When You Can't Find an Audience

[ysabetwordsmith]

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

Comments

[itsamellama]

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!