Boiling Over Sometimes

I really should be celebrating, because I have just got past the 150,000 views barrier, a great achievement in many ways, but I do not feel in a party mood, because this morning I woke up knowing this would be what I refer to as a resentful day, when the anger and frustration at perceived lack of sufficient views of work slaved over comes to the surface on my thoughts. This surely is something that every writer knows only too well.

I have posted over 1100 articles, stories and poems on this site, yet the absolute best performing post in terms of views has still to reach 1000, many of  them struggling  to reach the 100views mark. This is extra galling because I have written posts in times past that gained between 20 and 85,000 views each, something that I doubt ever could happen at triond, especially now that the google panda algorithm is active.

There must be many of you out therein the vastness of the triond fellowship who feel this same frustration, wondering what exactly you have to do to attract those elusive viewers. Even the most popular of my recent posts, about rainbow colored ants and gloriously flowering trees got less than 500 views each, and they were widely complimented and commented upon by my loyal triond readership.

The thing is that, however vast the triond fellowship might be, it still represents only a tiny percentage of the potential viewing audience out there, but it seems that the majority of that potential viewer pool never get to see our efforts because the search engines are still branding triond as a poor quality place for readers to visit, though the improvements with the site content are beginning to be more noticeable.

The trouble is that processes are by definition slow to take effect, and in the meantime we writers are at times pulling out what little hair we have left, in frustration at the unfairness of it all, because we know our work is good enough, but the viewing statistics continually fail to reflect that. If we all hold up our hands to being guilty of posting on multiple sites, then it becomes easier to see why we get fewer views on triond, but those who post only here are no better off.

In many ways it is very much a cleft stick about multi-posting, because you want your work seen by the widest possible audience, but having work on two sites is bound to dilute the viewing figures on each, and this has inevitably to get progressively worse, the more sites you post to. Posting links on facebook, twitter and digg is always helpful, though stumbleupon will not post links to certain triond sites.

All this, coupled with the ongoing problems on this site, which has vastly improved in the last month, mean that the feelings come boiling over on some days, and perhaps when they do the best course of action is to step back and revue your position, motivation, desire and ambition.  Is it, in your opinion, worth the recurring nightmare of constant worry about your submissions, or are you being unrealistic in thinking you can make decent money with the pen?

The writing life is a solitary one, and you will never be able to quantify, to a non-writer, what exactly it is that drives you to keep doing it.  Explaining the buzz of receiving complimentary comments about the writing you produce is difficult because a person needs to experience the feeling to truly understand, but for every writer high there will be many lows. That is the nature of the beast within us all, the creative monster that is never satisfied nor quiet, but driving our waking moments remorselessly.

Am I pleased to have had my viewed by so many?  Of course I am, but vanity dictates that the figure ought to be ten times as high, because my writing id worthy of such.  That self-belief is what keeps the creative process on track, enables me to produce new stuff on a daily basis, though occasionally it might be as well to take the odd day away from the writing desk.

I would be fascinated to know how others view this topic, because we are an artistic community, but should we looking to get paid what we really know ourselves to be worth by starting to look for more lucrative opportunities now, or should we be pushing triond as hard as we can toward higher ranking by submitting lots of good quality stuff? Everyone will have a view on this, so why not share it?