W1S1 Feburary Update (2014 edition)

This post I think I'll use to discuss more than report, because, I believe, I have something like insight to how W1S1 blog is run, and I know at least one other member looks at my blog.

 As far as the stats go...

Stories written: There was writing done, but nothing finished.
Stories submitted: 32
Rewrite requests: 2
Stories accepted: 2
Stories rejected: 30

I was working on a story this month, a story that I thought was going to be short-ish, and wound up being much longer, with still a couple thousand words to go. I was side-tracked with some requests to revise, which I hopped on immediately. One of these revisions resulted in a sale to Perihelion--first time I've had a repeat sale to the same market. My other sale was to On The Premises, taking first place in their "21 and up" contest.

So about W1S1... I had hosted the month of Feburary, which was little more than copying & pasting the weekly check-in and putting up a mid-week post. Half-way through, I began neglecting the mid-week post because I saw no one really gave shit about those. I looked though the stats for the mid-week posts in the past, and found: 1) Vast majority of them have less than a hundred views each. This is a blog that has 456 followers, just to give you an idea. Also, compare this to the weekly check-in posts that easily break a hundred views, going upwards of 2-300+. 2) Only a handful of people respond to such posts. And even then, I found posts with NO responses.

Now there's probably a couple reasons for this. The mid-week post is, well, in the middle of the week, and people are probably more likely to check their blogfeed on the weekends. Another reason is that people have no interest in the mid-week posts, which seem to have a tendency to be informative, rather than self-indulgent. It seems followers are much more eager to chime-in on the weekly-in posts, quite literally, in hours, within the post's first appearance. If I did see a response to the mid-week post, it would take a day or so.

So one has to consider if the mid-week posts are even worth the effort. It takes me about an hour to compose one, maybe for others it's less. And frankly, I'd rather use that hour for something more productive, than a blog post that will be largely ignored.

It's also disheartening to see, as I long suspected, that there isn't much community amongst the blog members of W1S1. See, I came from the AW forum to W1S1, where there was a lot more "togetherness", you could say. People reported sales and rejections, we exchanged information on markets or editors, passed on our experiences... etc. It was nice. The blog version is simply report your stats, and maybe someone will come along to pat you on the head. And yes, I know there are limitations to the blog format, that the people who visit the blog aren't the same kind of people who visit forums. Different mentalities, structures, and such.

I would like more community, but I don't know how reasonable it is to ask that of a blog. I did think the blog hops were nice, but those obviously declined in popularity, and were discontinued. So what else can be done?