Fowl's Garden
Powered by 🌱Roam GardenReaders are most attracted by what they think they will see next, not what they are seeing right now
Direct experience from D.C. Haenlien's post on RR's Forum:
Almost one year ago in April 2021, my patron reached its current peak, a peak that I wouldn't surpass until six months later. I began to think of the reason. My protagonist finally defeated a rival that I had introduced over a hundred chapters later. You can say that it was the climax of my whole story till that point.
It generated a lot of interest since I had to split the fight into three chapters due to how long it was, and maybe a few strategically placed cliffhangers. It pushed my patrons to a new peak as mentioned before. The problem is what came after. I started to lose patrons, and the numbers only started to rise again in September.
I immediately knew what happened. My story is closer to a relaxed slice-of-life, but it still had the same high points as other cultivation stories, which meant a lot of interest fell when the main threat disappeared, hence the dwindling patron numbers. As someone trying to make a living off writing, this was not good for me.
Around October, my patrons started to rise again due to the current arc reaching the climax. It wasn't to the same degree as the amount I went from March to April 2021. This was due to the antagonist being introduced in the current arc, so my readers weren't as interested.
Referenced in
Make more promises than a politician
As I previously mentioned, Readers are most attracted by what they think they will see next, not what they are seeing right now and that means that most of your potential is in what they think they will be seeing in the next page. As a writer, 80% of your job is creating the right expectations for the next page. 20% is actually having the good content on the next page. Sure, you do have to have good content, but if you only have good content without much anticipation, you might not make much money.
Injecting Magic in a Story
That is probably something I'm still lacking myself in my writing. I've learned a bit about Less is more and Readers are most attracted by what they think they will see next, not what they are seeing right now from Dan Brown's masterclass, but never like in that moment I understood the value of chaos, of a character escaping your control. See, I've always considered myself more of a psychiatrist for my characters than a all-powerful God; I was drunk on the notion that I was just getting their tales and writing them down. But I think that has not been the case until now. I think that so far, I've written down what I liked about my characters, not what they were really telling me. I think that, as the most insidious and dark among therapists, I was guiding their choices to reflect my beliefs.
Less is more
The less you show your readers, the more money you'll make. If you want them to spend on advanced chapters or books, you probably want them to anticipate what they are going to read. Readers spend money thinking of what they are going to read in the next page. So, you want to foreshadow, to titillate their senses. You don't want to have everything here and now. It's hard to master the art of the keeping the goodies in the shadown, but Readers are most attracted by what they think they will see next, not what they are seeing right now.