Why You Should Publish Everything You Produce
There is a fear that all writers have.
We all have the fear of hitting the publish button. Sometimes we experience it more. Sometimes less. But it’s always there.
It’s a fear of failure.
A fear of being completely ignored.
A fear of being told that our work sucks.
As a result of that fear, we sometimes decide that our work is not worth publishing. Instead of hitting that publish button, we keep our work hidden away in our closet.
That’s never worth it.
When we keep our gift from the world, we will never know whether or not people are going to appreciate it.
We will always keep asking ourselves whether or not this piece might not have had a chance of succeeding, after all.
It is a way of making ourselves anxious.
The habit of publishing
One of the most important habits that every writer needs to learn, is the habit of hitting that publish button.
Revising your work and making it better is good, but it simply can’t go on forever. Eventually, you will have to hit that publish button.
You have to see whether or not there is an audience for your work.
You need the feedback.
Being the lonely genius, tinkering away in your little room, is never going to make you a successful writer.
Your writing can only ever become meaningful, through the interaction between you and your audience.
That’s why you need to cultivate the habit of publishing.
The more you publish, the better. All the best artists throughout history, were also the ones who have published the most in terms of quantity.
A large chunk of their work was mediocre, too.
But they had the guts of publishing that work.
They had the guts to find out whether or not their work was any good. They were willing to expose themselves to the world as much as they possibly could.
Never hold back your art
What you publish today, will lay the foundation for what you are going to publish tomorrow.
Every single piece of work that you produce, will push your development as a writer further ahead. But in order to reap the benefits of that process, you will need to expose your current work to the world.
Maybe nobody cares about what you produce.
That, in itself, is a valuable form of feedback.
It could mean that as you are right now, you are simply not good enough. In that case, you need to work hard every single day, to get better at your craft.
It could also mean that you haven’t discovered a topic yet, which people care about.
Both of them are valuable insights.
They are painful pills to swallow. And yet, you can’t ever move forward as a writer, if you don’t know where you are currently standing.
Just imagine yourself working for years on a book, only to find out that nobody is interested in it whatsoever.
That is what is going to happen when you don’t publish your work.
Beat the fear
By publishing every single piece of work that you are producing, regardless of how many doubts you have about it, you are teaching yourself the habit of beating your fear of failure.
When you produce something, you immediately publish it.
That’s the habit you are going to cultivate.
You don’t sit in front of your article and read it a thousand times, only to decide that it’s not worth publishing. You don’t revise your article a thousand times, only to then press the delete button.
Firstly, that’s a pure waste of time.
Secondly, that’s nothing but stagnation.
You can’t even learn something from this piece that you have just deleted. Even worse, you won’t be able to develop an audience in this way.
You are dooming yourself, to write for yourself alone.
Forever.
Conclusion:
An important thing that most of us keep forgetting, is that the technical aspects of writing, aren’t nearly as important in attracting an audience, as we think they are.
Your article is probably not perfect.
None of my articles are even close to being perfect.
I wrote this article in about an hour. My whole editing process was to read it aloud once.
I did this for the sole purpose of having a minimum amount of quality control in place.
Then I hit the publish button.
Once I publish an article, my next step is to observe how the article is doing. Either it gets a lot of responses, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then one of two things is happening.
Either, I haven’t gotten my message across clearly.
Or, my message simply doesn’t resonate with its intended audience.
My decision on what to do next depends on my gut feeling. If it tells me that the article’s message simply wasn’t interesting enough, then I move on.
If my gut feeling tells me that I didn’t get my message across, then I’ll write a second article about the same topic at a later time.
Perhaps you have guessed it by now.
My failure rate for articles is incredibly high.
At the moment, only about ten percent of my articles get more than a thousand views. But as my experience to publish every single day is increasing, so is my percentage of successful articles.
Experience is the best teacher.
Keep publishing your work. See with your own eyes what works, and what doesn’t. Learn what people respond to.
Don’t let your fear of failure beat you.
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