People love glamour. Red carpets, film festivals, book signings with glossy posters. It’s easy to look at those moments and think, that’s what making it looks like. Someone wrote a book, printed it, and now they’re standing at a podium in a bookstore with their name in big bold letters. Or they scraped together funds for an indie film, and now it’s screening at a theater in front of 80 people, maybe free popcorn included. That looks like momentum.
But here’s the truth most people don’t see:
- A book signing often attracts 12 people, not 120. Half of them are family. The rest wandered in because it was free. The author signs a dozen copies, drives home, and the bookstore never reorders the title.
- An indie film showing is beautiful in its community spirit, but the numbers rarely add up. 40 attendees, a handful of donations, a small bump in visibility. By Monday morning, the director is back at their day job, exhausted.
These are not failures, they’re the reality of the creative grind. You’re constantly hustling for attention, constantly chasing the next event to stay visible. And visibility is fickle. One month you’re everywhere. The next, no one picks up the phone.
The Blog in the Corner of the Room
Now compare that to a blog. Nobody claps when you hit “publish.” No bookstore orders your work. No film projector hums while strangers sit in silence. At first, it feels like obscurity. But quietly, beneath the surface, something else is happening.
One blog post can do what a bookstore signing rarely does:
- Reach 400 people in a week without leaving your desk.
- Travel across 5 countries without a plane ticket.
- Keep working for you at 2:00 AM while you’re asleep.
Peter Lynch used to walk into malls and notice which stores had lines outside. That’s how he found Dunkin’ Donuts and Taco Bell before Wall Street caught on. Blogging works the same way, it’s not flashy, but it builds. Post by post, view by view, link by link. It doesn’t depend on one night’s turnout. It compounds quietly like reinvested dividends.
The Math Nobody Talks About
Let’s do the numbers.
- Book World: The average self-published book sells 250 copies in its lifetime. Lifetime. Even if you’re traditionally published, unless lightning strikes, you’re lucky to sell a few thousand.
- Film World: Most indie films never recoup costs. They circulate in festivals, get a few screenings, maybe land on a streaming platform with pennies per stream.
- Blog World: One decent blog post can get 1,000 views in its first year, without you spending a dime on airfare, printing, or promotion. But here’s the kicker: that post can keep pulling traffic five years later. If you’ve got 100 posts, each doing that quietly, you’re suddenly at six figures of reach.
The distribution advantage of the internet is brutal. Books and films rely on heavy upfront promotion and constant networking. A blog relies on consistency and patience. It’s like owning a REIT instead of trying to flip one house every year. One is a grind. The other scales.
The In-Between Days
Creative industries run on adrenaline spikes: auditions, signings, screenings. But what about the in-between days? That’s where people burn out. Weeks with no callbacks. Months with no festival acceptances. Whole years where you wonder if anyone cares.
Blogging feels slow, but it avoids those emotional cliffs. Every post is a small brick. Every view is a drip of water. And then one day you check your stats and realize 50 countries have read your work. Nobody applauded. Nobody handed you a certificate. But the reach is real, and it’s permanent.
Peter Lynch called this the “boring edge.” The businesses that look boring from the outside, paint companies, waste disposal firms, regional banks, often outperformed the exciting biotech IPOs. Blogging is boring in the same way. It’s not glamorous, but it compounds in the dark.
Sustainability vs. Spotlight
A blog is sustainable because it lives outside the spotlight. You don’t have to be “on” all the time. You don’t need constant events to prove you exist. You write, you publish, you let compounding do the heavy lifting.
That doesn’t mean other creative fields aren’t noble. Books and films matter; they shape culture. But if you’re looking at return on effort, they’re like lottery tickets compared to an index fund. One might explode, most won’t. Blogging is closer to the S&P 500. Slow, steady, climbing.
And here’s the kicker: unlike the author at a bookstore hoping 20 people show up, your blog doesn’t care if it’s Tuesday in Seattle or Saturday in Singapore. Someone is reading. Somewhere, right now.
The Compounding Difference
One thing I noticed about self-publishing when I dabbled in it: if I wasn’t constantly putting out work, traffic died off. I was only ever as good as my last project. The grind never really let up. A book came out, you’d feel the rush of release week, maybe move a few copies, and then, silence. You were already worrying about the next manuscript, the next cover design, the next round of edits, the next marketing push.
And if you didn’t push? The book disappeared into the digital dust. Indie publishing, like indie film, has its own awards, categories, and submission deadlines. It makes you feel like you’re “doing something” because you’re applying, pitching, sending, submitting. But the truth is, all of it is driven by the hustle. You are the engine, and the minute you stop, the machine stops too.
Blogging, though, doesn’t play by that rule. I can write a post, hit publish, and know that, even if it sits quietly for six, nine, or even twelve months without a single view, it’s still out there, like an investment quietly compounding in the background. One day, a reader stumbles across it. The algorithm nudges it forward. Someone shares it. And then traffic starts rolling in. That same post, which I put down once and walked away from, suddenly has a life of its own.
That’s the key difference: books are front-loaded, heavy on the launch. Blogging compounds.
The Reach of One vs. the Reach of Many
A self-published book might reach 40 people in a bookstore if you’re lucky. And sure, there’s the dream scenario, it catches fire, goes viral, spreads across continents. But unless you hit it big, the odds lean toward the former: quiet signings, a couple sales, and a lot of hoping.
A blog post, on the other hand, can reach across continents without you lifting a finger after you publish. That’s not theory, I’ve watched it happen on mine. Articles, quietly compounding for months, eventually climbing search rankings, the blog is now read in over 50 countries, close to 60 by the end of this year. That didn’t happen with my books.
And unlike publishing, I don’t have to pay for cover design, editing packages, ISBNs, or marketing. I don’t have to cold-pitch my way into a festival or a prize list. I write, I edit with AI’s help, I publish. The distribution is built into the medium itself. It’s the opposite of scarcity.
The Quiet Investor
When I dabbled with screenwriting, the same principle held. To make something of it, I’d have had to network constantly, attach myself to projects, try to break into indie film circles, spend more time on logistics than the art itself. It didn’t fit me. If I ever return to that world, it won’t be as the one chasing screenings, it’ll be as someone funding the projects that matter.
That’s who I am at my core: the quiet investor. I like the idea of someone walking past a nondescript office building with a simple brass plate that reads, “So-and-So Investments.” That’s my office. They’d never know it was mine, never guess that inside, on the balance sheet, sits money they could only dream of. I don’t need flashy. I don’t need anyone to know. The value speaks for itself.
Final Thought
That’s the beauty of this medium. Books, films, indie projects, they’re fragile in their reliance on constant input. Stop feeding the machine, and it dies. Blogging is sturdier. It compounds like an index fund in the background of your life, growing while you live, while you rest, while you’re thinking about other things entirely.
And if you build it long enough, it turns into something bigger than you imagined, something that belongs to the world as much as to you.
This blog is read in 50+ countries (and counting). If you’re a student, teacher, or lifelong learner from anywhere in the world, I’m honored you’re here. Economics belongs to all of us.
The Broke College Student 
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