Here is Why You are Lucky to be a Nameless Writer
Enjoy the third age of writing!
There are three ages in the history of writing and we writers are living in the best of them all. No one knows our name but the advantages far outweigh the cost of our near-anonymity.
Let’s look at these three ages…
Age 1: Famous Writers + Famous Readers
Once upon a time in ancient Sumeria of Southern Mesopotamia where writing was invented, around 3200 B.C., there were only a few scribes who knew how to chisel cuneiform tablets.
The main clients for those early writers were city administrators who needed to record land deeds, merchants who needed to document commercial transactions, and mighty kings who wanted to have their accomplishments carved into baked clay tablets and rocks for posterity.
Later on, the language changed to Akkadian and Assyrian but the scribes remained in demand.
The scribes were famous since there was just a handful of them. And so were the kings and the ruling class of Babylon, the prime patrons for anything written.
And believe it or not, we know the names of some of these ancient scribes:
- Sin-liqe-unninni (who wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh)
- Abijah (who wrote the Gezer calendar)
- Azi
- Baruch ben Neriah
- Bêl-bân-aplu
- Ezra
They were all famous writers who lived during those 3,000 years before Christ.
Down in Egypt
Down in Egypt, the situation was the same. Scribes worked for famous pharaohs and adorned temples and burial chambers with beautiful hieroglyphics singing praises of the ruling class.
The scribes were so famous, their statues were made and survived to our own day (as two of them can be seen on this page).
While the great majority of the people toiled in sweat and tears out there building pyramids and working the fields, the few chosen scribes wrote their documents in comfort for the famous few.
Scribes were mostly men who had to attend a scribe school for four or five years. Also: if you were not the son of a scribe, there was very little chance that you could become one. The entry threshold to the writing profession was very high.
If you lived in Mesopotamia or Egypt back then, the chances are you weren’t a writer but a peasant with a short life who lived and died under brutal living conditions. The life expectancy in ancient Egypt was 22.5–25 years for males and 35–37 years for females. I can imagine writers/scribes living a few years more since they did not participate in wars and worked indoors.
We know the names of the famous Egyptian scribes as well:
- Ahmes
- Amenemope
- Amenemope & Hori
- Amenhotep, son of Hapu
- Ani
- Chancellor Bay
- General Djehuty
- Dua-Kheti
- Hesy-Ra
- Hori & Amenemope
- Hunefer
- Irtyrau (one of the few female scribes)
- Khakheperresenb
- Menna
- Meryre II
- Nakht
- Nakhtmin
- Nebamun
- Nebmerutef
- Penthu
- Ptahhotep Tshefi
- Ramose
- Reni-seneb
- Roy
- Senu
- Setau
- Thanuny
Age 2: Famous Writers + Not-Famous Readers
The next age of writing (that lasted over 2,000 years) saw famous writers of the ancient world (ancient Greeks, Arab empires, and Chinese and Roman Empires) like Aristotle, Homer, Herodotus, Ovid, Plutarch, Tacitus, Euripides, Cicero, Confucius, Laozi, Qu Yuan, etc.
The middle ages saw yet another new batch of famous writers whose fame spread rapidly throughout Europe and the Middle East, especially after the invention of the movable type by Gutenberg around 1450.
The famous writers of the era through Rennaisance include Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Wycliffe, Bacon, Rumi, Sadi, Omar Hayyam, Erasmus, etc.
Scribes were called “katib” in the Near and Middle East.
In Abbasid Baghdad of 9th-12th centuries, Greek classics were translated into Arabic by famous writers and translators of the era like Rabban al-Tabari (who translated Ptolemy’s Almagest to Arabic), Thabit ibn-Qurra (translated Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, and Ptolemy into Arabic), Qusta ibn Luqqa, and others.
We know the names of these famous writers but not their readers. Especially with the invention of the printing press, the number of readers mushroomed exponentially.
Before Gutenberg, there were around 30,000 (hand-written) books in the European libraries. By the 16th century, this number exploded to 150–200 million copies. We can safely assume that the total number of readers grew to 150–200 million as well.
Suddenly there were just too many readers to remember or record their names. That’s why they remained nameless and anonymous.
