Three Publishing Rules for Short Attention Spans
I posted Three Dots this morning. It's a day-before post regarding the Ask Rands feature y'all helped me test — thanks again for that. Both the test on RLS and the testing from the newsletter community were invaluable.
Anyhoo, since I'm not going to bore you with a newsletter about a feature you already know (however, you'll be able to invoke the feature from the menu bar as well as within the post), I am going to tell you why it's called Three Dots.
I've been following three rules regarding my posts since I started doing this blog thing again many years ago. At the moment of their creation, they were throwaway decisions, but for reasons I will explain shortly, they stuck:
Rule #1: Titles often have little to do with the article. Three Dots is about AI hoovering up all the content and also yet another explanation that Google is not here to help; they are here to make cash money.
The opaque title rule came from a desire to get the reader to actually read the article. Seven minutes ago, I posted a single-line post to the ARC Raiders community on Reddit. One line — barely enough space for a thought, but these one-liners tend to engage the community much better than longer posts.
Opaque (but good) title? Forces them to click, forces them to read. Lesson: it does not. It's confusing, and when many of my articles become content in books, editors pleaded for better titles or the addition of subtitles. Which I did.
Rule #2: No dates. You will notice on the blog that I don't plop the date at the heading, but at the bottom. Readers of the blog do not like this because, related to Rule #1, folks are in a hurry and want to know if a piece is OLD or NEW.
Similarly to Rule #1, my decision to bury the publication date is me telling the readers, "Hey, take the time to read the piece before you judge." I stick by this one.
Rule #3: The new book is about to go to print, and I'm delighted to report Charity Majors wrote the intro. There are two moments I love in publishing (no, three): 1. Reading the index — I don't know why. 2. Being done. 3. Reading the intro.
In her intro, Charity writes about "The Rands Formula":
Short. Under 1k words, an opinion or a story, and it's done. Give something or someone a Label In Caps.
Charity is Right. Go back and read a few articles. I do a lot of Interesting Capitalization and Labels.
It is at this point that I realize that most of my rules are geared for the Short Attention Span Crowd™. Either designed to penetrate your short attention span or just to acknowledge it. Capitals tell you What's Important. Labels give you clear anchors for ideas.
Editors love to edit this voice out of my books. I mostly resist.
Happy Monday.