This note is mainly for folks who are starting from zero readers and/or are feeling discouraged in their writing efforts…
I know I’m still a small fish in the big Internet Pond, but I feel like it’s worth mentioning that there are two(ish) things I did differently to see this graph’s steady uptick in subscribers.
I started publishing steadily*, reliably and with more of my identity on the line. The first time I took a leap of faith and connected my editor-ness with autism, was the first time I felt readers really resounded with something I wrote. (Link to that essay below.)
In the past, I would get locked into a prism of social rules and some impossible standard I needed to meet, assuming I should only join the comments if I was an expert on the topic. (And then, inevitably, I would never join in, even when I really wanted to.) But I took a different leap of faith and stopped masking as much in online settings. I began joining in the comments of my favorite writers, saying things like “I don’t know,” or “I think I misunderstood,” or “I liked your story. It made me wonder about…”
The essay where readers started joining more steadily is here: theeditingspectrum.substack.com/p/why-t…. It’s not lost on me that in the list at the end, my first guess for why I don’t have more readers is because I haven’t published consistently. Sounds like I nailed that one. 😏
*This steadiness has been possible in large part due to the fact that I finally found an editor to edit and flesh out my writing ideas. This editing container for writing is the most productive I’ve been in my creative writing. 🫶 CC:
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