01 · Exposed to the world, all zeros

Here is where things stand. A literary instance has its own domain, ninety-odd published texts, a feed carrying full content, an app that works without a network, two accounts on social services, automated distribution releasing one entry every six hours, and source markers in its links, so that the event log knows which post a reader arrived from.

It also has zero followers on one service and zero on the other. Posts have a handful of views each, some of them the author checking whether they went out.

This is worth writing down precisely now, because six months from now only what worked is remembered. The pipe is finished before a single person has flowed through it — and that is not neglect but the consequence of a decision: since it had to be built anyway, better to have it sound before there is traffic than to be repairing it in front of people.

The cost is an illusion of progress. Every improvement to distribution looks and feels like work on reach, and is not. One can spend a week refining a feed description, aligning icons and stamping links, finish each evening with the sense of a job done, and be no closer to a first reader. The pipe does not make water.

The second thing follows from anonymity and is harder. A project under a pen name has no access to any natural distribution: no using one's own friends, private accounts or professional network. Every project that starts stands on the first hundred people who already know somebody. Here there are none and there will be none — the decision was deliberate and well founded, but the bill for it comes due exactly at this point.

That leaves one route: the writing has to hold its own where readers already are. Not a link to the site — the text itself, pasted whole where someone will read it without clicking. The site is what they find if they like it, not the thing they must first be talked into visiting.

The first attempt in that direction was made three days ago: one text submitted to a trade portal where editors assess it and other writers comment. There is no reply yet. The outcome — whatever it turns out to be — will appear in the next entry, along with what follows from it.