Tonight I'm going to write about the downside of addictive checking of one's pagereads, addictive noticing of one's ratings, etc. I have to at some point admit to my addiction and deal with it. I've become addicted through a combination of circumstances: some extra time, due to retirement; writer's block (I should be creating/producing but am not); lack of control of more meaningful things in raising children/living life, etc. So I sit by the computer reading other authors' work (see my various writing on what I call read marketing, which works to a limited degree; and while I'm there, I check my page-reads. Sometimes several times an hour. Sometimes several times in ten minutes.

Tonight they slowed down; I'd got 52 during the day, and I simply didn't get any more. So here's the downside: there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. If nobody is reading any of your books anywhere, you can't make them. You might be able to call someone up and say, "read a page now!" but if nobody's reading now, nobody's reading now. That 52 will stay 52 until someone picks up one of your books.

Now it so happens that the other night, I experienced the opposite: absolute nirvana, as two people appeared to be reading a single book, the McDonald's book, at the same time. On that night I opened up my page-read count and noticed that it went up about five pages every time I opened it, faster than a person could even read, and all the pages were going under the McDonald's book column. Five or ten pages every two or three minutes. I was overjoyed! I had to go to bed, but I almost sat still, eyes glued to screen, just to watch the little numbers pile up. That night I got almost three hundred total. I try to get sixty minimum and lately I've gotten a hundred; in fact, I have roughly a hundred a day for the entire month of November and today's 52 weakened it a little but I'm ok; I still have over 1500 for the month. It's a good month for page reads. But because I'm obsessive about it, having it go up to 52 and then just stop there is like torture. It's not giving me what I really really want.

Keep in mind that we're actually talking peanuts here. 1500 pages, my entire month's haul so far, only amounts to about five or six dollars. That's nothing. When I see my page reads go up to 52 for a day, I haven't even made 18 cents. I have kids who spend a hundred times that on a single door dash. So I recognize the absurdity of noticing as fractions of a penny come crawling in and then slow down to a trickle or die out altogether. And, I'm actually lucky that someone read 52 pages of my book as that's quite a bit for a single day, assuming it was all one person who was just flying through it. Some of these books they read a story at a time, or they start and just lose interest halfway through, or maybe they get busy and distracted by something more urgent. I know that because I too read to get reads and I sometimes have more than one book on my plate. Tonight I read maybe 90 or 100 pages of one book, but only about 20 of another, and about 30 of yet a third; it was a good day for reading but on the other end only "good" for a single one of those authors. I try to remember, if I want to be assured of getting 60-100 each day, I should be willing to read 60-100 each day myself, and some days are harder than others to crank them out; also, excessive exclusionary reading (at the expense of writing, of course), is simply not possible as a practical reality. So, as there's a limit to what I can read, that's the same limit to what I can expect in terms of page-reads coming in, even though they come in unevenly, a few hundred on some days, barely making 52 on others.

Several people have stiffed me; I'm sure of it; I even know who they are. One guy apologized and went and read my book; he's back in my good graces again. I didn't want to hang around being mad at him so I just spoke to him directly and it worked, surprisingly enough. Now I like him and will recommend his book(s). It's like I know all these authors personally and I like dealing with some of them, and others, I'm tired of their deceptive dealing. They're not willing to pay a read to receive a read sometimes, so they stiff you.

In any case, there I am, by the page-count dashboard, watching as each one comes in. It's like being a stockbroker, watching the ticker as stocks either go up or down. One has to obsess about something, yes?