If You Need Support as a Creator, Ask For It (You Might Be Surprised)

When you're an author you basically live or die on the support of your audience. It doesn't matter how much you write, what platform you use, or who publishes you... if you don't have an audience reading your work, at the end of the day you don't get paid. That's just the way it is.

Audience support goes beyond just sales, though. The algorithms on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter give preference to accounts that have the most subscribers. Books that have the most reviews, or videos that have the most upvotes, are the ones that get recommended to other shoppers and viewers, thus making it more likely for them to check out your work. So while buying books puts money directly into creator's pockets, reviewing books, following pages, commenting on and sharing posts, these things are all extremely important.

So how do you get people to help you out when you're a creator? Well... the easiest way is to just ask.

We've got to pump those numbers up! These are rookie numbers!

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It Really Is That Simple

There's are two, major schools of thought I've seen regarding building a following which I think are extremely silly, but a lot of people seem to buy into. First is the idea that people who see your work will be so struck by it that they will spontaneously follow all the things you release, give you good ratings, and binge all of your content. Don't get me wrong, those fans are great when you find them, but they are few and far between, so you shouldn't depend on them to do the work for you. Second is this idea that you have to be some kind of puppet master, using the proper keywords and oblique suggestions to plant the idea in your audience's mind that they should follow your channels, share your posts, etc. This school says that just coming out and telling them what to do is crass, and it's more likely to result in them not doing it because you weren't subtle enough.

Your audience is skittish, and you need to come at them sideways.

The idea that you need to be quiet about how your audience can help you reminds me of an example I was given in a textbook for a marketing class back when I was in college. You're at the mall looking for a new pair of shoes. There are two stores that both have the same model you want. The price is exactly the same, but you know if you buy from one store then a salesperson you like will get the commission. That knowledge that your actions are directly helping someone out can be the tipping point that sends you to their store, rather than somewhere else.

It's the same when you make content online. Because most people who consume our content don't think of things in terms of audience size, review numbers, traffic, and algorithm inertia. Generally it just comes down to, "Did I like that thing I just saw?" and occasionally the yes is strong enough for them to click the like button, or to subscribe to us all on their own. But if you don't want to leave it up to chance, take your audience's hand and tell them explicitly how they can help you keep producing content by liking, subscribing, sharing, buying copies, etc.

A personal example of this that I had recently was reaching out to the various communities familiar with my work to try to build the following on the Azukail Games YouTube channel. While grabbing around 40 fresh subscribers in a day is child's play for a lot of folks, it's probably the largest 1-day jump the channel has experienced in some time. While that only put it up to 195 subscribers (and it needs 1,000+ before it can get monetized) that's not a bad start. And all I did was tell people the channel existed, tell them how far we were from our goals, and asked for a bit of help boosting the signal and subscriber base.

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So if you want to get people to support your work, tell them how. Tell them often. Because it might feel repetitive, but a lot of people don't actually know how to support you, or even think about it at all while they're enjoying it. Be direct, be clear, and give people actionable instructions. Don't drop hints and hope for the best, because then you have no one to blame but yourself for your audience moving on without hitting any of the buttons you want them to.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing!

If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

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