I found this a little depressing.
Maybe not depressing, maybe challenging?
Your writing, your painting, your drawing – your art competes for attention with a lot more than you think it does.
We are fighting not just against our contemporaries for recognition, but against centuries of great art for an audience. Each new work competes for customers with everything that came before it and everything that will come after.
-Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller
Take books, for example.
Say I get a book deal and publish my first book this next year (Nice wish, I know.).
I have to compete for readers and attention with not only the thousands of other books published that year but also with every book still in print?!
Writing for the web is the same, if you think about it
I mean, all those fantastic articles posted 5 or 10 years ago aren’t exactly going anywhere.
Holiday concludes with this:
The idea that the world is waiting with bated breath for another movie, another book, another app? In fact, the whole idea behind perennial sellers is that the math overwhelmingly shows that people love classics from the recent and distant past. When HarperCollins has an imprint called Harper Perennial, for instance, or when catalog albums are outselling new releases, it should tell you something: People are pretty happy with the old stuff.