- Rita Mae Brown
This quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein, actually came from mystery author Rita Mae Brown according to Quotes Explained. Whoever said it first, though, the idea is pretty sound. After all, if you go through the same motions, and do the exact, same thing you can usually expect to get the same results time and time again, for good or for ill.
Unless we're talking about marketing, of course. Because when it comes to marketing (or just creating content in general), you've gone fully through the Looking Glass into a world where what seems like madness is now the order of the day.
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| It doesn't make sense... none of it makes any sense... |
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How Many Factors Can You Control?
The above sentiment regarding madness makes some assumptions, and they're assumptions that we don't always keep in mind when we start concocting our plans. The biggest is that, "doing the same thing," assumes that all the factors involved are the same every, single time. Because the same action, taken within the same parameters, should yield the same results... but a lot of the time we just feel like we're doing the same thing when, in fact, the only thing that's the same is our input as creators. Other factors (often factors we may not even think about, or which are drastically outside our control) play a part in this.
As an example, consider my Pathfinder Character Conversion For Batman.
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| Just stick with me, I promise I'm going somewhere with this. |
Now, when I first wrote this piece it was published on Yahoo! Voices (a site that no longer exists), and it received something to the tune of 30k views the first week or so it was up. That put about $60 in my pocket, which wasn't bad for an article I'd put together in a few hours. However, Yahoo! Voices closed, and the article eventually migrated over to Vocal along with a lot of my other work. And even though the article was updated to reflect changes in the game, it barely received 800 reads, which was worth maybe $2 to me at the time of republishing.
On the surface this seems like the exact same action yielding wildly different results. After all I published the content under the original title and with many of the appropriate SEO tags, I shared it in the same social media groups who had proven receptive to my content, and I did all the same things on my end that I had the first time around. Yet the results were extremely different. Why?
Well, because other factors had changed, which created different results.
Firstly, say what you want about Yahoo! Voices, but it came with a built-in platform that provided high visibility and a lot more traffic than Vocal does. So right off the bat (pun very much intended) there was a huge difference caused just by the platform being used. Another factor was that at the time the original article went up, character conversions in RPGs were just starting as a trend in a lot of places, and as such they were quite popular. By the time this guide was re-posted, conversions had become sort of passe, and there were a lot fewer folks interested in them. It could even be argued that the colossal failure of Batman V. Superman coming out in between the original post and repost had made the public less interested in the character on the whole, and as such Batman himself was no longer a subject of as much interest to readers out there.
This is the sort of thing we often overlook as creators. Everything from which hash tags are currently the best to attach to your posts, to which platforms have the best visibility, to what kinds of content are most popular at a given time, all affect your marketing, your message, and whether your work gets shared by everyone who sees it, or drifts off into the void.
How Many Times Can You Hear The Same Joke?
There's an old story told about a wise man who tells a great joke. Everyone laughs. He tells it again, and some people laugh, but they're mostly confused. He tells it a third time, and nobody laughs. The moral is about how we often take less pleasure in good things, but allow bad things to keep being as powerful as the first time they hit us... but there's a lesson here for marketers, as well.
Just because something hits hard the first time, doesn't mean a follow-up is going to have the same results.
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| Trust me, I wish that wasn't the case. |
I can give you another example for this one. When I wrote 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories over on Vocal, it shot up to over 5k reads. A pretty solid showing, and far-and-away the best piece of fiction I'd ever put on the site, performance-wise. The format was one of the things that readers said drew them in the hardest, so when I put together a sequel I narrowed the scope slightly and wrote 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Warhammer 40K Edition. While it didn't perform as well, it still netted just under 3k reads which was more than worth the effort to put the piece together. I decided recently to put out a third installment, and to keep the change-up going it was 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, SCP Edition. Following the trend I figured it might eke out about 2k reads at best, maybe 1,500.
The actual result? About 53 reads. Heck, the audio drama version got more attention than that (though not much more... but if you like it, consider subscribing to me on Daily Motion!).
Why did this happen? Too many factors to count, ranging from the popularity of the niches I explored, to the timing of the posts, to where I shared them, and what the algorithm supported or blocked. However, one thing that was clear to me was that the initial installment was something of a fluke. It happened to hit at the right time, in the right place, under the right circumstances. And while there was a positive reaction to the second piece, the format itself was not enough to support the series all on its own. The novelty has worn off, and attempts to recapture it by branching out into other arenas had... mixed results.
This can be extremely frustrating when it comes to our work, because (to put it bluntly) the public is fickle, and unpredictable.
As another example, when I first started this arc of my career, steampunk was huge as a genre trend. New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam took me a year to write, and another several years to finally get published. Steampunk was dead as a trend by then, but it hadn't been dead long enough that people were looking for nostalgia reads in the genre. I've released RPG supplements full of random encounters that folks said they loved and wanted more of, but then when I put out a second installment no one gets a copy because it's just "more of the same." Sometimes I pour time and energy into crafting a tale that I think will strike a chord with the audience, like Beyond The Black: The Emperor's Hand (a tale of the ogryn Gav Smythe as he fights the enemies of the Imperium), and it goes nowhere. Other times I'll just throw together something silly to fill space, like my article Let People Dislike Things, and it explodes for no reason other than it happened to strike a chord at that very moment.
It's Our Audience That Stacks The Deck
I say this time and time again, but at the end of the day it's you, the readers, who are the one factor that we have to count on. Because if there is support from the audience, it can force all the other factors surrounding our work and our careers into the proper, celestial alignment for success.
If you have a following of tens of thousands of fans on any social media platform, things you share are boosted by the algorithm purely because the audience made it known that you are a person of interest. If there's people buying your books in numbers large enough to hit the bestseller list (which really isn't as many sales as you think), that's going to make you newsworthy, and you'll get coverage from various outlets which will boost your sales even further. If you even have a couple dozen people who share your content around in a dedicated way, you'll start to see outsized numbers of new readers come your way because those readers are making a fuss over you. And even if your content is free to consume, if you regularly pull down a few million watches per video, or a million reads on an article, everything else falls into place.
But it takes numbers... and those are numbers we cannot do all that much about on our own. All we can do is produce the best stuff we're capable of, and put it out there. Which is why if you have a creator whose work you enjoy, help them out. Subscribe to their channels, share their posts, consume the free stuff, and buy their books when you can afford to. While it might not feel like you're doing a lot as an individual, remember that a blizzard is made up of a bunch of snowflakes that all fall at once.
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 sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!
If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!
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