SCRIBBLES
A few thoughts.
We’re going out for day trips and overnighters for the next two weeks, so I might be sporadic with my posts—probably not, but possibly. I’ve scheduled my post for Sunday. It’s a new story. It takes place in Congo, 1960, during Independence. It’s a love story. Just to warn you, I don’t have a lot of happy endings. I hope to be around for my Wednesday release of my serial: THE SHIELD OF LOCKSLEY.
Now, a few questions I want to ask. Are my stories too long for you to want to bother with? I write long stories because I like them. It’s as simple as that. I like them because it gives me the time I need and the room to flesh out some of my characters. I like to layer stuff. Today, I had our heroine sweep her husband’s hair out of his eyes. I went back and added it in three other places so it looked like something she always did. But it was important, because there is one particular time when she does it...
I’m asking because my numbers are falling. Not that it matters—I have people who subscribe and never open a link. You click a link, Substack counts it; you have to open an email 5 times before it counts for one. They take those numbers, the number of opens, and divide that into the total readers you have, and you have an idea of how many readers are opening and reading.
And my numbers are dropping.
It makes me ask myself: Are my stories too long? Are my readers losing interest because it takes seven weeks to get a story out? Are they losing interest because, in what’s supposed to be an action/adventure serial, the action’s moving too slow? You have to tell me these things. You have to say…ya know, I didn’t really think that was such a great story. It was way too long for what you wanted to tell.
But nobody says anything, so I question myself. We all do…
Now I don’t know how to get a shot off my iMac, and I don’t have a phone. I’ll have to figure that out later. But I have a graph that tells me how my subscriptions are doing. I look at it for inspiration. It’s a steady climb up. Slow and steady wins the race, right? The first 500 they tell me, they’re the hardest. You’re going to have dips and valleys; you’ll have plateaus. And what’s that? A plateau is when you don’t pick up a subscription for a couple of weeks. It looks like you’re flatlining. Your graph has a horizontal line for a week or two.
On July 14 I had 215 subscribers. And now I’m down to 213. So I lost two you say? But that was July 14. It’s the 23rd in five minutes. That’s 9 days. My growth prior to that week seemed slow, and sluggish. I’m not getting the views. My graph also tells me that I had 5 visitors to my site Friday. The Wednesday/Thursday I had 70 & 80 hits. Yesterday I had 5?
Oh yeah, and in the before I forget category…
I’ve put up my paywall and plan to reward my 7 readers with my “Mill Stories.” My reason for doing this is that I know all 7 of my paid readers personally. (One of them is my brother.) One I comped. But I went to elementary school with her and she knows a lot of the people I worked with because of the neighbourhood we grew up in. She just doesn’t know it yet.
If you want to read my stories, you’ll have to open the PAYWALL by sending me $5/month. To put that into perspective, you have to remember that you’re paying for that in Canuck bucks. What’s that? $3.75? It seems I get more openings for my mill stories.
I decided to stop looking at stats. There could be a number of reasons why people unsubscribe. Some do it because they've too many emails and want to clean house, they want the free stuff, and or they don't remember subscribing and so they unsubscribe...etc. I do that too. When I started subscribing to Substack writers, my inbox was just too much to look at it. So, I switched from emails to notifications on the Substack app only. I find that it's been tolerable to do it that way for me. As for my own Substack, I just focus on writing and finding other platforms to get new readers.
I love long-form fiction.
As someone hoping to release a long-long form novel on Substack (220K), I’ve been thinking about your post all morning. It fits with observations I am making about my own reading habits, which concern me for long-form/serialized fiction.
Note, these are my behaviors as a new Substack subscriber to fiction, not everyone else’s, but I’ll take a stab at describing them.
• I have one designated time in the day for fiction—at night, before falling asleep. The rest of the day, it’s micro-micro hits or I can’t. I just can’t. No matter how badly I want to. Day Job, life responsibilities, my own writing, three critique groups, yada, yada.
• All these great stories flowing into my inbox—All. Day. Long.
• At night, I want to sink into something and read until I can’t read anymore.
• I don’t want to try to find the beginning of something from an email I saw that morning, or three days ago (now buried and forgotten).
• I don’t want to start in the middle.
• I want to start at the beginning.
• I don’t want to have to click around to find the earlier episodes when I have an 18” tall TBR stack of physical books sitting at my bedside. Or too many kindle downloads unread.
• But, I really want to read some of the fiction on this platform.
Here’s my plan: I have an old iPad. Once I finish reading the physical novel I’m working through, I’m going to set that iPad up like a dedicated Substack fiction reader, find a long-form story I want to read, and read it from the beginning, like a book. I’m not sure whose story I will start with. And I probably won’t say until I’m finished, in case I DNF something.
So, as a writer hoping to release long fiction here on Substack… I dunno. I just dunno. Observing my own behavior is causing me the most doubt.
All this is to say: It’s not the writing, Ben. It's the reading.