Distribution channels
Winkletter • 8 Dec 2022 •
On Medium I had a quick spike in views and reads. Nothing spectacular, but half my reads for the past 30 days fell on December 4th through 7th. It took me a while to realize this was coming from a comment I left on a Cory Doctorow article.
While I don’t earn anything on those reads, it’s a reminder that creating content is only a first step. The Real Reason Nobody Is Subscribing to Your Newsletter is a lack of distribution.
When I leave a comment on a popular writer’s post shortly after it goes live, that comment gets distributed to a lot of people.
When I post an article on Medium but don’t even bother to send out a toot on Mastodon, few people will ever see it.
It helps to think of my articles in physical terms. If I have product sitting in a backroom, no one is going to buy it because they’ll never see it. I need to stock my product on shelves. And I need to tell people where to find those shelves.
And this insight is recursive. If I toot, or tweet, or post, or whatever, that post needs distribution as well. So I need to decide on some distribution channels and come up with a plan to improve views on those channels.
Comments
@jasonleow It’s easier to visualize what distribution means with physical products. Online it gets complicated, because it’s not just a shelf in a store. It’s keywords and also-boughts, and doing that kind of SEO research is just as important as what goes inside the book.
Yeah and usually the business of thinking about distribution is left to the publisher. The book author just writes. Not easy to figure out all that abstract intangibles!
Some marketplaces do distribution for writers pretty well. I know a Amazon non-fic author who doesn’t do much marketing for his coding books, but because of how he researched topics for ‘Amazon SEO’ before writing/publishing, his books get found nonetheless. He gets a few K of passive income every month. Super impressed by that.