Growing Your Readership (and Mine)

This week, Jane Friedman posted a video of her talk from the 2013 Midwest Writers Workshop on Audience Development. In the video, she shares her experience with starting a website: the quiet beginning, the learning curve, and the principles of cultivating readers “over the span of your career.”

Jane Friedman has over 180,000 (180 THOUSAND!!) followers on Twitter and tens of thousands of hits on her website daily. If you’re interested in readership and author platform, this video is worth the twenty minute investment of your time.

What I love most about her talk, besides her honest and humble perspective on how this all works, is her approach to any new (or ongoing) professional project, two simple words that I view as the underlying current in my work and writing:

Incremental improvement.

Writing as a craft is similar to audience development in that it grows or improves inch by inch. Page by page. On those days when I get caught up in (what seems to be) a lack of progress–on a story or on the novel–I need only look back on the last few months to see that I have been moving forward. In tiny increments.

As usual, it’s all about perspective.

And speaking of incremental improvement….

I’m also progressing to a new way for subscribers of this blog to receive email notifications when new posts go live:

After Google Reader fell to the wayside, I turned to WordPress’ Jetpack plugin for readers to sign up via email. In the last several months, though, Jetpack has been letting in suspicious email subscribers–with login names like “puzzledhelp” and server tags like “topsandal” and a few risqué logins that might fit in better if I wrote erotica. Mmm hmmm…shady, if you ask me. The logins, that is. If you write erotica, more power to you. But, I digress….

While I love seeing my numbers rise, I don’t like thinking some tech worm has wiggled its way into my site. So, from here on out any subscriptions to this blog will run through a MailChimp campaign. I’ll be able to manage subscribers with a little more ease and comfort, and you’ll be able to manage your subscription with a little more control as well.

If you’re already subscribed, you don’t have to resubscribe. But, I do ask two things of you:

1. First and foremost: if you receive more than one notification from me next week, please accept my apologies. I’m hoping, as I deactivate Jetpack and transfer everything over to Mail Chimp, everything will run smoothly and you’ll only see one email from me. But, technology isn’t always my friend.
2. Should you receive more than one email from this site, feel free to unsubscribe from the email that does NOT include the MailChimp electronic stamp. If you have any trouble with this, contact me.

Incremental improvements. Little by little. Your patience is greatly appreciated.

(If, by chance, you’re not yet subscribed but would like to, MailChimp makes it easy. Just click the link on the sidebar.)

Are you able to see the progress–little by little–on your own projects, writing or otherwise?

* Photo credit: FlyingPete on morguefile.com