Two weeks in. . . in It's a llittle llazy over here

. . . two weeks and the effort to reward ratio is just murderous.

I am, admittedly, playing this game on hard mode because of a couple of things....

1) Seriously, how much interest can you really get narrating original stories on youtube when you’re up against people with cats. Cats! If I just posted videos of my cat, I’m pretty sure I’d have dozens of subscribers by now. Cats run the internet.

2) Rule number one. You obviously pimp your channel to your friends first. You leverage every last piece of social network you already have to kickstart your channel. You blitz facebook, you beg every friend you have to share your stuff on every feed they have. If you can start off with 20-30 people willing to support you for a bit, you’ve got a chance of attracting your first randoms.

This project is off-grid. Nobody in my life except knows about it, not even the good lady. I am starting from 0.

I now have two twitter followers and one - I counted six times to be sure - youtube subscriber. I am not remotely ashamed to say I basically jumped around the room when I got that one, because I really was starting to think for a minute that I was going to get to January with no subscribers or views. Also, the guy has about 5,000 twitter followers so if he retweets one video of mine that’s hitting about 4,998 more people than any of my advertising does.

But it’s hard, because not only do I need to write the damned content (which is going to get really, really hard to keep up with), I have to record it, I have to sort out the video artwork and processing, and then spend probably an hour a day watching other people’s channels, posting comments, sharing, retweeting, tweeting, trying to find new people to follow and so on.... In between all of that I need to remember that the purpose of this is to help with my main writing. And maybe sleep at some point.

I need to sort out a schedule, I think. Like, a proper one. I have to set aside at least three nights a week to work on my actual book, the one that won’t be on the channel because that’s the one that will go to the literary agents when it’s done. Then I need to make sure I set aside time to write the one short story every week that I need to post on the channel/blog/diary to keep the content flowing. I may actually ditch the blog because I set it up with blogger and there’s not really a social aspect to it. It’s just dead-weight right now - people might stumble across my entries here, but they won’t on there.

Hallelujah for the ability to schedule videos on youtube. I have Sunday/Wednesday videos set up to post automatically all the way to 4 July.

It’s Monday tomorrow. This sucks.