There had not been the huge increase in reads overnight that I had hoped, but nevertheless I felt like I was on track. I had stopped with the 'following hundreds' tactic to get reads at this point, not really caring all too much. You see, the thing with followers is that there is no point in having 600+ if none of them will read your works, and so it's about quality rather than quantity in this department.
I wanted to work out how my progress with reads compared to the previous works that I have made on different accounts which I also recorded the progress to. On a different account, it took me 3 weeks to get to 218 reads. This shocked me. I'd always remembered that book as being one which gained reads practically overnight, and yet the reality didn't match up. This made me re-evaluate my progress so far. My reads were moving at a very rapid pace, so I must have been doing something right.
I'll say it again - my success was down to posting regularly. By day eleven I had 13 loyal readers who would read every chapter. I firmly believe this is because I put out chapters each day. At this rate, I thought to myself, this will be the quickest I have ever finished writing a book in my life.
But I had one problem at this point, I didn't know how the book was going to end. I hadn't planned that far ahead, and this was beginning to concern me. I knew I only wanted it to be around 40 parts, so I was roughly only a 1/4 of the way through, but I had no idea what was going to happen at the end. I needed to plan.
I think another important point to make at this point is that I had been reading a new book by a smaller account everyday since the start of the project. I had made multiple friends at this point just through supporting smaller writers' works as well as big writers. This was another vital part of my journey gaining reads. I knew I couldn't just be a passive writer and only focus on my book.
Statistics at the end of day eleven:
364 reads
98 followers
Lesson learnt: Sometimes we need to take a step back and evaluate our own progress.