Mar 9, 2021
A Succubus Success Story
Once upon a time I wrote headlines for newspapers and magazines. The whole idea of a headline of course is to attract the reader’s attention.
Back then I had some success, and the copy chief even complimented some of my efforts. One that sticks in my mind, from The Seattle Times, was for a story about two young men trying to smuggle bales of marijuana onto a Puget Sound island in a small single-engine private plane. The pilot made a poor landing on a primitive strip. The aircraft went sideways and straps holding the bales broke. The heavy bales pinned the smugglers inside the fuselage to await arrival of the police. This was the seventies when hippies and dope went together like peanut butter and jelly. My headline: “Flying it in just wasn’t their bag.” Not a bad effort, right?
Ah so long ago. Nowadays the conventional wisdom on Medium is that your headline must beguile or you will be ignored. True so far for me. Scores of efforts garner one or two views. A few get views in the teens. Once in a while I crack 20. Less often, 30. Rarely 40 or more.
And sometimes zero. Zero for days and days. Here’s four examples:
Usually entries including the word “sex” get more hits. But the one that stands alone, with more that four times more views than any other, only alluded to sex. Medium readers must be intellectuals:
Succubus Dreams: 479 and still going up. Go figure.
- 498 now. Meaning 19 more views since I published this five days ago. Yet zero views of this post. Go figure twice. Will “Succubus Dreams” be my first post to crack 500?
March 17: 516 views, and still not one hit on my second post mentioning succubus.
- March 19: 530. Bewildering. No hits on this one still.
- March 31: 576 views. Still none here.
