Category Archive

Publishing

Acculturating new readers who find us on Facebook

Offbeat Bride’s Facebook page has blasted into the stratosphere this month, with our Like count going from 33k to 43k in the last 30 days. This is basically an average of about 400 new Facebook followers every single day — way above our baseline. Ok, so this is great, right? So many people finding Offbeat Bride and being introduce to the awesomeness, right? So many new readers! So many new eyeballs! Well, yes and no…

“I’m weird for being normal”: the reverse discrimination fallacy

I’ve written about “othering,” and how in an online community where many people define themselves by their non-normativeness, it can be really weird to suddenly be part of the majority.

However, I’ve never dedicated a post to what I call the reverse discrimination fallacy… where community members allow themselves to feel marginalized because they’re in the majority.

Taint week

We’ve entered what I’ve come to think of as “editorial taint week,” the publishing industry perineum between Christmas and New Year’s Day. As mentioned before, we’re doing lighter posting both this week and next week, and our blogging sausage factory has slowed to a sputtering hum instead of it’s usual slamming thunderous hammering and splorting. We’re working on some perhaps ill-advised dev projects behind the scenes (who’s idea was it to upgrade the Tribe over New Year’s Eve? Oh right: mine), but for the most part things are pretty quiet.

Offbeat Bride Facebook survey results

I’ve talked a LOT about my conflicted feelings about Facebook, but things have changed over the course of this year as I’ve been shifting my thinking about recency vs relevancy. Also, the recent performance of Offbeat Families’ Facebook page has pretty much blown my mind. Moral of the story: my contentious publisher relationship with Facebook is shifting, and I conducted this survey to help me confirm some hunches.