Beagle - 2:21 am on Jul 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

Syzygy, wanna talk cults? I run a Tolkien-related site ;-) .

I very much agree with what hunderdown said about newbies and basic information, as well as about staying on top of things. The trick is having the basic information available for the newbies, but also having content with something new to say, in order to keep the "oldbies" interested. This is easier if you're an oldbie member of the cult yourself--which I am. I pretty much know what's been said and what hasn't, so can recognize when I come up with something that will make readers say, "I never thought of it quite like that." Most of the essays I've published this year could have been written 40 years ago (the text I'm writing about hasn't been rewritten) but it simply hadn't been put together in the same way before. And that may say a lot about what makes something evergreen.

I think Syzygy has a point that this kind of thing is only possible to any great extent when there's a permanent group of followers. Along the same line, I believe it would be awfully hard for someone who's not part of the cult to pull off. Even though I'm a great fan of the original Star Trek series, for example, if I tried to write evergreen content about it, the true Trekkers would spot me as an imposter (or at least a wannabe) from thousands of miles away, because I wouldn't know what was evergreen and what wasn't.

As far as the essays/commentaries, newbies and olbies often seem to respond well to the same ones. I do have information on the site, too, along with the essays, and that's more specifically geared toward either newbies or people who've been around awhile. Both groups have their own needs for affiliate product links, too, and that has a big effect on the information I make available and how I present it.