For writers in the making

70% of My Stories Have Flopped In The First 3 Months of Writing. Here’s Why

Sharing my thoughts on why some of my stories are rubbish

I used to care but not anymore. Why? I have to learn. Let them crash and burn.

You know the story. You spend an hour writing the perfect article. You leave it for the next day for editing with a fresh head, and in the end, it flops.

No one cares to read it. You want to throw the towel, thinking you’re not meant to be a writer.

When you start, embrace that your stories are garbage. No matter how many hours you spend on them.

What will do you next? Understand why they turn to rubbish.

Looking at the data from the last 3 months, here are the reasons why mine flopped.

A poorly crafted headline will make your story a hard pass.

I’m far from nailing headlines. Once we get better, we will attract more readers to your stories. A well-crafted headline will answer these 3 questions:

• Who is it for?
• What is the story about?
• What are you promising to deliver?

The more specific you are in your headline, the better the reader will understand if the article is for them. There are a few on my portfolio that I rushed into getting done and not answering these questions.

Resulting in an instant dud.

Here are 4 other reasons that I’ve collected from my stories. Make sure you compare them with yours.

• You keep the reader guessing on what the article is about.
• Being generic in some cases with no specific examples
• The story is about the reader and not about me.
• You haven’t figured out what the reader wants.

This means, that now that I have captured the main problems I can work to refine these in my next articles. Let me explain how we can overcome all these problems I laid out.

Here’s how case by case:

Reason 1: You keep the reader guessing on what the article is about

The moment the reader opens your article, he must know what is the article about.

He will continue skimming through your subheadings if your intentions are unclear. If they can’t pick on anything relevant to them, they will jump out. All this well under 30 seconds.

Here’s how to fix this:

• Short Introduction giving more details on what your story is going to be about. It should be a more detailed explanation of the headline.
• Make use of the Kicker and Sub-title, to help give more information about the story
• Use the subheadings as a section explainer. The more information what the section is about the better. Your whole article should be skimmable. Yes, you read that right.

Reason 2: Being generic in some cases with no specific examples

Every reader is sick of hearing the same boring advice with no substance.

Don’t rush and write whatever others are saying. Every topic you’ll read has the same platitudes. I failed in some to be more specific or give examples, and ended up writing some old boring platitudes.

Make your content stand out. Here’s how can we fix this:

• Do more research, and find out what’s missing from what others say. For example, challenge both who say quantity before quality or quality before quantity. Why can’t we have both? Explain why, and be specific.
• Give some credibility to your claims. Have you tried and have results? show us how you did it. You studied other famous creators and know their secrets? Show what you’ve learned.
• Add personality. Use some humor, a more conversational tone, or in-your-face language. That is if those are the styles where you want to go. Create something that will have readers identify your style in a heartbeat.

Reason 3: The story is about the reader and not me

As a new writer, we must understand that we aren’t writing for ourselves.

It’s fun when I write those crazy histories but I shouldn’t write what comes to mind. Instead, I should dwell on:

• knowing who am I writing for? How big is my audience? Is it a broad or very specific ‘niche’ audience?
• knowing what my message is. What problem am I solving? What is it that I know that challenges what is conventional?
• knowing what I want to achieve with the story. Do you want to inspire readers? Show them where are they wrong, what their mistakes lie, or where are their weakness. Then show them how to solve them.

Whatever you’re writing, get to the root of the problem early. Readers want solutions. It’s what makes them pay attention.

Step 4: You haven’t figured out what the reader wants

The comments section is the most powerful metric that you can grasp in your arsenal of data.

Only when I paid attention to this data, did I realize how distant I was from my readers. Ignoring your reader is shooting yourself in the foot as a writer.

Comments are not the only metric you can set your eyes on. Look at your best performance stories and draw conclusions from them. Here’s mine:

• Lessons Learned. Share always what you learn. Your readers are sick of the same old crappy theory. They want a personal insight of those who have tried and worked.
• Share success. Don’t rub your achievement all over the screen like a narcissist prick. Readers love success stories. They want to find something that would help them or inspire them.
• Writing advice. This one shouldn’t come as a surprise. A good part of your audience are writers. Any piece of advice is well received to improve their craft. Listen to their challenges: writer’s block, ideas, focus, time management, productivity, etc.

The readers will keep giving you hints on what is working and what they would want to read from you.

If you want to know how to use tags in your stories, check out this piece right here:

Thank you for reading, if you like what you’re reading don’t forget to follow and subscribe to read more of my writing.

I’ll see you in the next one.