BOOBS — MADE YOU LOOK
Grabbing Readers is 100% About Your Title
Click baiting you or inviting you in for a closer look?
How do you attract readers? That’s what most people on Medium want to know. And I gotta tell you, it’s all about the title. 99.8764%. If you can’t get people to click on your title, it doesn’t matter how great you are.
Your title is your push-up bra, your padded jock, your fake job. It’s you at the beginning of the night — before your mascara ran off with a body shit and before you started farting that burrito out n the bar stool, pretending there’s a citywide sewage leak. Your title is what makes another human look your way and say “Hey. I’d do that.”
Think about dude flicks. A guy and his friends get wasted. One of them wakes up next to a girl who looks completely different than when he picked her up at 2 a.m. Her boobs are less perky. Her face smudged off on his pillow. She’s four inches shorter and her butt is flat not moon-shaped.
Don’t even get me started on what men look like in the morning. Okay, they look exactly the same, but they smell awful. And instead of being a CEO, he might be a CEO’s dogwalker.
Titles are like people you hooked up with but don’t know very well. The title Hot Mamas might be about menopause, not girls gone wild. The title Big Cocks might be about genetically engineered male chickens, not favorable genitalia.
In my wonder years, I wrote a lot of fiction. My titles were pretentious. They were writerly titles, the kind that made other writers slyly grin when they caught my literary references. It was their approval I sought. Then I joined Medium.
Obscure references were a no-no here, or so my claps whined on about. Still, I wrote titles I hoped would make Flannery O’Connor come back from the grave and praise me for. Wanting approval from dead people is stupid. They don’t know you. How dare they come back from the dead and judge you. This is your time. They’re worm food. But those titles didn’t work here.
Nora Ephron, another favorite writer whose approval I can’t have because she’s dead, wrote a book called I Hate My Neck. I bought it twice. It was that good. She also directed a movie called, You’ve Got Mail. I’ve seen it several times. The title sucks. I don’t know if I would have clicked on either one of those titles had I seen them on this platform.
I Hate My Neck might have drawn in people over 50, or people who wanted to be more beautiful but their neck was getting in the way. The sexiness of necks is rarely mentioned in Medium — not like boobs. Writers here only mention freakishly long necks— ballerinas, giraffes, ice-cold beer. Readers want tech and sex.
Three mantras guide my writing here.
- Once you name your price we know what you are.
- Know your audience.
- When in Rome.
I know it’s not classy to say, but I like money — but only because I like delivery, not pickup. I also help pay the mortgage so I need to make money every chance I get. Does that make me a whore? A little but if I plan on selling my writing here, I need to spruce it up, grab passers-by, hey baby over here them.
I need to make what I’m selling look sexy. Titles help. I’ve written a great story with a banal title and it flopped. I went back, changed the title and the clicks rolled in. Ask Hogan Torah. Titles matter. I put lipstick on a pig and someone asked her out. Oink oink.
It’s important to know your audience. That’s first base, but everybody gets tired of first base. So much whisker burn. Can we move on already? Second and third base — where you really get to know your readers — that’s where it’s at.
Don’t get me started on home runs — those are virals and it’s not always your best work. Definitely not worth a sexy videotape. Oh, sorry Millennials. A sexy videotape is like a TikTok but longer and you can hear your knees clicking.
This place can be like a writer’s workshop if you're not afraid of criticism and engagement. I’m not talking about drive-by criticism where some ding dong is working out their unresolved issues on your piece because they don’t believe in therapy. I’m talking about listening to your readers. Talking to them. Being inspired. Many will become friends, allies, and consistent readers. Others will send you hate mail, say weird pervy things and you’ll end up blocking them. Like life.
I’m writing this piece because a couple of my readers were thrown off by one of my titles. Sure, I could ignore them, but why? They read my piece and enjoyed it but they said the title didn’t match the story. I get it. They felt duped. Three card monte-ed. Not my real boobs.
I wish I didn’t have to come up with snappy titles. I wish I could title all my pieces, Here is Something I Wrote, and people would gather in the streets, declare me Hemingwayette, and chant, “Holy shit!!! 5,000,000 claps.”
But, that’s unrealistic. That would be like putting a sign outside of a strip joint written on notebook paper with a number 2 pencil. We got the hottest girls in town. Free drinks with each lap dance.
If your stripper sign is written in pencil and taped to the sticky door, I don’t care what you wrote. No one can see it. The people passing by your club will zoom right past your establishment and head to that joint next door — the one with the blinking neon sign that reads, NAKED NAKED NAKED GIRLS!
I don’t think you have to dumb your stuff down here, or totally rely on click bait titles to be in Medium’s version of Rome. Some of the writers I read here are the best writers I know. You know who you are. I think this is a great platform for elevating our writing, seeing what works, and making our work better by doing it a lot.
I also think it’s important to mix it up. For me that is. You be you. Maybe you only write poetry. I’m not worthy. Maybe you’re a computer whiz. Thank God — help! Comedy. Bring it on. But if you want to make money, my broker says, you gotta diversify. Thanks, E.F Hutton, you try writing comedy, poetry, sex, tech, and fashion. I’m not a vending machine.
Some days I’m funny and I write for my funny readers. Some days I’m not funny but I got big ideas about the world — that’s a different audience. Some days I write about being older. It’s like having different groups of friends. Party friends, parent friends, creative friends, friends who buy you negligee, girlfriends, friends you pick up at jail, and dudefriends with questionable boundaries — like life.
My title doesn’t always match my story. I’m sorry. I try to get as close to the message as possible, but it’s my neon flashing sign. If you can’t see it, how are you gonna see my boobies? I mean, my writing.
Thanks, Susan Brearley and Betsy Denson
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