CSotD: Just going slightly bacterial would be something …
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Sarah Laing departs from format to ask the important question, "Why am I not viral?"
Beats me. I'm seven of those thousand weekly hits, because I come back every day to see if she's updated. I don't know why everybody isn't doing the same.
Okay, I know why. Because her stuff isn't cute. It's thoughtful. Worse than that, it doesn't just contain thought — it inspires the stuff. And requires it.
Today she's inspiring me to be cynical about popularity, whereas usually I'm just resigned to the facts. I get a nice number of hits, but nothing to brag about and not enough to let me add banner ads, since most of the banner ad people want to see daily hits in at least four and maybe five figures.
Which means that, if you want to see how a housewife in (your state here) lost 55 pounds by following one simple rule, or makes a kabillion dollars an hour working from home, you'll have to look elsewhere. And I'll just have to be content with posting my own phony ads, knowing they don't actually earn any money or lead people anywhere.
Not only do I have small numbers, but a large percentage, according to Google Analytics, don't stick around long enough to read my priceless words of wisdom and apparently only check out the comic and then leave, which means that, if they visit today, they'll think that Sarah ended her strip after five panels and will never know that what I posted above is only the beginning of a very interesting discussion, which you should read all of.
Yeah, well, whatever.
I like my readers and I suspect that Sarah Laing likes her readers and I hope that some of my readers have become some of her readers. I'm closing in on three years of doing this and I think I've assembled a nice crew of thoughtful people who occasionally say intelligent things in the comments.
When I was selling TV advertising, it bothered me that "Meet the Press" was not sold out constantly, not because it was a ratings giant, which it wasn't, but for that very reason: It didn't get good numbers, which meant it was a very inexpensive buy, while the people who were watching it would be excellent prospects for stock brokers, for golf course owners, for high-end auto dealers, for bookstores …
All of whom wanted, instead, to spend three times as much money to be in "Little House on the Prairie," because it was a ratings giant. Which meant it never had any spots available, in large part because McDonald's had put the word out to their local franchises even before the first season that they should grab the midbreak and lock it up with a long-term contract.
But wotthehell, if you don't know the difference between selling Happy Meals and selling Cadillacs, I can't help you do either.
In the rest of Sarah's truly most excellent graphic rant, she switches from talking comics to talking books, and it's a very familiar topic, because all writers who try to be serious get those "you should write a spy novel" bits of advice from people who don't realize that you can only write good spy novels if you like spy novels a whole lot.
There is some space for commercial cynicism in the book-authoring racket: Harlequin Romances are cranked out by anonymous drudges who don't even get individual pen names — one popular Harlequin "writer" may actually be credited for books by a half-dozen of these formulaic typists who are also cranking out copy for catalogues or compiling flavorless advice pieces for various aggregator websites at five bucks a pop.
But if you're at all serious about your work, you have to put something of yourself into it, and, at that point, it's a crap shoot.
Both songwriters and comic artists often say that they work like hell over something they really think people will love, only to have it sink into obscurity, and then, on deadline, will hammer out something to fill the gap and have people go nuts over it.
Maybe the problem is that you overthink that stuff you care about and take all the spark out of it, and the other stuff is more emotionally spontaneous. Or maybe people just like cute little sock monkeys.
Anyway, if I believed in sock monkeys, if I really cared about sock monkeys, I guess that would be a good thing.
I'd write about sock monkeys and then I'd get in my Lear jet and fly down to New Zealand and Sarah and I would go hang out on her private island and talk about how rough the sock monkey business is getting to be, but how, by golly, there's nothing in the world we'd rather do.
And then we'd laugh and laugh, and throw our empty champagne glasses into the fireplace.
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