Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Bloom
In 2010, my first year of blogging on Red’s Wrap, I got two likes. The next year, 2011, saw a big increase to three likes. So this fabulously successful blog got five likes over the space of two years. That may have been five different people ‘liking’ or just one dear person pressing the like button five times, I don’t know. I want to think it was a small but very intelligent and discerning crowd but it doesn’t matter.
What matters is attention. I go back now into my archives of nearly a thousand blog posts and there are many with no likes. How did that feel? I don’t remember. I just continued. Certain people always read what I wrote. My husband, a couple of friends, a few business colleagues who would slyly sidle up to me to whisper a quote of something I’d posted the day before. There were readers, I guess, just not very many and not very expressive.
Schooling people how to formally register their ‘likes’ seemed phony, like buying my own birthday present and signing my husband’s name to the card. Did I really need that kind of attention?
Yes.
Likes jumped from 137 in 2012 to 830 in 2013 and then took an enormous leap to 3,256 in 2014 primarily because WordPress featured an essay called You’re Asking the Wrong Question on Freshly Pressed. This year’s total, with a few days to go, is 5,199, a long way from the two lonely likes of my first year of blogging. 2016, like 2014, was a year when WordPress exposure, this time of an essay called Book Mark, brought a ton of new readers and several hundred likes.
All the while, I was trying to bring new readers to my blog by cross-posting in other places. I loved cross-posting on Open Salon which was a curated forum hosted by Salon.com. Open Salon featured an essay of mine which was later picked up and widely circulated by Salon.com. The essay, called The Wire, was the first time I’d written about an illegal abortion I’d had while in college before Roe V. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S. After the essay came a visit back to that same college at the invitation of the local chapter of Planned Parenthood. I stood on a stage and told my story. It was extraordinary.
But the charm of cross-posting has faded. The last post I wrote that was featured by BlogHer/SheKnows appeared next to a post about five ways to improve anal sex. It irked me. Not from a prudish point of view but from an aesthetic one. I want my stuff to be found among the diamond rings, not the K-Y Jelly. Is that wrong? Putting on airs? I don’t know. And then there’s the thing about once a post is published on some sites, it becomes theirs to use, re-posting as they wish with no prior notice or permission. If you want their attention, you see, you have to pay for it as long as they want.
The one exception to cross-posting right now is participation in the Yeah Write weekly challenges. Whenever I can, I post a nonfiction piece, a poem, or a story to the Yeah Write grids. Each week there is a dose of writing guidance along with explanations of what makes writing really stand out. I’d recommend Yeah Write to any blogger who wants to take their writing from keeping on online diary to publishing pieces of significance. A lot of good writers have emerged from Yeah Write. Good company to keep.
So what’s with my preoccupation with likes? If nobody buys the book, it doesn’t matter how good the book is. By that I mean this: it doesn’t matter how fabulous I think I am if no one else thinks my writing is meaningful. The likes are a metric* of the extent to which what I write hits home with people. If I’m not striking the right chords, I’m failing. In other words, if I’d kept getting two or three likes a year, I’d have quit. No one would be buying what I was selling so why keep pushing my cart up and down the street?
I haven’t changed what I write to get more likes but I have focused on what could make my writing better. I’ve tried to tackle tough issues like disability, race, and mental illness. I’ve taken chances on topics and tried to push forward what I could trust myself to say well. And I’ve decided to own my work. I don’t want to be part of the cheap churn of articles on mega-sites. I don’t want to be part of the ‘list generation’ of writers in order to post 10 things I love about winter and 5 strategies for a stress-free divorce. And I don’t want my post to be next to the K-Y Jelly ad.
Red’s Wrap is my little jewel, my little flower. I’ve been watering it pretty steadily for six years so it could take root and be something beautiful. And bloom. I wanted it to bloom and to keep blooming. And I think it is.
________
*Wordpress generates real-time metrics for WP sites, like Red’s Wrap, which include #views, #unduplicated viewers, #followers, #likes, referral sources, and viewers’ countries. Data are aggregated daily, weekly, monthly, and annually.
Written in response to The Daily Post prompt to reflect on the past year of blogging: Retrospective
8 Comments on “Bloom”
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
I’m a new blogger & appreciate the thoughts. Thanks for the suggestion on Yeah Write.
You’re welcome and keep blogging!
A different perspective on this “like” thing: I love your writing. I read your blog regularly (though I get backed up sometimes, which is why I’m commenting on something you wrote almost a month ago) and recommend it to other people, But I never knew there was a “like” button until reading this today. I think I’ve commented on your posts occasionally, but it’s pretty rare because I don’t have a blog myself, don’t like to entangle my facebook feed with other entities, and the systems seem to make it difficult to random people to comment without such entanglements. So while I completely understand your sense of “if no one is clicking Like that means no one likes me,” I just want to say that may not be true. They might just not know how to tell you.
Hello Jan, I had a little smile when I read your post on ‘likes’, it so much echoed how I have been feeling about my own blog. I started a blog for many reasons but I became quite downhearted when I could not engage as I thought I should with the blogging community. I’m still having a lot of problems with the technical side of the blog. I don’t expect that everyone would want to read my offerings and I have used my blog very much as a ‘toe in the water’. I have gained a bit more experience now and I will be entering more writing challenges as a jump off point for my writing. I have had modest success but I want to improve my work by being amongst people who like me write because they love the language of words.
I have visited Yeah Write and thanks to you I am determined to submit something in 2017.
I love the idea of engaging with writers all over the world as well as my native UK. (The time difference always bamboozles me!)
May I wish you and your family a very Happy New Year. Norma
You are one of the best bloggers out there. I like liking you.
me to
Just started blogging this year but I do get a bit upset when I don’t get a lot of likes for my writing. You offered some good thoughts so thanks. I’ll keep trying. I enjoy reading yours.
I also love the yeah write community – it is always the first place I go to when I haven’t written any fiction or blogged in a while and need a little bit of push and inspiration to get back to it. And, it’s how I found your blog!