Inspired by a link Jennie Rigg posted, I’m going to try something for the next week or two. I’m going to see if using clickbait headlines — while changing nothing else about the posts — causes my blog traffic to go up, down, or stay the same.
I suspect that if anything, the traffic will go down — that people who read my blog don’t like clickbaity headlines, and that other people still won’t come to the blog — but it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I have a mental block about doing anything that seems like promoting my writing, because basically it makes me feel low-status and rather soiled — experimenting this way might be a good way to let me find real ways in which I can promote my writing.
What I’m going to do is write each blog post as normal, then enter a one- or two-word summary (in the case of this post it will be “clickbait experiment”) into this clickbait headline generator, and keep generating random headlines til it hits one that will work (so for example in this post I won’t accept anything with “ten best ways to…” in, because it makes no sense for the post). When it’s something like the Cal Dreaming posts, which have a standard naming scheme, I’ll put that in brackets after the main headline.
Do tell me if you find this annoying, or funny, or whatever, but I’ll keep doing it at least a week, and almost certainly no longer than two weeks.

Also, a note to my Patreons — I didn’t make my 20,000 word target in February, because the shortest month of the year coincided with a particularly bad one for my health. I intend to make this up by doing at least 30,000 words this month, and if I don’t hit that target I’ll take no payments for March.

Batpost later tonight.