Nobody is looking for links to click*
don't let Space Deer sink
Hallå my pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
I landed in Sweden last Friday, first visiting a friend in Göteborg and then I will be going north to spend the rest of the year in my home town with my family. It’s becoming a tradition that I come here every December or during summer. I either see my hometown underneath 50 centimeters of snow or in blasting summer heat.
Anyway, on to today’s piece of writing! Something’s been bothering me about how a lot of creative people use twitter, myself included.
Nobody is looking for links to click*
Nobody ever goes on twitter or any social media thinking “I wonder if there’s a nice link that could take me out of here.” I mean, most of everything I came for is already right here. Game dev stuff, peoples’ thoughts on things, art, comics, memes, etc.
Still, whenever I write or make something. Like a comic page or a blog post. What I want to do is copy-paste the link into a tweet, and say ”check out what I made!” and be done with it. I know it’s lame, so what I usually do is I try to spice it up a little by hinting more about what’s on the other side of the link. Even that rarely works though. Not necessarily because it’s a lazy effort from me, but because the effort is wasted on something I don’t actually need people to do. I don’t need people to click on a link - I want them to see what I’ve made. And if they’ve seen my link, they’ve already seen that I made some kind of thing. Then I could just as well have put my creation right there, in that spot on their screen where I already had the opportunity to be, instead of that boring link.
It’s the same in a flesh to flesh conversation. It doesn’t work to ask someone to read your blog post right there and then, it’s too disrupting. Imagine reading a 3 minute blog post while the author is breathing down your neck. What the author should do is tell the story, or talk about their subject.
So instead of sharing links I try to extract stuff from my blog posts, either quotes that can stand on their own, or try to adapt stuff into threads. Sometimes I just take a screenshot of my writing and share that. When it comes to comics I could just share the whole strip, or whole pages.
You might think: ”but I don’t wanna give everything away for free here!” And I’ve thought this too.
But that’s exactly why people don’t click on links. It’s because you are asking them to give something to you (attention). But why would they? Unless the title of the blog post is already super catchy by itself or you manage to get the exact right subject in front of the exact right person, then you are highly unlikely to convince anyone except for your most dedicated followers to check out the link.
If you say what you have to say right where they are, then you minimize the effort they have to make to engage with you.
If they liked what you said or what you do, then they are more likely to click any link you might have somewhere else. Like in your description, at the end of a thread or some occasional links. Every blog post, comic, game, idea or project you have and share is an advertisement for your whole back catalogue. It’s not just the last thing you made that matters.
It’s easy to make something, put it on a website, share a link on twitter and then complain that ”twitter engagement is garbage, twitter sucks.” It’s harder to admit that you are scared of putting your work where it might actually be seen and to hear what people actually think. Pleading for attention is a lazy way to share what you make.
* I wrote this with social media and twitter in mind. I think it’s perfectly good and fun to put links in a newsletter. It’s a very different format, it’s expected and fun to find links in newsletters.
Mini Notes
💭 Thought - How traffic lights actually work
For most of my adult life I’ve had conflicted feelings about pressing the pedestrian button at crosswalks. Somehow I got the idea that those buttons don’t do a shit. Maybe cause it just seems too powerful? Why would they give me the power to disrupt traffic? It must just be a placebo button to make time pass faster. To give me a false sense of control.
I often try to discuss this whenever I cross the road with someone and I realized how ridiculous it is that I still didn’t know when I could just have googled it all this time.
So I googled it. Now I know. A lot of them do work, probably most of them. But there are some that never work, and there are some that only work at certain times.
🐦 Tweet - Ordinary People VS Creative People
I found this absolutely ridiculous. That’s such an absurd and naive thing to imagine. There’s definitely some truth to it though. I’ve caught myself thinking that I’m different from normal people, simply because I’m creative, I hate that I have elitist thoughts like that. We’re all normal, we’re all creative, we’re all weird.
This reply to it made me crack up.
Comics
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Take care and have a creative week.
Very fun :) Sometimes I utilize the opposite of this effect to ensure I find *only* excitable people! I'll add extra steps to cull out the less dedicated people. For example, when I was making applications for game dev mentorships, I required people to be thorough by my choice of questions, and most people did not pass. I also have a separate website where I write my thoughts, *not* on twitter or other low-resistance platforms. But I imagine artists who need exposure (dedicated or not - cast a wide net) are well-off by utilizing this effect :)
Good thoughts and well put.
Also, it's so good to have Space Deer back :)