What Stories Got The Biggest Reactions From Readers

After five years of exploring writing, what gets the best results is a great question. Here's my answer, for what it's worth, with some at over 40,000 readers, and some in the lower four digits.

STORIES

Some people have niches they stay in when they write. Others have found they like to write about different things. Which stories we pick to go after depends on us. They are representative of our likes, interests, curiosities, and our personality. And if we're willing to learn enough about a particular subject that we can put together a story, or an article, and present it to the world in a way that they are entertained, or learn something, or get something they need from it, then that's okay.

Everyone enjoys it when a story does well. It's fun to get recognized. Even when it's just a top story or a ton of comments, getting recognized or seeing big numbers tells you that your efforts were appreciated. But the question of what is going to go over well is on the minds of everybody when they think about writing something. From book authors to bloggers, what works and is going to be widely liked is always a question.

What works for you versus what works for the next guy might be entirely different. That's because of your particular voice and how it resonates with a crowd. Take examples like Dean Koontz and Clive Barker. Both were creative horror writers, but they had different styles and appealed to slightly different audiences. That reality applies to you as well.

In the past, I've written well over 1,000 stories, articles, poems, and essays. I've worked with Vocal, Medium, and Substack platforms. I used to write, trying to catch a large audience. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. Then, I started exploring different things and changed my approach. I started writing for me more than for followers. Some of it still caught the attention of you and some of my other followers, and even people searching for information on Google.

What worked better than anything else?

There isn't much of a surprise to the answer. The answer is about the same as it is for any writer. Things that intrigued people worked better than anything else. Things that provide possible answers to questions worked extremely well. Things that are consistently in the news seem to work well, but they were only going to be garnering attention for a period, and then people got distracted from the subject by other things.

Probably the biggest hits of my entire writing experience can be summed up by looking at a dozen stories. That's a dozen out of over a thousand. When I think about those hits, the ones that stick out, I consider the subjects, and I often look for new things along those lines.

On Vocal, my absolute biggest hit, and one I promote periodically, is still THE BIG BAMBOOZLE: WERE PHILLIP MARSHALL AND HIS KIDS MURDERED BECAUSE OF SOMETHING HE WROTE, OR WAS ABOUT TO REVEAL? OR WAS IT INDEED A MURDER SUICIDE?

I honestly don't know if anybody has had a lot of luck getting one story off of Vocal to hit nearly 23,000 reads, but this did it for me. At 22,848 reads as of 3:00 today, it's by far my crowning achievement as a writer.

Why did it go over so well? It's a true crime story, and people do love true crime. Even more, it's a real-life, possible conspiracy, centered around a guy who had alleged connections to the CIA, a drugs-for-guns scandal involving the federal government, and an intelligence operation, the character played by Tom Cruise in American Made, and was allegedly about to unveil his next book, a story about the real reasons and people behind the 9/11 attack. If that's not an interesting story, the details surrounding his death were at best weird, and at the worst, smelled like a set-up.

Lately, however, people don't have as much time to be on the internet as they did during the pandemic era, and things are a bit slower. I have been fortunate enough to keep my daily reads around 50 on average. So, I'm still doing something right.

The drop between my first and second place on Vocal is pretty dramatic. We're talking a fall from the top of Everest level drastic. It drops from 22,848 for the Big Bamboozle to less than 3,500 for REMEMBER THESE TIPS BEFORE CALLING INTO WORK TO PLAY HOOKIE.

Why did this get over 3,000 reads? It's pretty simple. During a period of time when people were less worried about work, there were frequent call-ins in places I knew the best, and the rest of the workforce was dipping into a new mentality of life first and work second, I presented the facts about calling in sick and how you get caught by work. I had been in middle management for many years, and knew the ins and outs of people calling in "sick" because they wanted the day off for some reason and didn't get it approved. Usually, it was people's own stupidity that caught them up.

It was a well-timed story, and I posted it to professional groups, particularly those involving correctional officers and correctional or law enforcement officer issues. As an ex-sargent and somebody who'd caught people numerous times, it showed some value and taught people how easily it was to get into trouble when a little bit of thought would have saved them, and their superiors, all the stress. In middle management, it really does become a don't do it, or if you do, don't tell me and don't get caught, kind of situation.

When I look at stories on Medium, I see the reasons why some worked so well. Keywords, subjects that were well timed, subjects that will forever be of interest, and strange tales of things that are weird or bizarre sounding. As far as reads go, the one that will likely hold the top spot for a while is my story about the Great Pyramids. If We Can't Recreate the Great Pyramid of Giza If It Were Destroyed, Then How'd The Ancient Egyptians Manage It? It examines the question of how it was done in the time period, and different experts say we couldn't do it that way today.

This is probably my best example of evergreen content. It's been read over 42,000 times and seen by 70,000 people.

Takeaways

What works are stories that are timeless, stories that are extremely entertaining, and stories that have something to offer the readers. They have to fill a need to readers; otherwise, they aren't going to be around long enough for computer algorithms to count anything toward your stats.

If you're not worried about stats, then you don't have much interest in these ideas. If you're not interested in stats, you could also post your work as a Facebook post and not use the platform for exposure. Just an observation, but I'd stand by the thought.

Anyway, that's my look at what's worked the best. Lately, short bursts, like poems, or things less than four to five minutes long, have the best results.