Well, I believe my books are leaning to the easy-read kinds instead of the old-fashioned ones lmao.
And I’m not discouraged by those millions-view book. I’m pretty content with my audience and last week, one of my books passed 1M-view mark, but then when I see how some other million-view books are written poorly, I can’t help thinking that the views don’t tell sh*t, you know. Not saying mine is written perfectly, since it’s unedited and I still need to come back to patch up some minor plot holes (to make it flow better). It’s just, getting the fame merely from how many views you have, it can be very misleading.
At this point, I prefer how it is on Inkitt. My very book that has over 1M views on Wattpad is also doing well on Inkitt, but the readcount isn’t visible publicly there, so it doesn’t mislead readers. But it shows ratings and the overall reviews. It’s the real test if our story works or not.
This might seem like a bit of a tangent, but I promises it circles around to address your comment. A few months ago, I ordered a few copies of my book in print as early Christmas gifts for friends and for the novelty of it all, one of which I gave to a coworker during final exams week so she’d have something to read while proctoring her own. Every few days now, I get text messages from her mentioning some specific detail she read or saying how much fun she was having annotating.
It’s easy to get caught up in seeing your view count slowly increase, or some other analytics increasing too quickly or too slowly, but what really matters in my view is enabling those moments of genuine joy. The ones where a reader tells you how a line made them laugh or writes paragraphs telling you what they thought of the ending and how they wish it unfolded—because they care that much. If someone offered me a thousand readers per day at the expense of all those moments, leaving me with only some scattershot emoji in my comments, I would staunchly refuse.
It’s easy to get caught up in seeing the latest iteration of “The Bad Boy and the Cheesemonger” get millions of views with no apparent effort, but I doubt those books have people curled up on the sofa with a thick blanket and a cup of tea, reading carefully and making memories. As long as you have some readers doing that, you’ve done your job as a writer. We can save the superficial clickbait for the TikTok influencers.
I’m almost done with the 3rd chapter now. Which is really nice, but I’m at this point in the story where I have an awkward two days left before the inciting incident happens. I’d time skip, but I have a nagging feeling that I haven’t built up to it enough. I really can’t pinpoint what’s missing, but any attempt I make at skipping to the inciting incident feels forced, so I must need to develop one more thing in this chapter here before I move on. Guess I’ll spend the next couple holiday days thinking on it and try again on Sunday, if I don’t figure it out before then.
The Russian Nationals are done for the day. We got up around 4 am to start watching. My beloved skater came 8th after the short (that damn quad Salchow again, of course) so he will be doing his usual attempt to climb up in the free tomorrow. I never really hoped that he’d make Olympics, but I am keeping fingers crossed for top 6 for him. Pairs were pretty good, and women are skating tomorrow, so yeah, another hard day of fangirling.
It is snowing really heavily, so I am going to try and curl up to finish the chapter, at least in the rough draft.
I guess if I could count them, the real antagonistic threat in my story are the monstrous parasitic mechs that came from either outer space or somewhere far underground.
I say this because there is no clear antagonist in my story.
One of the formats I’ll use is alter a common word that is the definition of the thing, like our world’s language went one way, and theirs diverged from ours.
Thus one story has functious instead of functional.
Before I start plastering my ceiling with post-it notes, I decided to check out Campfire.
I’ve wondered about it in the past but never actually tried to use it. It might be worth the effort.
I’ll still work with index cards because I want to see the big picture but if Campfire lives up to its promise, it could help simplify some things for me. Currently, I keep all my drafts and notes in google docs. It would be cool to have some digital organization. But I also like to do things a certain way and don’t know if Campfire will let me. The only way to find out is to use it, right?
I’ve played in there today, trying to mess around, creating things to see how they work. It gets frustrating sometimes. On the surface, it looks easy to use, but if you want to do anything that’s not default, it’s not easy to find how and google search does not help.
hmmmm. This might be a good subject for a series of ungoogleable blog posts. Those are actually my most popular blog posts. I could make an unofficial guide. lol
boring blog stats
By ungoogleable I mean when you type your unique technical issue in google and none of the results give you what you need. I don’t remember the exact terms I typed in when searching for a solution but it was likely something similar to what my visitors searched for when they stumbled upon my blog (which, at the time, was the only source offering a solution).
1,5,6 lead to my hard drive article.
2,3,4,8,10 lead to my charts article.
Ooh let me know what you end up thinking about Campfire! I’ve peeked at it before in the past and I’m curious what it’s like. It may be easier, at least once you get the hang of it, than sticky-noting your ceiling
Not writing as much as I hoped during the holidays, but it’s been nice just hanging out with family and friends, going out to places and enjoying myself
That way they were out the way but still easy to look at. I don’t have much in my bedroom though lol.
