Happy Friday,
I just bought 9 books on Amazon. Nine! Three trilogies by the same author. One giant story spanning nine books.
I read the preview and wanted to eat up everything that woman writes.
All of them.
Gimme.
The books aren’t the point because taste is subjective but that whopper of an order got me thinking about something writers get backwards.
Writing skill won’t get you readers.
Writers love to think that. It’s a lovely dream — that if you’re a great writer, your work will somehow, magically “find” its audience.
Like Puss in Boots, your book will pull on it’s butt-kicking boots and go out into the world and find fame and fortune all by its lonesome. Without needing your help at all.
It doesn’t work that way.
Your writing chops aren’t how you get readers.
It’s how you sell them.
They find your book (somewhere) and read the preview.
If they like it, they’ll buy the book.
That’s what I did. Right?
I read the preview and it was long enough to hook me in, and the writing was enjoyable (which is totally subjective) so I wanted to finish reading.
The writing sold me.
I still had to find the book. I promise you, her writing didn’t go out into the world and find me.
Finding the writer and buying the book aren’t the same thing.
Doesn’t matter if you write books or if you write on the internet.
The same thing applies. When someone finds you, they either like your writing or they don’t. That part is subjective. But no matter how “good” you are, subjective as that may be, there’s still the “finding you” part.
People can’t love your writing if they don’t know you exist.
If a tree falls in the forest…
Most writers struggle getting their work out in the world.
Mostly, because of the porcupines.
The Hedgehog’s Dilemma…
On a cold winter day, a group of porcupines huddled together to share body heat so they wouldn’t freeze to death. But when they huddled, their quills poked each other and it hurt. So they scuttled apart.
But then they got cold and started to shiver, so they had to get close again.
Need each other, hurt each other. Need each other, hurt each other. Around and around it went as the porcupines tried to find the right amount of closeness that allowed them to stay alive, but with minimal pain.
It’s a parable from Schopenhauer’s book, Parerga und Paralipomena, published in 1851, and it’s about human relationships.
We’re all porcupines, except instead of quills, we use words.
Words can cut deeper than a quill.
Sometimes, we hurt each other accidentally.
Some of the times, we realize we hurt someone and try to make amends. I’m sorry. So sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. Other times, we don’t even realize we hurt someone. An offhand comment, not meant the way it was taken.
Some people take pleasure in hurting others.
Trolls, bullies and self-inflated critics that don’t know the difference between critique and criticism. People who are broken enough to think they can lift themselves up by putting other people down.
And it hurts, mostly because mental aberrations are invisible. Easy to see when someone has a broken leg. Not so easy to see a broken brain that feeds on cruelty.
Because… what if they’re right?
If you could see their broken brain the way you can see a broken leg, it might not be so painful. But you can’t. So they push our buttons. For fun.
Sometimes, they push buttons for profit.
You know what I’m talking about… all those people who write “how to know if you suck” and “how to know if you don’t cut it” tripe. There’s no shortage of mean, regardless of whether it’s for pleasure or profit.
I’m not sure which is worse, hurting people for profit or hurting people for fun. Doesn’t much matter, I guess.
And then there’s the people who aren’t mean themselves, but they’ll consume it and applaud it. It feeds something inside them, too, I guess.
“You don’t get how much I hate marketing…“
That’s what an author told me. She doesn’t really hate marketing. She hates what she thinks marketing is. It’s never occurred to her that marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all any more than pantyhose is.
You can’t fill a cup that’s already full.
The saddest, perhaps, are the writers who don’t promote their work because they’re afraid of the trolls, bullies and button pushers out there.
Pain is inevitable. We’re all little mammals that need each other and hurt each other, intentionally or not.
It was never about whether you’d get hurt.
It was only ever about whether it was intentional.
Ignore everyone who jabs their quills intentionally and it all gets so much simpler. Not easier, but simpler.
Because somewhere out there is a crazy person who will buy every single book you wrote. Read every word you write.
If only she can find you.
“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere, it hides a well.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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Thanks for reading!
:)
Linda