When You Can't Find an Audience

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

haikujaguar wrote a post about being an indie midlister. I commented about the value of interaction within a niche market. Then jsl32 observed, "It is precious and I find it to be amazing in so many ways. But that makes it so much more crushingly brutal when you can't find an audience in the new world of micro-appeal."

Yes, that's often a miserable experience, and there can be many reasons why it happens.  You can do something about most of them.


* You could be expecting too much of a new project or audience.

* Sometimes your technical skill isn't ready for public view.

* Sometimes your storytelling or other aesthetic potential isn't ready.

* You may be using a platform that is poorly designed and doing nobody's exposure any good.

* You may be in a venue where the audience just isn't into what you're into and you'd have better luck elsewhere.

* Maybe you're falling short on self-promotion skills.

It's not always easy to tell these factors apart.  Understand that several of them may stack, too.  Here are some general ideas for identifying and fixing such problems.

* You can't tell the success of any online project in less than about a year, which is also true of most businesses. If you've been at it less than that, keep plugging away, it may improve.  If you've been at it longer, then more troubleshooting may be helpful.

* If you've been writing/painting/whatever actively for less than 5 years, and the audience response is not very favorable, it's probably your skill level. Go make some big hunks of creative material and then try again. Fanwork is awesome practice; for original work, bingo cards and prompt calls help with inspiration. If less than 10 years, low skill is still pretty plausible. Pick a technique or a content type that isn't your best and push to improve it.

* If people have liked your work before and now they aren't, suspect context over content. 

* If your audience is consistently complaining that a specific feature is unsatisfactory, you have two options:
-- Change the feature to please your current fans.
-- Look for new fans who would like what you're currently making.

* Use multiple venues.  Make them different types  of venue too.  It's amazing how people go online in a bunch of places, but the people in any one place are different than who's in other places, and it can be hard to get them to migrate. Expand your use of venues where you get attention and drop ones where you don't. Try new ones.

* Watch for people to complain about things they can't find or don't like. It's targeting information, use it. You can ask your audience for input too. Or you can just go out and mine some place that tracks what people like. Writing or art? Hit fanworks. It tells you what people love so much that they'll cobble up some on their own to get more of it. Just pick whichever of the dozens of popular tropes you personally like, and load that stuff into your original canons.

* Study self-promotion techniques.  If you have potential but little practice, then do more and you'll get better.  If you just suck at these skills, admit that and try to find other people to boost your signal instead. You can often find friends to swap skills with.  Nobody is good at everything, and that's okay. 

Comments

[itsamellama.livejournal.com]

This is all super helpful advice!

* You could be expecting too much of a new project or audience.

I'm often very worried about this! I never really know what will click with people.

* You may be using a platform that is poorly designed and doing nobody's exposure any good.

* You may be in a venue where the audience just isn't into what you're into and you'd have better luck elsewhere.

It is so very easy to spread yourself too thin over tons of social networks, too! Sometimes the ones you least expect are the ones that gain you new followers. Always good to be open about new venues (and to know when one venue isn't working for something in particular.) Ex. I sell notebooks best via Facebook, icons via dreamwidth, because my audiences are very much different on both platforms.

* Maybe you're falling short on self-promotion skills.

This I definitely wish I could improve on. I'm also always worried about promoting too much or too little. I've read articles that cited statistics saying that the best exposure meant having to reshare your work at least 3-5 (I think) times within the day, because not everybody is online at the same time and they can likely miss your post. I'm thinking this is probably more applicable to very fast-paced social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Maybe I just don't have that many dreamwidth connections yet, but I like to think dreamwidth isn't as fast-paced? (Maybe? Due to its nature of not being a microblogging platform?)

It can get really exhausting trying to promote your work everywhere too (see: spreading yourself thin). I really wish I could afford to hire somebody to do my social media for me so I could focus on creating the dang things. Meep!

[tentaclecore]

Thank you. This is solid information that I needed.

You're welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I could help. I have a whole archive of crowdfunding materials over here:
http://penultimateproductions.weebly.com/crowdfunding.html