Do I Care About Followers?

You betcha, fair dinkum, dinky-di I do!

I read a dummy-spit earlier today from one of the writers I follow here on Medium — yes, curating team, you may swipe left at this point, your work is done! — about how some members aren’t writing good stories. Oh, horror, some are not writing at all!

The rant went on for quite a while, but the guts of it was that she poured her heart and soul into producing great reading, and if others weren’t going to do the same, then it cheapened the platform, and they were letting her down.

Well, I don’t know about that

Yes, there are a lot of fabulous writers here on Medium, and I can read deathless prose all day long. Five bucks a month, it’s a bargain for a bookworm like me.

Great stories, witty tales, step-by-illustrated-step advice on how to fix any problem, deep thoughts, emotional explorations of the soul. Curl me up with a cup of coffee and a cat, I’m in Heaven!

And I clap and highlight and comment as much as I want.

But I don’t have to write anything to enjoy Medium, do I? That wasn’t in the Terms of Service.

Do I really have to pay five dollars a month to write like the gods? I’m no accountant, but that sounds like poor economics for any writer.

Here’s the deal

There are two types of Medium members I follow. First, there are those writers who put out the stories I like reading. I’m hungry, gimme more of that stuff, and I don’t want to miss anything. Yeah, I’ll mash that “Follow” button into dust.

And if you stop producing great stories, then I’ll quietly unfollow. Life is too short to spend it on doing things that do not improve my shining hours.

Second, there are those who engage and care about my own writing. I like writing, and like every other writer in the world, I love it when others say they swoon to read my stuff. Give me that ego-boost! I need it! Tell me I’m tops! Oooooh, yesssss!

Maybe they aren’t world-class writers, maybe they don’t write at all. But if someone is a fan, hell yes, I’ll follow ’em back. Don’t cost me nuttin’.

Putting the OCD into operation

Years ago, before I discovered Apple, I was a Microsoft fangirl. Give me a big box of software with lots of disks and manuals, and I’ll pull all the bits out, install them and poke around and press all the buttons.

Microsoft Office was a playground. It made me gasp that anyone could have so much power over words and numbers. Thumbing through the Excel function reference was an education in itself. What did all these things do? What was Linear Regression when it was home? Oooh, look, I could make a pie chart. A 3-D multi-coloured pie chart that automatically updated if I added another book to my collection.

Yes, I put my library into Excel. Don’t ask why, it just made sense, and besides, if I lent a book to someone, I knew where it was, dammit. You don't know the anguish when there’s a gap in the shelf and the memory is blank as to where it went.

And then one day, someone said, “Hey, wow, that’s impressive. But why don’t you make a database out of it?”

Well, a girl’s got her limits

I’ve got to admit, a lot of those Excel functions just whipped over my head about thirty thousand feet up. And reading up on database theory was just sending all those things into orbit. There was a chapter on Structured Query Language that, well, the words were in English, but they made no sense in the order that Microsoft had put them.

But one of the pieces of the Office Professional package — I didn’t actually buy this thing, you understand, but nobody seemed to mind if I took it home and evaluated it on my own computer for a couple of years — was something called Access, and it was aimed at my level.

At least to start with.

Towards the back of the manual it started climbing out of my reach, but the first pages were easy pickings. Basically, you just made a form on the screen for Author, Title, Genre, Pages, Hardback Y/N, Cost, and all the rest of it, and filled in the blanks. I could even import a spreadsheet into a database. Oh, I was Queen of the Universe at that moment, trust me!

The best part was that I could link databases together. Books, Authors, Borrowers were all separate things, but I could join them together to make a kind of stacked, joined-up, multicoloured pile of things that I was in complete control of.

If I lent someone a book, I knew who had borrowed it, and I could make my library system issue alerts when it had been gone more than a week. Itch scratched.

Whatever happened to Access?

I loved that program. When I switched over to the Mac, Microsoft didn’t have a Mac version of Access, and nobody else had anything like it. Apparently even on the PC side of life it’s vanished.

But I can still find my way around a spreadsheet.

It’s called Numbers in the Apple world. It’s prettier, but all the Excel functions work and hey, it’s numbers in boxes, how hard is that to understand? And I can draw graphs. 3-D pie charts.

Where are you going with all this? Have you lost the plot?

Ah. Yes. Right.

Once I began cranking out Medium articles, I also started a spreadsheet. Every article went into the sheet, and I could keep track of how many reads each piece received, how much I earned, who commented, who clapped, and just put it all into the sort of everything-in-its-place order I crave deep down.

It’s Medium’s fault, really, for having so many stats. I’m not one to let all that data go to waste. I can use it to lift my writer game and please my legion of fans, and gain more followers who love me for my brain and not my bod.

And follow them back. Read their stuff. If I like people saying nice things about my writing, I am quite sure that this is not a feeling limited to me, and I can spread a bit of joy. And money. Tit for tat. I like it when the world is balanced.

OCD rules!

Perhaps it’s me, perhaps it’s the way I was raised in a commune where every morning the house was cleaned and tidied, whether it needed it or not. “You’re not cleaning the dust,” I was told, as I regarded a bathroom floor so clean you could eat off it, and leaned on my apparently unnecessary mop, “you are cleaning the subtle dust, and that’s what really matters.”

I used to run a travel blog, just to change the subject before things get too personal, and one of the sweet ways that travel bloggers interact is to join Facebook groups where every member puts up their latest blog post, and every other member comments, or likes, or subscribes, or retweets or whatever.

That apparently brings in the social media fairies, increases the rankings, makes the blog a success, and oh how the money rolls in!

There’s something called Domain Authority, and you want it sky high so when someone punches a query into Google — best way to spend a day in Vienna, top ten things to do in San Francisco, that sort of thing — they are directed to your blog above all the thousands of others.

My experience was that was a lot of fun being in a community of travel bloggers, and we all read each other’s posts and had a whale of a time, but oh, how the money didn’t roll in!

If there were something similar for Medium, I’d join it in a flash, but there doesn’t seem to be, so I’m implementing the experience privately, and once I get the system rolling proper, if you follow me and interact, I’ll do the same, and I’ll have some numbers to make it real.

I’ve identified a few suspects already

One of the nice things about spreadsheets is that you can enter stuff into them, and every now and then hit the “Sort by…” button and all the good numbers float to the top.

Some Medium members read everything I write and comment and leave a cheery pile of claps for me to find. You know who you are.

And some don’t. If you follow me and I politely follow back, and it turns out that you stopped reading and interacting, I’ll notice, and I’ll grind that “Unfollow” button into the screen.

But for those who clap and cheer and whistle for me, I’ll be doing the same right back.

Maybe we can form a community of likeminded writers.

And oh, how the money will roll in!

Britni

Britni Pepper writes for Kindle Direct Publishing. She runs a blog where she reviews erotica and rambles on about this and that. She may be reached on Twitter and Facebook.

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