The Blog Post That Nobody Ever Read

The problem with writing a post that nobody has ever read is that nobody can tell you what was wrong with it. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s something most writers probably wouldn’t want to admit.  I wasn’t going to, and I normally wouldn’t, but there’s a point to be made, I guess.  I have a blog post on Dysfunctional Literacy that nobody has ever read.  I published it on this blog almost two years ago.  It’s still there.  It can be found if readers look for it, but nobody ever has.  According to my stats, it’s never gotten any hits.  When I wrote it, my home page hardly ever got read either, so as far as I can tell, nobody has ever read that post. 

It would be embarrassing, but nobody’s ever read it so nobody knows about it.  How can something that nobody knows about be embarrassing?  In fact, I’m also almost proud of it.  I’m tempted to put up a link to it as proof, but then somebody might click on it to read it, and the whole point of this post would be lost.  Even worse, somebody might click the “like” button just for the heck of it, and that would really tick me off.  If somebody “liked” the post that I claimed nobody read, then I would lose all (or at least some) of my credibility, and I can’t have that. 

In this post that nobody has ever read, I compared two books about baseball.  It’s not a bad post.  It’s probably way too long, but nobody would know it was too long before they started to read it.  That meant the topic was bad.  Or the title was bad.  Or the lack of a picture turned people off.  For whatever reason, this post has gotten no hits in two years. 

I’ve written stuff that I WISH nobody had read.  I’ve written a bunch of lame jokes that I probably should delete, but I keep them up to remind myself not to publish every day just for the sake of publishing something every day.  I have nothing against writing every day; I think it’s a mistake to publish something every day (unless you’re that good of a writer, and I’m not). 

At first, it hurt my feelings that nobody read this post.  It was a long post.  I spent a lot of time (I don’t know how much) revising and perfecting (in my mind) the word choice.  I thought my Brad Pitt introduction was good enough to suck people in (it didn’t work).  I spent hours working on it, and then when I finally posted it, nobody read it. 

When I checked my stats a few minutes after publishing it (that’s always a mistake), nobody had read it. Nobody?   I was a little surprised. 30 minutes later, I checked again.  Nobody?  60 minutes later.  Nobody?  Overnight.  Nobody?  By then, I figured the post wasn’t going to get many hits, but I didn’t think the post would NEVER get any hits, not even an accidental search engine look. 

I could have just left it as a Word document, and it would have saved me some aggravation. 

I don’t get frustrated when I write an ebook, and few people buy it.  People don’t have time or money to buy ebooks from unknown authors.  I occasionally buy ebooks to support bloggers that I like (and some of the books are actually good).  But nobody was willing to read this blog post for free.  Even my worst selling ebook has sold more copies than this post has hits. 

Now that it’s been almost two years, I’m kind of proud that nobody has read that post.  Dysfunctional Literacy is doing okay as a blog, way better than it was two years ago.  I think I’m improving as a writer, and I’m learning a lot from other writers and their blogs.  But when it comes to responses, I have to remember not to expect anything because you never know when you’re going to write something that nobody will ever read. 

Am I the only writer this has happened to?  Have you ever written something that didn’t get read… at all?