A quest for readers, Part II
I shifted away from metrics and toward a “felt sense of satisfaction”
I don’t like setting goals and I don’t like numbers.
There, I said it.
Phew, that feels good to share.
In yesterday’s post (Part I of this series), I wrote about how I want so badly to be perceived as a mellow, slow-life-living goddess who never feels desperate about her writing and publishing pursuits. And today I’m confessing another terribly embarrassing truth, especially as someone who has been in startup business environments since 2012 so I really ought to know how to hang in there by now.
Goals and metrics and numbers have served one purpose in my life and that is to shame the hell out of me. I avoid them like the plague, as much as humanly possible. Numbers turn into brain confetti the minute I try to make them play nice. When I have set a goal in the past, the only thing my brain knows how to do is rub my metaphorical nose in all the ways the goal was missed. I just never see the point of signing up for a really terrible metrics party.
I also think goal setting around metrics simply feels bad, and I don’t like it.
So in whatever way a (neuro)typical marketing guru has wanted me to “keep my eye on the numbers,” I now categorically refuse. Because it’s always spun way out of control. It’s never served me to watch a number and then try to somehow get my (autistic) human brain and body to influence that number.
BUT… even while all these things create enormously unhelpful reactions inside myself, I do agree that my work needs to be measured, tracked and checked. So maybe I don’t set goals in the traditional way of fancy business folks, but this year I decided to do it my way—the way that doesn’t push me to the brink and have me fantasizing about burning down all my hard work.
I touch in with the feeling of being supported and I work from there with what I rationally know metrics are telling me. (Remember: I was a marketing gal for several years. I know what they’re tracking. I just haven’t known, historically, how to work with them productively.)
If I sense exhaustion, depletion or inner angst, I don’t push on and say, “Sounds like a great time to be creative and strategic!”
I give myself space, time and permission to check in with the metrics in a way so I can also remain neutral (not triggered) and productively engaged.
Here are a few things I do to stay connected to my “felt sense of satisfaction” around writing and growing my readership:
When I feel anxious about number-y and dollar-y things, I call a timeout, go to my Subscriber list and read through the names of people out loud. And I remind myself of what it feels like to have these wonderful people sign up to read my writing and give our community some of their hard-earned attention and care.
I do not push or hold myself captive to a metric or a goal by looking at it every day. I know what it is, and it stays in its tidy little box. And when I’m feeling especially resourced (calm muscles, measured breathing), I do a quick compare-and-contrast to my month-over-month progress. As long as things are trending generally upward, I don’t do anything drastic. (Confession: This month I was seeing three to five unsubscribes for every one person who signed up. It did not feel great. I did panic a bit. But then I did No. 1 above and felt a closeness to and warmth for The Editing Spectrum readers as if we were friends in real life, and it really did help recenter me.)
I always know where my ripcord is, and I know who to talk to before I use it. In my interview with KC Davis, she put shape to a concept called “pulling the ripcord,” which is a tool to give yourself permission to end a project without “crashing with the plane,” as she says. If you have a background with trauma or are neurodiverse, knowing that you have full permission to walk away from writing, marketing or metrics may be the ripcord you need in order to keep creating from a place of sustainable neutrality.
I put focused effort on identifying and describing the sensations I wanted to feel on a good day, were I to have one. I’m going for 80/20 on this here. If 80% of my days generally have a feeling of friendly or loving connection (a warmth in my chest); a modest sense of organization (eyes and muscles relax in my most-used spaces); and my sense of taste and smell are zinged in even a small way, then I’m in the zone of felt-sense satisfaction.
If the business, marketing and outreach stuff you’re doing for your writing is making you want to run away from your writing life entirely, stop doing those things right now. They are not feeding you. They aren’t the things you “just have to do” in service to some perceived grind and hustle culture. If they are harming you, they are not helping your writing in any way. It’s also important to know that metrics never tell the whole story of who you are as a writer. Remember, they’re probably just brain confetti in the end.
If metrics make you frustrated, take their power away by ignoring them for a few months and come back, hopefully refreshed, and consider what a helpful relationship looks like. This is what I mean by coming back to a “felt sense of satisfaction”—when my days generally feel better, I begin to find a small dose of energy coming back to me. I am sustained in my writing efforts, rather than just depleted in a maddening, cyclical sort of way.
Basically, I write where the heat is without it incinerating me. I pick things up and put them down multiple times a day. Why? Because I’m still learning what is too hot to handle; what will push me beyond the brink; and what is a little challenging but that I feel equipped to handle and work through.
What about you?
Do you know what a good day feels like, and do you use it as a re-centering tool?
Are there any metrics that Substack tracks that make no sense at all to you?
You can read Part III of this series here, where I talk about making a “hell yes” for readers to sign up for. This quest for readers series culminates with an Editorial Branding List: The places your words matter most when building a Substack newsletter.
I struggle with my posts-in-progress. My most important metric is whether i feel good about what I'm writing. That's become the main if not the only source of my writing-related stress.
Trying to get one post ahead, but it's a struggle.
Thank you for saying all of these things and saying them so well! Years ago, I read an interview with Roxane Gay in Creative Nonfiction magazine. It was right after she became very well-known as a writer. She described how much work she does speaking, teaching, and writing, and said something in it about how (paraphrasing), no, writing didn’t give her much joy anymore. Part of it was how much and how hard she was working.
This was when I was still on Facebook and involved in Binders Full of Women Writers, which I have to say was tremendously supportive at the time (it might still be but I deleted my FB account in 2017). But I also saw increasing amounts of hustle for tiny amounts of pay, and often none at all.
When I read that from Gay it was really sobering because I’d been writing just long enough to know how little it paid. And I thought: it doesn’t pay enough, and probably will never pay enough, to make it worth losing the joy of it. That completely changed whatever writing goals I thought I had. It’s why I kept copy editing as my other job: nothing I could make from writing would ever be worth having to hustle so much that the joy was gone.