things. That’s a much smaller group than a million followers. It might be exactly a thousand.

The math of 1,000 true fans assumes that a thousand people who each spend $100 a year on what you make is $100,000 — which is, in the phrasing of the original essay, “a livable wage for most people.” I’m not running those numbers out loud here. I’m just saying that the premise — that you don’t need mass appeal, you need specific appeal — has been the most clarifying idea I’ve encountered about what I’m doing on the internet.

I am not trying to appeal to everybody. I don’t.

What I’m trying to do is find the people for whom the specific combination of what I am — the English teacher, the writer, the woman with strong opinions about books and rubber bands and the social architecture of Utah — is exactly what they were looking for. If there are a thousand of those people in the world, I would genuinely like to meet all of them.

The Amazon link is just how we shake hands.