Peak Readership?
August 26, 2011The other week, the ESPN columnist Bill Simmons analyzed the Barcelona-Real Madrid rivalry. I felt he overlooked a vital aspect – the Spanish Civil War – so I sent him a note suggesting he revisit the topic. Instead, Bill published my email in his mailbag column.
What does this mean? Well, likely, I’ve hit peak readership. By some reckoning, each Simmons column gets 1.4 million page views and he has tremendously devoted fans so it is highly probable that more than a million people read words (badly phrased, off the cuff words, but whatever) I wrote.
How does that compare to the past? Some of my newspaper articles were picked up across Canada and internationally, but it is hard to estimate the net circulation of the newspapers involved and newspaper readers notoriously ignore the vast majority of the articles. Ode Magazine has a really impressive and committed readership, but it measures in the hundreds of thousands, not the millions. A piece I wrote for The Guardian on my favorite bookstores got and gets a ton of buzz but it’s impossible to measure in terms of actual eyeballs because I have no access to the site’s web data. And my Shakespeare book attained some success, but gross international sales aren’t much more 100,000 copies.
Ironically, the thing that comes closest to this inadvertent mail bag question in terms of readership was a rant I wrote to Andrew Sullivan a few years back noting that part of me was relieved by the housing crash because it cheapened the price I paid for dropping out of society (the home and pension I forsook suddenly had less value and were more precarious). What do the Andrew Sullivan Rant and the Bill Simmons Mailbag have in common? I, of course, was paid for neither of them.
So, am I depressed that a Simmons’ mailbag represents my peak readership to date? Not really. I remain highly optimistic that one day I will settle down and write a sizzlingly popular crime series or that maybe my Mary Magdalene book (whenever it’s done) will go colossal. However, it might cause me to rethink parts of my writing strategy: instead of bunkering down with Steven Pinker and Hobbes in attempts to write thoughtful essays, maybe I should just riff and rant on the Internet …
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