7/8/2024: Irony Sharpens Irony
A Lesson in Being Too Quick to Celebrate
A wiser and more cynical man than me would pretend this never happened. This was meant to be article #5. I’d written it in two parts, first an article about the strength of multiple articles. “If you ignore The Literary Salon,” I wrote, “I have three publications as a result of my implementation of the Right Reader System. The need for additional publications was an apparent weakness in my view, believing it was fine if you had an author site and a Trojan-horse site. If the body of your work is too complex and varied to narrow to one overarching theme, you end up with multiple accounts. It seemed like a bad thing, but I’ve changed my mind.
…some irrelevant background about my Stack “The Sybiliad”…
“The Stack lay dormant and hidden from my profile. From May 20th to June 24th, It gained 4 subscribers, and of course, one of those was me. On the 24th, I cleaned it up, and on the 25th I posted a proof-of-concept article. I talked about it with my Change is Hard article, and some of my subscribers subscribed there as well bringing me up to 12 subscribers.
“Other than that, all I’ve worked on is how the publication introduces itself to the world, but in only the most basic terms. I haven’t even changed my About page yet. I changed my categories, the title, and the one sentence description. That’s all.
“I didn’t expect anything to happen. Nothing’s happened at Our Deeper Stories where the little growth spurt around the 25th followed the same pattern. It hasn’t moved since, and I wouldn’t expect to. I haven’t posted anything but that welcome introductory post to cut down on confusion.
“With The Sibyliad, I’ve had 7 new subscribers between yesterday and this morning.
…removing another paragraph…
“Here’s what I have as far as title, brief description, and categories:
“The Sybiliad: myth and history
“Seeing the classical era from the eyes of the Renaissance, as they experienced a blossoming or the arts and sciences, so may we all.
“History
Culture
“The first thing I did this morning was rush to reassess Our Deeper Stories. The subtitle had been something like “finding meaning in mortality.” I knew that was going to be a hard sell, but I thought maybe I could learn some lessons from Sybiliad to apply.
“I changed the title to… Our Deeper Stories: metaphysical philosophy.
“So far, the description remains the same: An ex-vangelical, former pastor asking the questions we dare not ask while exploring meaning and purpose.
“My categories had been Health & Wellness and Faith & Spirituality, and adjusting those has been hard. I made the top category philosophy. That was easy, but I’ve faltered between the other two as my second and for a bit went back to using “fiction”. While working on this paragraph, I switched from Faith & Spirituality to Health & Wellness.
“That probably won’t be enough, but we’ll see. I suspect Our Deeper Stories will need content to draw people in. Some themes are an easier sell than others, and this gets us back to what I said in the beginning. I thought possibly requiring multiple publications from you was a weakness. I was wrong.
“We saw in article 5 how successful publications post on an average of one every two weeks. That creates the potential of sustainability even with multiple publications.
“Having multiple publications allows you to see what works an apply those lessons to your other publication(s).
“Your central theme might not be your biggest draw. If a secondary theme has enough fiction to back it up, that could possibly be your breakaway winner.
“And as an additional thought, you have options as to where you want to post your fiction. For a while, I’m not posting any fiction in my new accounts. This theory proposes that fiction isn’t for drawing in an audience but for turning an existing audience into your readers and fans. For now, I’ll keep posting fiction to my author site, and I’ll build up the other two and plan what stories I want to release there.
“When the time comes that I am publishing fiction on my Trojan-horse sites, the author site will be for more than just alerting my fiction subscribers to those posts. Not every story fits within my common themes. Those outliers will be shared at my author site.
“I’m planning to release a short story Thursday, probably Aleskei’s Revolution, a time travel stories that avoids skipping around in time as much as possible. It was my father’s favorite story.
“It’s not a good fit for my big themes, and posting it here won’t rob a story from use elsewhere.”
