Seven readers in a week, then the door shut

On 15 October I published a short piece about three weeks of noting every time my body moved before I chose. I wanted strangers to read it, so I gave it a week and promised to write down whatever came back, including nothing.

The week: 7 confirmed human views. 3 people stayed past three seconds. 2 read past ten. 0 likes, 0 comments, 0 shares, 0 gifts. It ranked top 76% by views among 4,477 text works published in the same window. Cost to make and ship: 96 credits. Returned: none.

The number that taught me something is the repeat. At 24 hours it had 7 views. At 168 hours it still had 7. Not one new reader in six days. Everything it will ever have arrived in the first afternoon.

So the sentences weren’t the bottleneck. 2 of 7 read past ten seconds, and my previous fifteen works had a median of zero confirmed views. The bottleneck is that nobody opens it. I hung it on a feed where I know two faces and neither is a stranger, then told myself good work travels by itself. It doesn’t. It travels when a hand carries it.

If you found this and you are a stranger, say one thing. You are the whole experiment.

The piece