A Quest For Readers, Part I

I started from scratch with marketing myself

As much as I would love to be perceived as a meditating, mellow, easy come, easy go sort of editor and writer, this essay series is going to toss all that out the window. 

The biggest difference in my writing life that preceded building a community of 1,100+ readers at The Editing Spectrum is embarrassing.

I was fucking desperate. 

The real, worn out, I’ll do anything, desperate. 

The kind of desperate Glennon Doyle talks about when she started really, really writing—and she’d get up to write every day from 4-6 a.m. before the kids got up and life went full speed.

I published my first Substack post on June 3, 2022, and let me paint a picture:

Four months postpartum, blissful and also still trauma twitching from three years of miscarriages, fertility treatments and, of course, most recently, growing a human with my body. I still hadn’t been cleared to walk more than a half mile after my c-section. We lived in utter isolation—my constant companions were a treed mountainscape and the black Russian squirrel who taunted our dogs on Saturday mornings. My husband is the sole breadwinner of our family, so he came upstairs to help when he could, but mostly it was just me keeping our girl Evagene alive. Sun up to sun down I was pushed to the brink with sleep deprivation, breastfeeding failures and a dash of hypochondriac syndrome. I was wobbly, physically and mentally. I yearned for something familiar to my pre-trying-to-get-pregnant life. At one point I even said, “I’d love to cozy up to a nice, predictable Excel spreadsheet.”

Starting from scratch begins with honesty

So, maybe the desperation opened up an honest channel in my mind. Maybe it pushed me to take bigger risks. Maybe it was seeing my daughter and knowing I didn’t want to be this person whom she formed lasting memories of. I got desperate, I got honest and I started from scratch.

I decided that I was done being the editor who polished everyone else’s voices and then said, “OK, well, good luck finding readers.” Because I honestly didn’t know how to find them in the real-life sort of way. I knew from experience at a marketing agency how people with buttloads of money did it, but that wasn’t me. 

So I tried sketching out and applying a nauseating number of business plans to my writing, along with social media strategies and content marketing plans—and they all built so beautifully on this premise that I had finally found the missing piece. Everything launched beautifully—launching was never the issue—and then fell flat within a few months. This year is the first time I can say my writing life and publishing aspirations are chugging right along, steadily, going forward and some days they’re even downright dreamy.

But here’s the thing: I still don’t really know how to find readers. Just last week, I was looking at my trending numbers and was once again plopped into a swirl of questions: Am I doing the right things, publishing in the right cadence, opening myself enough in my writing? While I was fretting, I kept writing, pushing, crying and nudging the doors of honesty open. So I’m here to say that no one really knows how to find readers. I just know that, for me, I have to keep knocking on doors, trying new things in my writing and going to the deeper places inside myself.

Now let’s get to the tangibles for writers who may be somewhere similar like I was in June 2022. Maybe you’re not quite that desperate, but you’re really frustrated. The answer is: it’s probably a combination of a few things. 

First, it could be your writing. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it might be. I’ve been writing my whole life and there’s a lot I’ve written that I can look back on and go, “Oh, honey, that was for your journal, not for the world.” I’ve also been editing other people’s work since 2006. I don’t even know how many thousands of hours that adds up to. And it’s taken me a long time for me to figure out which parts of my writing are just for me and what I should package up for readers.

Some writers need help with packaging their writing and staying inside some editorial bumper rails (without being suffocated or shamed—it’s a real art!). Some of y’all need a writing plan and to then give it a real shot to work instead of poking holes in it and starting from scratch every four months.

It’s also entirely possible that your writing needs a little improving. It might need a little work before people are inspired to pay for it. 

Inevitably, right now, the people who have some decent writing chops are thinking, “Oh, no! I’m a hack! I must hide!”

That’s not what I’m saying.

Instead, how about we try something different?

Your direct experience of writing should have a voice

Instead of leaning into the very good and very bad buckets of objective (aka ruthless) writing evaluation, let’s reflect on your experience of writing.

What is it like for you to work on a piece from idea to pressing the publish button? How does it feel to be a writer? Beyond the moments of inspiration and good feelings when folks comment, what is happening in the background? 