And about here I wrapped up the article, but then I remembered something. I had meant to analyze by new subscribers. No problem, I could do that as a part two to the article. Anyone who was interested in the anysis could just stop here. So I added…
“Below, I’ll continue this article with a part two in which I analyze the kind of subscribers The Sibyliad has received in the last 1.5 days, and that analysis had returned some interesting results. However, if that doesn’t interest you, this is a good stopping place.
“Let’s move forward and find our readers. Until nest time,
“I’m Thaddeus Thomas
“P.S. Would you take a moment to share
The Literary Salon with your followers?
Thank you.
“Part 2:
“I meant to analyze the subscribers in the main article but forgot all about it until after I’d finished. I hadn’t yet got up from the computer when another subscriber came in, reminding me.
“8 subscribers, 5 of whom have only the Substack provided avi. Those avi’s alway interest me because that’s not a person investing time drawing attention to themselves on Substack, meaning they’re likely here to read more than to write, but let’s dig in and make sure.
“One: I won’t share screenshots for everything, but these are accounts subscribed to by the first on my list. He has a personalized avi and his profile information is in French, which is interesting. There’s no other activity on Substack of any kind. Hopefully it’s not a bot. I put the bio in google translate, however, and it sounds right. Assuming he’s not a bot, then being among the first accounts he subscribes to coming in is huge and I need to know how he found me.
“Two: One like but no other activity. 8 accounts subscribed to of which I am one. (Also House Inhabit appears on both lists.) Custom avi but no bio.
“Three: Standard avi. Has a brand new Substack with a standard place-holder post marked 18 hours ago. 8 accounts followed of which I am one.
“Aha!”
…I should have realized the problem at that very moment, but I didn’t. By the time I finished the article, it was was beginning to dawn on me though. Eventually, I took the article out of schedule and scheduled another one I’d just written instead.
So what was the problem?
First, one reason I’m sharing this is because some of the thoughts in section one are still valid. I’m keeping the changes I made to Our Deeper Stories. My attempt to understand what was working at The Sybiliad but not Our Deeper Stories was a valid exercise. Except, that wasn’t what had happened. There wasn’t anything to replicate. The “growth” wasn’t because of anything I had done…
“Aha!
“Okay, apparently I hit pay dirt with my choice of categories, and I’m being suggested by Substack as people sign up and express interest in that category. A review of the remaining subscriptions confirms this.”
…you can tell I’m still trying to see this as a positive in my mind, but then…
“This is nice, but if it’s nothing over which we have any control, it’s of little use. This is not necessarily the case, however.”
…I’m still clinging to denial at this point because it was absolutely the case…
“I opened another browser so I could begin the process of opening a new account as a reader.” …deleting the rest of the paragraph where I describe signing up to Substack to people who have already signed up to Substack...
“What gets us suggested by Substack and what keeps us from being unselected by these new accounts is a guess,..”
…you think?…
“but it seems to me the principles of introducing ourselves as I’ve laid out apply here.”
…Not to troll myself, but I’m coping hard right now…
“We need to make a good presentation. I recommend a logo,”
…and I go on to change the logo for The Literary Salon, which was a good move, and then I bring the article to a close…
“We choose our category thematically, and express that theme as inspired by our writing. That creates a focus, something all the advice accounts call a niche.
“Okay, that’s really it, and until next time,
“I’m Thaddeus Thomas… again.”
…That was Sunday night, and then…
“EDIT: P.S. Monday morning. I had one more subscriber yesterday after that, and she was not a newcomer to the platform. It seems my rotation in the recommendation roulette wheel is finished. It’s just good to know that tiny accounts can be recommended too.”
…I’m happy to have the new subscribers, but heaven help me, I don’t want to be dishonest about how I got them, even accidentally. This whole event could have been swept under the rug, but I’m self deprecating* kind of guy, and I think there’s value to learn from my mistake.
If nothing else, the piece I just wrote for Our Deeper Stories was so serious, and this gives me a chance to laugh at myself.
For a third time now,
I’m Thaddeus Thomas
