Poseurs are getting out of control. Like, it is becoming a very annoying situation.
A woman that only just recently "started reading books" looks around, sees that book people spend a lot of money, and decided to start a book related business. She likely heard about booktok and thought that was her bag.
So she started a monthly subscription service.
She looked around, grabbed some popular ideas, and started producing bookmarks. Because she’s not a reader, so she doesn’t understand how readers work.
Seriously: Readers will buy a handful of good looking bookmarks with the intention of using them, but somehow they’ll end up using a folded post-it note as a bookmark. And they’ll use that same post-it note for the next 6 books, then not be able to find any of those fancy bookmarks they spent actual money on.
So, from my point of view, I think a monthly subscription box that delivers curated bookmarks to your home is a pretty dead end business long-term.
The fact that she was able to find a bit of a niche and that she was making enough money that she was able to turn it into her job, that was very lucky. She should have been grateful. She should have kept making her little bookmarks and taking pictures of them and posting positive content. She could have probably kept on keeping on for at least another year or two before she ran out of customers.
But instead she CHOSE to announce that she had trademarked a fairly popular hashtag and that everyone that had ever used it on any kind of merchandise had to stop immediately.
She basically destroyed her own little business. And I don’t feel bad about it, because that was a seriously dick move. And I have no sympathy for dicktims.
Same with the Australian couple and their now failing athletic wear company.
It’s not our fault they didn’t do any real marketing research before starting their business. If they had, they would have realized that athletic wear is a very saturated market. Their expensive yet cheaply manufactured gym clothes are not necessary to the public. So their bit of bad PR backlash destroyed their company. And crying about it on main is not going to turn things around for them.
I’m just tired of people that aren’t part of a community, seeing a community, and then trying to use that community for their own profit.
"I only started reading books last week, so now you should buy my products because I’m part of the book community."–My dude. And then they hold up some random ass book and we’re all supposed to be like, "Wow, one of us! One of us!" and hug them into our hearts.
There are so many different book genres!
You can’t just be like "I like book. We friends now."
Is it a horror book? A romance book? A fantasy book? A science fiction book? A murder mystery book? A philosophy book? A comic book? Naw. It’s just some random ass book she "just started reading," so now she gets to be President of Books.
Fuck off with that.
It’s the same deal with the non-authors/non-readers suddenly realizing that they can produce 300 books a day with the use of AI. They’re just so into the cash grab that they never pause to consider whether what they’re doing is ruining society.
Assholes gonna asshole.
~Harper Kingsley
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