Returning to Many Old Notebooks, Many Old Selves
Metafiction and the endless “meta” of my meta-notebooks
As writers on this platform have shared, there may come a time when one your pieces (in most cases, your least favorite) suddenly gets traction and earns steadily for months, unlike your other pieces (in most cases, your favorites) that get a few reads and then just die in obscurity.
I got lucky with this 2-minute piece that I wrote following a prompt in a productivity-themed publication:
The prompt required it be short, not more than 500 words. I self-published and tagged it accordingly, yet the target publication bypassed it. The article anyway collected some views for a week then stalled. Two months later, there was a sudden spike in my stats attributed to this article.
I can’t know for sure how “What is a Meta-Notebook?” began earning steadily. The algorithm might’ve begun the work of actually recommending it to readers who are most likely to read it, who incidentally are not my regular audience.
