I Don’t Need Followers.

I need readers. Ready?

I’m one of the four hundred and eighteen last people on the planet to join Twitter. Frankly, I never thought I would climb onto that particular pile of twits, but here I am acting all 21st century. Why not, I thought. It might be fun, I thought.

Here’s the only thing that’s fun on Twitter:

Here’s what’s not fun but extremely prevalent on Twitter (and across social media): follow-me-and-I’ll-follow you.

Thanks to social media, specifically Instagram and Twitter, there’s an incredible drive to collect followers. I see people desperate to “get to” 1k, 5k, 10k followers. The ever-popular “writers’ lift” shows up repeatedly on Twitter instructing every sentient pair of eyes and hands to follow and retweet to get more followers. The holiest of social media grails is to hit 100,000 followers and then keep ’em coming.

Have I fallen prey to this collective insanity? Oh, you betcha. I have duly lined up to post links to whatever profile or W.I.P (Work In Progress), to retweet, and to go down the list just a-following my little face off. In this way, I’d gain ten, twenty, forty followers in the next hour or so — an hour of my life I can never regain. Then over the course of the next day or two, I’d watch as three, eight, fifteen of them disappeared. They hadn’t even stayed long enough to see if I was worth following!

Am I worth following?

How the hell would I know? Do I do or say anything particularly follow-worthy? And what TF does it even mean to have “followers”? After two-plus years of often daily writing, publishing, and promoting on this platform 2,137 people have clicked the little green button at the bottom of one of my stories that says “follow”. Who knows what inspired that action and who knows how many of them pay much attention to what I’m dutifully creating over here in my corner of the ether. If even half of them were actually reading I’d be unbearable in my chest-thumping and gloating. Wait. Scratch that. I’d be all humble outwardly while doing the Snoopy Happy dance around my living room.

Don’t follow me. Read me.

For most of my writing life, I was one of a million Emily Dickinson’s, spinning my precious little tales in isolation. I wrote strange stories and drew strange pictures. There was the summer I ran away to San Diego, when I found a public spot to sit and draw my strange pictures. It was my first experience of not creating in isolation. People would stop to see what I was doing and then other people would see those people and come over to see what they were looking at and most evenings I found myself basically performing for an audience. People would buy my weird little drawings for five or ten bucks or a bag of decent pot.

Some would come back night after night. My first followers.

Things didn’t work out in San Diego, and soon I was back in Cleveland couch-surfing and trying to find work cleaning rooms in some airport motel.

It took years before I built up the nerve to start submitting my curious little stories to literary magazines. This isn’t a story with a happy ending. Fifteen years of submitting work and six published pieces to show for it. Ok, yes, I was nominated for a Pushcart back in 2011, but nothing ever came of that or anything else that was published.

It wasn’t until I signed up here that my work began to get read on a regular basis. Real people with better things to do were taking the time to read my stories. Unbelievable! It’s intoxicating, let me tell you. After a lifetime of diddling with words and images all by myself I now suddenly have people reading and responding to my work. I like it. I want more (because anything that makes me feel good is something I want to gorge myself on)!

But followers?

What do I look like here, some kind of Messiah? Do I have some great Message to deliver from on high to the straining ears of followers gathered at the base of some scrubby hill?

No. No, I don’t and that’s not even what followers in our social media maelstrom are interested in. I don’t even know what any of us think we’ll gain by following. Of course, I follow people on social media. I will read something that I like, for example, one of Muhammad Nasrullah Khan’s evocative and deceptively simple stories, I click “follow” and hope The Almighty Algorithm will make his next work visible to me.

I suspect at least some of my “followers” do the same.

But The Almighty Algorithm is fickle and not to be trusted. This is why followers are meaningless but readers are the gold standard. As a reader myself I won’t wait passively for TAA to deign to drop one of my favorite writers’ gems onto the path in front of my feet. I go looking for their stories and articles and poetry.

And deep in my word-laden little heart, I hope that you are like that, too. Lots of you. Why can’t there be some magic incantation that would allow me to turn at least a third of my 2,137 followers into readers? Maybe there are obscure, small gods of scribblers who can be prevailed upon to inspire followers to get out there and read. If so, I am determined to begin making the appropriate sacrifices.

And those sacrifices? What would need to be sacrificed to magically transform passive followers into active, hungry readers? Oh, the usual. Time, focus, attention. It’s actually pretty simple if not easy.

All I need to do is write entertaining stories and articles. That simple. Clearly, I have work to do.

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