Pacing

Introduction:
Starting this blog, I have hundreds of ideas all fighting to come out of my mind and onto the web. As much as I would love to sit down and write them all out in a marathon of blogging, I have some reservations. For one thing, it is incredibly time-consuming and there are only so many hours in the day. For another thing, I have limitless space to post and there are only so many thoughts floating around my head at a given time. If I write down everything I'm thinking of at once, I will eventually run out of thoughts and go days or longer without anything new to see.

Now, while this may balance out in the long term, it is a poor business model. I need people to come at regular intervals for a bit of content that leaves them wanting more. If you disagree, then I must ask, why am I posting my thoughts online for all the world to access? It is because I want people to read them. Otherwise I would keep them to myself.

So I pace myself. I post one new blog a day and I will, in theory, never run out of ideas at that rate. People will know that there will always be new content and they will always be returning to get their latest fix.


Relevance:
I am working on a webcomic which will launch on May 22. I write it not just for my edification, but to share it with others. I want people to read my comics, but I also want them to come to my site and read them regularly and always want to comeback for the next one, which they know will be there on the day I promised them.

In "How to Make Webcomics", the authors talk about pacing in the form of the update schedule. The short version is to update at a pace that you can support indefinitely. Promise your readers that much and deliver it, even if it is only once a week. If you ever find that you can support more updates regularly, then you can make that change. People will embrace you when you tell them you will give them more comics per week, but if you promise 5 updates a week and realize you have to scale it back to 2, they will be disappointed.

Having read comics that break these rules and other comics that regularly maintain them, I find that they do hold up. I stop reading the comics that disappoint me and I read the good comics every day it updates.


Afterthought:
People are happy getting what they are promised. They also enjoy getting more than they are promised, but are infuriated at getting less. I want to say it's sad that we can treat people with the same level of intelligence and complexity as we treat a dog, but since the evidence supports that observation, I'll just have to let it lie.