As usual, I love the way bookshelfbattle thinks. This post is well worth reading if you’re interested in goal-setting, finding readers, or developing a writing practice. Before I send you on to the original post, a few thoughts and responses:
1. I love that this is concrete, actionable, and attainable. You can’t decide whether someone follows you, but you can decide whether you’re going to post; make your goals in terms of things you can do.
2. Quantity and consistency are worthy goals. It seems there’s some debate about whether it’s worth pushing for quantity instead of quality. My stance is that if quality is your goal, quantity is a great path to it.
3. I like that bookshelfbattle isn’t shy about trying to get readers. That’s the whole point. Writers want readers. And readers want good stuff to read. If you don’t think your stuff is worth reading, write better stuff before you go public.
If, however, you think your writing is worthwhile, why would you not want to give it to as many people as will benefit from it? Applying strategy and focus does not make this evil, it makes it effective.
4. I’m joining in, but more cautiously. (Caution™! Putting the boring back into success!)
I’m planning to post every weekday, holidays optional, through the first quarter of 2015. I’m still figuring out where blogging fits into my overall career strategy as a writer, but I’m enjoying it so far and I think three months will make a good baseline.
Also I really appreciated bookshelfbattle’s willingness to share stats, so for the record:
- After about 2 1/2 weeks of posting consistently, I currently average something like 10 visitors a day, with about 40 people following.
- End of March will be (let’s see…math math math) 42 more days of posting, so by then I’d like to see at least 100 following, with 25-30+ visitors a day.
Really what I’d like to see is more people reading my stories, so in addition to posting I’ll probably be experimenting with new ways to make those more visible and fun.
Anyway, enough from me. Enjoy. And if you have any thoughts on what you’d most like to read about here, I’d love to hear it, so leave me a comment and let me know.
Cheers!
—Ben
PS – It will be especially hard for me to write quick posts without worrying too much about quality. I think that alone will be a useful discipline to develop.
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