Note for All Subscribers
Please open & respond
I just learned that if you open my posts on your phone the popup footnotes do not pop up.
Background: I decided to format my lists so that they look like lists—easy to read, uncluttered, easy to copy, with ancillary info footnoted. This has given me room in the notes to say as much or as little as I want—including links, observations, gossip, bits of personal history, etc.
Earlier, a friend told me the popups weren’t popping up and that when he scrolled down they were tricky to find, visually. So I began labeling each note in bold to help with that. I attributed the problem to my friend’s older technology.
Now I see that everyone reading on a smartphone has the same issue.
I need to know how to fix this. But it’s part of a larger problem. My posts should be opened on a laptop—they were designed to be seen that way. Many of the Substacks I get, via email, have a button that says: Read in browser. And so I do.
Believe it or not, I do not own a smartphone, thus if you read the posts on your phone, I don’t know what you see.
Recently, several Substacks recommended mine; subscriptions doubled, yay! . . . then I saw that the number of “opens” was about the same—which I take to mean that people’s phones are inundated with Substacks, and only a few are opened. I get that—I do it myself. Yet, this isn’t the kind of involvement I wanted for this project. I wanted these lists and this dialog to be an ongoing resource—i.e., not ephemeral, not something you glance at, richochet off of, have no real engagement with, and never return to. That shouldn’t be the norm.
It’s possible I’m simply too old a dog for this affair. But I mean to keep going and to make an artifact that’s useful to you, as part of my own project to act as an elder in the fiction-writing community.1 I hate the thought of being thwarted by all the cool new technology. I know that my posts are too long for many attention spans, and for reading on a phone while standing in line—that’s OK so long as subscribers see them as a resource that can be returned to. This is not a site that self-destructs after a day or so. The longer posts are long because I want to be comprehensive-ish; if I leave stuff out to appeal to the quickie scan my inner critic scowls at me.
A few weeks ago, for newer subscribers, I reprised the offer to submit years for the Birth Year Project and/or books to add to the list called Shelter From the Storm. No one did. Not one. So, a quandary: Nix the two sub-projects? Chew out subscribers for inattention/ennui/all-around fecklessness? Sigh expressively and keep on keeping on?
Or what?
I welcome your thoughts on all this.
Because, as noted before, otherwise I’m just another old guy flapping his gums to no good end.
I like the birth year project. I also like reading your posts and often do, when they pop up on my phone/email. I think that with the kind of engagement you’re after, it’s essential to keep having conversations with readers in the comments and on Notes, probably. Also it’s probably more suited to a lower subscriber count as it’s more likely for such a group to feel like a community (fewer people but more meaningful interactions). Easier said than done, of course, but I hope you keep going! And you’re doing a good job!!
I will say that you already had both my birthday and my husband's. Thank you.