Maybe I was never meant to have a niche

This essay is included in the October issue of my epistolary zine, EPISTOLARIA. Project subscribers receive the zine, which includes this essay, a limited edition print, book recommendations, and fragments of conversation, via post. Paid Substack subscribers get access to the digitized version below. Please consider upgrading your Substack subscription to read the essay below in full or join the zine mailing list to support my work! I see and appreciate all of you. Thank you for helping to make this creative practice a possibility. — Lian

It is a fundamental marketing principle to have a niche. Know who or what you are, play to your strengths, find your audience, slip into where you best fit and stick to it. Successful content creators apply this religiously, the niche defining the specific contours of their brand. The down-to-earth wellness influencer with unpolished, relatable videos, the stylish, celebrity-adjacent multidisciplinary artist with mysterious emojis for captions, the walking Tolkien encyclopedia with weekly trivia content. When you encounter them on your feed, you know exactly who they are and what to expect, and this comfort might bring you to follow them, buy their merch, or join their mailing list. Finding a niche is sensible advice, tried and tested, one that I myself follow as a marketing professional.

Sensible advice, yes, if the objective is to turn myself and what I do into a profitable business — which, really, isn’t what I want. Conflating content creation with the artistic practice corrupts the latter’s vitality, as the market forces underlying the former find their way into the process of creation, inquiry, or critique. It’s tricky, though, navigating this entanglement when there aren’t many options for artists — especially those outside of the establishment — to survive. I can’t deny the appeal of becoming a content creator over keeping a rather unpleasant day job to pay the bills just so I can sustain my largely invisible writing practice at night.

I just, try as I might, can’t find a niche to box myself into. Curating parts of myself into a brand, cohesive and whole, chafes against an inner restlessness. It has taken me years, but finally I have come to terms with my phases and rhythms. I have come to cherish my shapeshifting. But who would want to bear witness to someone’s constant metamorphoses? Who would trust my fluidity and excitability? In evolving, do I remain incomprehensible?