In this era writers were again the privileged few. In the 14th century, only 5% of Europe’s population knew how to read and write.
If you were a peasant, you had zero chances of becoming either a writer or a reader. You had to be the (almost always) son of a local aristocrat or ruler to learn how to read and write and become an author.
English King Richard II and his Parliament passed a law in 1391 that read: “No serf or villein…. should put his children to school.” That’s another indication that it was very difficult to become a writer in Middle Ages.
In my opinion, this age of famous writers read by non-famous readers lasted until the invention of the Internet.
Age 3: Not-Famous Writers + Not-Famous Readers
Something truly unprecedented happened in the 1990s with the invention of the Internet.
No doubt, we still have famous authors. They are too many to list here.
But the not-famous writers now outnumber the well-known ones probably by a factor of one million. That is, for every famous writer, there are probably a million unknown ones.
Just look at me. I published well over 1,000 articles on the Internet and over 30 eBooks. If I lived in the 14th century, I’d probably be famous all over the world.
But would you know my name today at all if I weren’t writing for Medium? Certainly not. I’m one of those millions of not-famous writers writing for millions of not-famous readers.
Let’s look at the numbers.
The Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), one of the largest unions in the world for famous writers, has a mere 20,000 members.
In contrast, according to the latest 2021 data, 7 million blog posts are published every day, which roughly translates to 7 million writers!
How about readers?
There are 77 million readers posting new blog comments each month. And readers who don’t post any comments should be in the billions. Day or night, at home or out in the street, we are all reading all the time now.
Is it a wonder that we are truly living in an age of multi-millions of not-famous writers and billions of not-famous readers?
Advantages of the Third Age
Here are the advantages of our beautiful third age of writing:
- You are not beholden to kings and rulers to learn how to write and produce text.
- You are not limited to hagiography for a writing subject. You do not need to write flattering biographies of saints, kings, commanders, and rich merchants. You can write about anything you want in this glorious third age of writing.
- You do not need to become a monk at a monastery under the tutelage of a religious organization to earn a living as a writer.
- You do not need to be the male member of an aristocratic family to adopt writing as a career path.
- You do not need to be a member of any club, organization, party, country, ethnic or cultural group to write anymore.
- You do not need any degrees or diplomas from any schools or institutions to write whatever you want.
- You can make money every day without anybody’s permission, both as a side-hustle and also as your full-time career.
- You do not have any establishment gatekeepers to prevent you from writing and publishing whatever you want.
To understand the importance of the last point, let’s look at how the publishing industry worked before the Internet and online writing.
Publishing in the 20th Century
Back in the 20th century, a writer used to work a year or two on a book. Then submit it to a traditional publisher and waited for the editor’s reply, which was followed by another year or two of back and forth editing.
And if all went well, the publication was scheduled according to the publishing house’s busy calendar.
So eventually, after another year or two, you would hopefully see your work published and printed.
Unless you were willing to invest four or five years of your precious time from start to finish, your thoughts ideas dreams could not see the light of the day.
Then, there was the matter of distribution and the placement and positioning of your book in bookstores.
Unless you were already a known name, your precious baby would be delegated to the back shelf of a dusty bookstore or library, with close to zero chances of being read.
After a year or two of obscurity, your book would be removed altogether from bookshelves, returned to the publisher, most possibly on its way to revert to what it was before you showed up: wood pulp.
All in all, writing was a sad exercise in futility for most writers.
Publishing Now in the Third Age
Thank goodness those days are gone.
Now you can write anything in an hour and publish it online within 15 minutes, and start to make money right away as well. Gone are the gatekeepers of the old establishment.
Number of Readers is Still an Issue
But now we have the issue of readability.
Does a tree fall in the forest if no one is aware that it fell?
Same situation. Have you really written something if nobody is even aware that you’ve written it?
That’s the tough challenge of our online world. That’s the bad news.
But the good news is, now there are billions of readers who can potentially read what we write. The pool to which we can market our products is much larger now.
In Conclusion
Dear not-famous reader, thanks for reading this far.
My last word is for all the not-famous writers around the world:
Go ahead, write to your heart’s content, publish whenever you like, make all the money you can make, and live the life you always dreamed of and deserve.
This third age of writing is all yours.
