The path to career success reversed from craft-first to promotion-first.

Evidence

Want to be a cookbook author? Julia Child attended Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris, taught students from her homes in France and Washington, D.C., and spent years testing recipes before attempting to write a book. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was rejected by Houghton Mifflin for being too long, and Child took several years to edit and revise the manuscript before submitting it to Knopf. Promotion did not begin until the book was finished. Today, promotion, not cooking, is most important: start a food blog, make cooking videos and post them to YouTube, correspond with other food bloggers on Twitter, write newspaper and magazine articles, appear on television, and sign a book contract to write a cookbook. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 495

Categorization

• SEED: The Julia Child contrast is a crisp, concrete anchor for an essay on how the creator economy inverted the craft-to-fame sequence.
• CANDY: The Julia Child vs. modern food-blogger contrast is a quick, vivid way to make the promotion-first point in conversation.