Searching for Success

I’ve written this blog pretty much every weekday for about ten years now, give or take. (Actually I just went and checked. My ten year anniversary will be January 17th. Coming right up!) And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in that time, it’s that there’s no way to know ahead of time when a post will be successful or not. I can spend an hour on a post. Pour out my feelings on the page and really put in a ton of effort. The resulting post might be fantastic in my opinion, but the moment I hit “publish”, it’s out of my hands as to whether people read it or not.

Oh, there are some things I can do to try and boost its visibility. I’ve posted some things to Reddit. Reposted things to Facebook later in the day if I feel like a post isn’t getting the traffic it deserves. But the sad truth is that even that isn’t enough to get things read.

Ten years doing this, and I still haven’t gotten it figured out. Yesterday’s quick “Come on, Mitt” post was my most popular post in months, easily. No one reposted it. No one retweeted it. But somehow it managed to find its way to an audience. Other posts end up being more of the “slow and steady wins the race” variety. For example, the one I wrote almost 3 years ago about getting into BYU continues to rack up the views each week. A little here, a little there, but it’s now the 6th most popular post I’ve ever written. It’s the second most popular post people have read this year. The second most popular post people have read this quarter. The second most popular post people have read this month. The third most popular post they’ve read this week.

You get the picture.

I don’t do anything to promote that post now. (Well, until this entry, I guess.) But people find it.

In a way, this is really frustrating. I write my posts so that people will read them. All of them. They’re all important to me (well, most of them, at least.) And if I could figure out a way to have them all get the attention they deserve, I’d do it. But in another way, it’s comforting. Because the same thing happens with everything out there. The books I write, for one thing.

I’ve finished 15 novels now. Two of them are professionally published. 2 are bouncing around editors’ desks, still trying to find a home. 1 is about to go out. But for all of them, once I’ve written them, much of their success is out of my hands. I can write blog posts. Do book signings. School visits. Conferences. But in the end, so much of their success is dependent on things other than me. I can move the needle only so much.

In a way, that’s depressing. But in a larger way, it’s freeing. It’s a big relief to know that if a book doesn’t do well, it’s not all on me.

And that’s my deep thought for today.

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