One often hears amongst authors on the sister site of Mabooki, woes.co.za, that ‘nothing ever happens on Mabooki’. From time to time, some authors even prefer to publish their English work on woes.co.za for this reason, arguing that they will get more exposure on woes.co.za than on Mabooki. But the idea behind Mabooki and woes.co.za is in fact that the former is purely for publishing in English, while the latter is for publications in Afrikaans. Only functional cross-language references are really allowed. But while it is true that the level of activity in terms of items published as well as the interaction on Mabooki is not comparable to that of woes.co.za, I believe it is totally untrue that this site is not very active.
I am not one who takes great care to follow the amount of times my work is being read. It is not as important to me as it is to others, but based on a little observation that I made, Mabooki in fact compares well to woes.co.za when it comes to the amount of times an author’s work is being read. Compared to my profile on woes.co.za, I published round about a tenth of the amount of work on Mabooki to that I published on woes.co.za – that is, for every 10 items I publish on woes.co.za, I more or less publish one on Mabooki. Interestingly, I also have roughly the same ratio of ‘hits’ (in other words, times that a work is opened). For every ten ‘hits’ on woes.co.za, I have round and about one ‘hit’ on Mabooki. Commentary is of course a total different story, because woes.co.za has a lot of people that interact. But this can be understood in terms of the amount of publication on this site. There is little publication, and as such, there is little interaction between authors.
The above mentioned trend confirms my view that not only with regards to woes.co.za, but also with regards to Mabooki, it is not members who mostly read an author’s work, but ‘ordinary’ people ‘outside’ woes.co.za and Mabooki. People, I believe, who mostly is just surfing the web for some or other reason and accidently stumble onto this site and woes.co.za. It is, to my mind, a mistake to think that one’s work gets very little exposure on this site. I think it is quite the contrary. It is only because there is less interaction that the illusion exists that ‘nothing’ happens on Mabooki.
Based on this observation, I want to say to all authors on this site as well as those on woes.co.za that they must not underestimate this platform. Mabooki, I believe, does give authors a voice on the web.
(480 Words)
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