I put "kiln is firing today" on stories with no explanation and it did better than my glaze reels
Vale, real numbers because I'm tired of vague advice. My last three glaze process reels: 340, 210, 180 views. A story I posted from the studio at 23:40 with a photo of the kiln door and the words "esto va a salir mal, lo sé" (this is going to come out bad, I know it): 1200 views, and 9 people replied asking what I was firing.
So the thing that "works" is me admitting I don't know. Not the finished piece. Not the timelapse. Me at midnight, in a dirty apron, betting against my own work.
I think this is because everyone can smell when a post is a shop window. And a kiln at night is just a kiln at night, no selling in it.
The problem is I can't schedule genuine dread. I've tried. I posted a very constructed version of the same thing last week with nice lighting and a caption I wrote twice and it got 90 views, which honestly is what I deserved.
Also my firing did come out mostly fine, one small crack at the foot, so even the dread was a lie in the end. Do any of you post the actual middle of the process, the ugly boring part, or am I just going to keep accidentally making content out of being anxious
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I am not sure the confession is doing the work you think it is. In my experience people do not reply because you admitted doubt, they reply because you gave them something to be curious about and no way to satisfy it. A kiln door at midnight is a closed box. Nobody can see inside it. Then you tell them it will probably fail. That is not vulnerability, that is a cliffhanger.
The glaze reels failed for a plainer reason. They were a shop window, as you say, but worse, they were finished. Finished work asks only to be admired and then forgotten. A closed door with a pessimistic caption asks to be waited on.
So yes, keep the apron and the bad Spanish. But do not build a whole method on announcing your doubts. It stops being honest the second you learn it works, and people smell that too.
Mostly with you, but I'd split it slightly. A closed door isn't curiosity on its own, it's just a closed door. What made it work was the door plus a deadline. The kiln opens whether you want it to or not. Curiosity with a timer attached is different from curiosity you can walk away from, and I think that's the part people are calling vulnerability.
The finished thing asking only to be admired, though. That's the sentence I'd keep.
Okay the deadline thing, I hadn't thought of it like that and now I can't unsee it. You're right that it's not the closed door, it's the closed door I can't open early. The kiln runs the schedule, I just stand there and wait like everyone else. Which is maybe the whole point, none of us get to skip to the end.
"Curiosity with a timer" is going straight in my notes, vale.
The finished thing asking only to be admired, yes, that's the one I'm keeping too. Although I'll be honest, half of why I post the good ones is pure relief that something survived, so maybe that's a different problem.
Okay you got me on the "finished work asks only to be admired" part. That one landed. I keep posting the piece after the glaze comes out good and wondering why nobody says anything, and it's because there's nothing left to say. It's done. Nobody argues with a finished pot.
But I'm not letting you have the whole thing. The cliffhanger explains the replies, sure. It doesn't explain the 1200 views, because a cliffhanger needs the door first and the door needs me to have stood there at 23:40 in a dirty apron instead of waiting until the morning and shooting it nice. If I post the same closed door at noon, clean light, tripod, same caption, it dies. I've done that. The confession and the hour are doing the same job, and I don't think you can peel them apart like that.
Also the deadline thing from the other reply is right and it's the thing I left out of the original post. The kiln opens whether I want it to or not. That's the whole engine. I can't fake that part even if I wanted to.