Woe's Hollow
the creator economy comes for us all
Earlier this month, Josh Horowitz interviewed the actress Maya Hawke on stage at the 92nd Street Y. Maya is the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, and she voices Anxiety in Inside Out 2. Although she’s the daughter of Hollywood royalty, in this interview she comes across as self-aware, sincere, and hard-working. She sees her work as a craft she’s privileged to practice alongside talented peers.
She told Josh she has no problem doing publicity for her films “when it feels like the promotion of a thing that everyone got together to make together…and saying, come see this movie. We all worked really hard on this. I did my little part, but thousands of people did their part and they deserve to be on the stage just as much as me. And let me tell you who they are and what they did. That’s totally comfortable and fun…talking about what the material is [and what] point we were trying to make.”
What she hates is promoting herself.
When it feels like you're doing press and it's not clear what you are promoting, it's like, wait, hold on, what am I talking about? I think that it's a little bit old-fashioned and I definitely think loops back into the way that I was raised—but I think that the line between actor and celebrity has gotten extremely blurry. And I think, you know, in some ways a celebrity is someone where their personality is what is the draw. And what I always wanted to be was an actor where the work is what the draw is, not the personhood. But the industry keeps changing and you have to change with it and understand that all of these things are getting blurred.
She sounds like a writer, I thought.
Most writers I know would jump at the opportunity to give an interview to Terry Gross or Oprah or Dax Shepard. They’d love to talk about their work in front of an audience that someone else has spent years building.
Most writers I know want their work to be read, just like actors want their films to be seen.
But they are resistant to growing their own audience, developing a relationship with their audience, and marketing their work directly to that audience. Many writers believe that finding an audience for their work is someone else’s job (their publisher).
What I’d love for writers to understand is that the shift from institutional media (where the publicist at your Big Five publisher lands a review for your book in the New York Times) to the creator economy (where personally knowing a BookTok creator can lead to a video that gets nearly a million views) is impacting all media.
The ascendance of the creator economy over institutional media means two things are happening simultaneously:
People with big personalities, talents, energy, time, and guts can grow huge audiences on platforms like TikTok and Substack by creating original content and then pivot into creative industries like Hollywood, book publishing, and music. This is absolutely crazy-making for actors and writers and musicians who have been working for decades. Justine Bateman announced Hollywood was “dead” after The Hollywood Reporter put out an “A-list” of creators like comedian Sabrina Brier and vocalist Laufey. In 1999, Britney Spears was on the cover of Rolling Stone. In 2025, it’s Addison Rae, who got her start in the original TikTok Hype House.
People (like Maya Hawke) who appear famous to us lowly worms don’t get to opt-out of creating content on the internet because they’re already famous. They’re expected to have platforms to promote their work!
In a clip that’s gotten 58,000 views on X, Hawke told Horowitz that directors now look at the size of actors’ online platforms when casting films, in the same way that literary agents and book editors look at writers’ platforms when deciding to represent or acquire a project. Hawke says:
I've talked to so many smart directors [about how I want to delete my Instagram account]. And they're like, just so you know, when I'm casting a movie with some producers, they hand me a sheet with the amount of collective followers I have to get, of the cast that I cast. So if you delete your Instagram and lose those followers, understand that these are the kinds of people that I need to cast around you.
Not that it was ever easy to make a career in Hollywood, but things seem especially bleak right now. As one pseudonymous Hollywood art director told
in June 2024:I studied film history and I can't remember another time wherein the available work evaporated rather suddenly: there was always film production going on, the technologies and formats just kept changing. The 15 million dollar indie movie of the 1990s turned into the 15 million dollar Peak TV series of the 2000s to 2010s. But, now, TV shows and film projects are disappearing, and there's nothing there to replace the voids yet.
So the studios need actresses like Maya to become content creators.
They need actresses to serve as extensions of their branded IP—part of the marketing machine for a new TV show or film. This reminded me of when literary agent Carly Watters (who’s long been ahead of her time) told me in November that by building an online platform, she can serve as a brand extension for her author clients.
Why? Because audiences are not following studios or book publishers or legacy media brands1 in the same ways they are following people.
I’ve been interested in the social campaign for season two of Severance and the way Apple TV is using Britt Lower’s account to post from the point of view of her fictional character Helly R. (look at the caption):
I’m working on a longer post about paperback releases, but I think novelists could take a similar approach to their content, as if their paperback is “season two.” Create content that lets fans of the hardcover feel like they’re in on a joke.
Maya Hawke would prefer to work with Quentin Tarantino (who doesn’t have a cell phone) and I get that. I get the appeal of working in a shed. It’s your one wild and precious life and you don’t have to spend it on Instagram scrolling Mary Oliver quotes.
It’s more pleasant to remember the magical time when it was easier to be a novelist than to figure out what this transformational moment in media means for the future of your own career. If you’re confused, it’s because the people you’ve long looked to for leadership and guidance are confused, too.
Semafor reported this month that Democratic strategists met in DC to learn how to “better get their messages out on new media platforms. [A politics influencer] presented the members with do’s and don’ts for short-form video and text, encouraging them to…not overly workshop their online content.” So basically they got the “TikTok for writers” seminar I taught in 2022.
Change is hard, so I admire anyone who’s willing to say, “That didn’t work. Let’s try something new.”
Upcoming Events
My next Chat Room will be with editor Sarah Cantin, whom I emailed as soon as I finished Andrea Dunlop’s new book The Mother Next Door, about Munchausen by Proxy. I tore through it in 48 hours and I want everyone to read it!
I’m also excited to host Sarah because she acquires fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for St. Martin’s.
She acquires book club fiction, domestic drama, historical fiction, psychological suspense, literary thrillers, and romantic comedy with a smart, high-concept hook. She’s also interested in narrative nonfiction that illuminates women’s issues and women’s stories, and accessible poetry that readers can turn to as a form of self-care. She has worked on books by Carola Lovering (Tell Me Lies), Emilia Hart (Weyward), and Jessica George (Maame).
Paid subscribers will receive the Zoom link by email on the morning of March 3rd.
Yes, we could come up with exceptions to this! A24 is doing a good job on TikTok.
Sigh. I know all of this to be true. But that shed, Leigh. It's the place where no one invites you to collaborate on a post that calls your first book (which happened to be about a writing shed!) "boring and predictable." I love that freakin shed
I sat in on a talk given by a Webby Awards executive to a branch of one of our federal agencies (it was through my day job) and even they are feeling the pressure/burn. Every branch of government is trying to access their audience through the creator economy and I won't be specific because it was a closed session but they feel just as strange, awkward, and out of their depth as many others do...and they do it anyway. Sign O' the times!