It’s one of those dark, dreary days when your mood’s already low. You’re writing, because that’s what you do. And yet you can’t help but ask yourself why you keep doing it. Why do you put in the hours, day after day, year after year?
It’s one thing to spend all that time on writing the stories that you can’t NOT write, either because the characters you’ve created fascinate you, or you’re intrigued by the plot you’re weaving, or because it’s your burning desire to help or teach others wisdom through the power of your writing.
What about the writing, though, that you do because you feel it’s necessary? The blog articles. The social media posts. The marketing copy or the guest posts or any other incidental writing you do because you hope that it’ll promote the “other” writing – the one that truly matters to you?
It’s especially hard to keep up the secondary writing when it feels like you’re publishing into a void. Nobody reads your blog posts, let alone comments on them. Your Tweets garner a “like” or two, and sometimes not even that. You’re not making the contacts and you’re not gaining the followers that seem to flock to others so effortlessly. How do you keep going? Why do you keep going?
The main reason, of course, is discoverability. With an emphasis on “ability”. If you don’t promote your work, that ability is gone. You can be sure that nobody will discover your writing – or you – simply because you haven’t gotten the word out. So a certain amount of outreach is inevitable. One way is through your own platform, but another way is reaching out to agents and publishers. Every query you send is a marketing effort.
So if you’re serious about your ultimate goal to find readers for your stories, keep writing those stories. But also, dedicate some time to reaching out, even if you dread it and rue every minute you spend on it. Because without that outreach, there’s not even a chance that your stories will find an audience. As the old lottery adage goes, you gotta be in it to win it.