PART 1: Trying to understand "success"
This is not scientific. It is purely anecdotal, one person's experience and observation.
I have one pretty-damn-big, grass-roots, organic success on YouTube, and I did absolutely nothing to attain that "success" other than post a video publicly. From the feedback I get in the comments these days, it appears to be genuinely helping people of all ages (around 400 each day) understand how long division can be done, all in the context of one single, annotated video example.
The video was something I spent one morning putting together, as a review for the 4th graders for whom I was serving as interim math teacher in the spring of 2012. And I posted it to YouTube for their benefit, and as a message-in-a-bottle to anybody else on the web who might (a) stumble upon it and (b) find it to be useful. There was zero expectation that anyone actually ever would.
I don't understand the algorithms behind YouTube and the Google search engine that are partly responsible for the relative success of this video. (I don't think there is any human being, even on the teams of people that design and maintain the underlying algorithms, that fully understands how they "work".) And I don’t understand the group dynamics that originally (before the video was a "success") made a certain critical mass of people "go for" this one math instruction resource as opposed to the others that were presented to them by search engines.
But I do know that within systems like YouTube/Google, nothing succeeds like success, and NOW it is almost certain that, on any given weekday while school is in session, this video will receive slightly more or slightly less than 400 views. And the average daily view count is steadily growing.
But this "success" was not a given when I first posted the video. In fact, at the time I would have been thrilled if just 10 of the students in my class had watched it (and they didn't, by the way). What is it about this video that gave it even the possibility of gaining an initial groundswell of "popularity" that ultimately led the cold equations buried within the YouTube and Google algorithms to pick up on it and eventually show it as a top result when anybody searches for "long division"?
I've got no real answers here. If, after viewing the video, you think that YOU know what aspects of this video led to its "success", please comment here and enlighten me!! I would like to produce more instructional videos that are (1) as helpful and (2) as successful as this one, but to do that I feel a need to get at least a tentative handle on what made this one "work".
Coming soon…
PART 2: Trying to understand “failure”
I've just launched my first experiment in the world of crowdfunding, with a Kickstarter project designed explicitly to "pre-sell" at least 50 to 100 copies of my upcoming audiobook, CLASSIC TALES OF HOPE AND COURAGE (the third in the "Classic Tales" audio series).
While I do have a steadily growing group of Facebook fans (650+) who seem to be engaged by my work, it's an open question whether a Kickstarter project can be used to finance production of an audiobook in this way. We'll see how it goes!
In the meantime, enjoy the project video here, and click on through to the project's Kickstarter page to find out more (and to participate, if you'd like)!
Most composers write music with the intention and full expectation that it will ultimately be played aloud. Such performances represent the ultimate fruition of their art -- the notes in the score MUST be brought to life in this way, or else the artistic cycle is not complete! On the other hand, writers, while they may be cognizant of the possibility that the prose they are writing *might* at some point be read aloud to an audience, do not necessarily give predominant focus to the "oral readability" of their work as they write. (There are no doubt exceptions to this, particularly in genres like children's books, but I'm speaking in generalities here.) A wonderful and complete fruition of the writer’s art might lie simply in its being read by individuals in silent solitude -- the artistic cycle is complete without need of giving physical breath to the words on the page.
Thus, there is a significant body of perfectly wonderful prose that can (and DOES) prove quite a challenge to the audiobook narrator -- the challenge being to bring the words off of the page and deliver them to the reader’s ears in a way that is not only crystal clear in its meaning, but also aesthetically gratifying and stylistically appropriate. A good writer *does* have rhythm in mind, either consciously or unconsciously, as they write, but it is not necessarily a rhythm that is naturally and instantly amenable to expressive and effective *oral* reading. So in some cases I find that I have to really *work* with a text, being willing to try and fail, try and fail, try and fail, until I finally stumble upon a style and rhythm that *works*.
One of my most recent challenges in this regard was in creating a recording of Jack London’s iconic short story, TO BUILD A FIRE, for inclusion in my upcoming audiobook collection, CLASSIC TALES OF HOPE AND COURAGE (which will be coming soon to classic-tales.net). I ultimately had to make three complete recordings of the text before I finally fell into the “right rhythm” in the third recording. In my first misbegotten takes I was somehow missing the mark that London’s writing needed me to hit. But those initial takes, while sounding rather forced and stodgy to me, proved to be effective rehearsals that ultimately helped me find my way into the more naturalistic and understated reading that London’s prose demanded.
Here is a five minute excerpt from my final take, in which I found the rhythm I had been looking for. Below that is the recording of the complete short story, which will require slightly over 45 minutes of your time if you’d like to experience it.