Getting Seen Is Hard

Acquired behaviours are hard things to shift. You pick them up early in life, and depending on how the gods are feeling, they can become albatrosses around your neck, or a bit of wind beneath your wings. Your accent and dialect, for instance, are classic social signals that can mark you out as the “right sort” for career advancement. But they can also banish you to a back office, forever, and they were largely formed before you had any real say over them.

On a lighter note, some acquired behaviours can be subtle and merely a bit annoying. Holidaying to Greece always brings up this kind for me. I went there all the time as a kid — being Anglo-Hellenic — and try as my parents did to have beach holidays, my very orthodox grandmother would insist on church visits. Consequently, we always packed smart clothes.

Now that I'm middle-aged — in body, at least — I get to decide for myself what I do on holiday. But after packing the swimwear, shorts, T-shirts, flip-flops and beach reads, I feel an overwhelming compulsion to pack long-sleeved white shirts, woollen suit trousers and dress shoes. And I do pack them! I have no intention of going to church, or even leaving the beach for anything except food and sleep, but I can't not pack them. It's as though the immortal ghost of my grandmother is in the room and chastising me for being a peasant.

Similarly, my English heart can't boast. I've been socialized into thinking that all the good things in my life will make people who don't have them feel bad. So, even if they have things I lack, I pretend everything is plodding along at an ordinary pace for fear of offending. Failing that, I have to force down the discomfort of being honest. To wit — I'm thrilled at how well these articles are doing.

Really, I'm chuffed. God, Thor and all the others, bless every subscriber. I published my first article last summer, and it was read by fifteen people, the one after that reached twenty-one people. It's been a journey. What started as a little evening project has grown into a small operation with income, expenses, opportunities and challenges. And damn, getting seen is hard. I dread to think how many great writers have given up after months of publishing into a reader-less void.

It’s very rare to go viral as a writer, and our content isn’t “sticky” enough for the major social platforms to boost. YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels, for example, work because endlessly stacking video snippets on top of each other lulls viewers into a state of passive content consumption. So passive that even the most pointless, boring and repetitive drivel can maintain their attention. Readers have to be active.

And people who want to actively read tend to spend a lot more time doing it than hanging out on social media or searching the web. That makes reaching them — meaning you, me, us — is extremely difficult by almost any means available without a large marketing budget.

The one available means that works is paying to advertise in other writers’ publications. It’s less dirty than you might think. I haven't paid anyone to subscribe, nor have I paid to have my face intrude on anyone. I've merely compensated other writers to include a link to me in their work, and I do the same for them, it's a big part of how we grow and how we fund ourselves. But the cost scales in the opposite direction to what you’d expect.

In normal economics, you get a discount for buying in bulk — i.e. if you go to a store and order half its stock, you'll be able to haggle the price down. Paying for online exposure works in reverse — the more of it you order, the more expensive each bit of it becomes. There are complex reasons for this, but it boils down to everybody wanting the high-performing channels and ignoring the long-tail of very cheap, smaller options. To put it in analogue terms, it costs you a fortune to advertise in Vogue, but you can buy space in village flyers for a pittance, although hardly anyone reads them. I have an idea that might make our lives a bit easier.

If you’re a writer, you’ll probably be familiar with cross-promotion, which is an unpaid swap of links — you put a link to me in your work and I'll put a link to you in mine, no money involved. The problem is that we have to be about the same scale for the swap to work. Otherwise, if you have fifty-thousand readers that see a link to me, but I only have seven-thousand that see a link to you, then you're getting screwed. This severely limits who can cross-promote with whom, and finding writers to partner with is a time-sink.

Technology allows something better. This is a shameless plug of an article, but I've built a platform that allows writers to promote several others with a single link, and a system that will credit you each time a reader clicks, no matter how many, or few, readers you have. It's entirely non-monetary — if you send a new reader to another writer, then the system sends a new reader back to you. That's it.

And I need writers to help me with a pilot. If you're interested, head over to indywriters.com and request membership (or reach out to me over at LinkedIn). We'll get something good going.

Thanks for reading. If you know anyone who might like my work — or be interested in the Indy Writers pilot — please forward this article to them.