Does walking through the world as a storyteller feel good to you? When it’s time to lean into craft, push through, call out and eek out a better line, a better subheading, do you work with that discomfort in a decently positive way? (I’m not saying you have to love the grueling tasks because sometimes things just suck.) But, in general, does being a writer fit you and do you enjoy it enough to come back again and again? You be the judge on whether writing is the best fit for you. In the meantime…

I’m going to assume everyone reading this today has some decent writing chops. I think “decent” is a fantastic place to be with writing. I think you can be decent and still not be published in any major news or literary publications. I think you can be decent if you’re the gal whose storytelling with friends on Friday nights keeps them on their toes and asking questions.

When we’re “decent,” it means there’s substance to work with. It means there’s some glimmering gold sneaking through our writing, but we need practice pulling more of it out. So let’s look at the first of three really big changes I made that I think nurtured a new way of bringing my writing into the world (with parts II and III publishing on Tuesday and Wednesday).

I forgot about marketing and started “Storytelling Marketing” as a writer

If your mind is akin to a circus show of marketing strategies and social media clips, let it all go. Forget any of it existed. If you’re anything like me (and have an autistic runaway brain!), it’s highly possible that you’ve been picking up, analyzing and storing every single marketing tip and trick you’ve observed for years. And it’s also highly possible this knowledge library has resulted in knowing too much about marketing and that it’s choking out the inspired originality of your writing that needs to come to the surface. 

Please embark on a journey to forget everything you’ve heard about marketing yourself as a writer. Because what was planted in you from a young age, this spark to write and weave disparate threads together through the written word, needs to be given room to surface. 

Most marketing advice is not designed to help a writer’s creativity flourish. It’s really important to know this. Marketing isn’t art. Sometimes it’s artful, but that’s not the same as art. Marketing is not a channel for self actualization, greater depths of discovery and rarely is it effective at bolstering our sense of self trust. It is a tool, and it should stay in its lane. It should serve you, not topple you over.

Who you are in your heart of hearts as a writer is the magic readers are looking for. What did you have an endless obsession with as a little child? Write an essay about that thing—the people who spoke to you about it, whether they were encouraging or otherwise. I think the first step to marketing is remembering what you loved before you had to pay the bills or started learning about the different types of anxiety.

When I decided to forget everything about marketing, something showed up instead. I found a profound sense of permission to play. To do the thing I love to do more than anything else—to grab a captive audience in my hands and tell a story. Looking back now, I think this was a key to transforming the effectiveness of how I reached out about my writing. I wasn’t doing any social media masking or outlining a 17-point plan. I was being me. I was relaxing. I was storytelling. I was reading other people’s stories and thanking them. This is work I will do for my whole life, regardless of whether or not I have bills to pay. 

So I tried a thing I call “Storytelling Marketing” which is basically a simple, no pressure, just-be-you type of networking:

• If you read someone’s writing and it really resonates with you, tell them in a public way (comments section, a note on social media).

• If their writing made you think of something important to you, start by telling the writer what you loved about their writing and then share your story.

• If their writing was bonkers good and helpful, grab a great quote from it and share it with friends along with (you guessed it) a story that relates to them.

>> Action item: Write that essay about the thing you loved the most as a child. You don’t have to convince me or anyone else. If you loved it, it counts, so show us how you loved this thing. Publish this essay and tag me in a Note so I can see what you loved. Reading about other people’s playfulness and joy is a contagious vein of writing. And it’s a window into what makes you the writer whose writing we are willing to check out next.

Let’s meet in the comments

Did you have a chance to self reflect on how writing feels to you? Does it change how you perceive yourself as a writer?

Have you ever felt inner turmoil and life's challenges deeply influencing your writing? What did you do?

What would starting from scratch with marketing mean for your life, your rhythms and writing?

Can desperation be a catalyst for creativity? Share your experiences of how moments of desperation have affected your writing or creative endeavors.

You can find Part II here, which is all about moving away from metrics and toward satisfaction. This three-part series culminates in an Editorial Branding List: The places your words matter most when building a Substack newsletter.

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