I set up this blog because I have previous experience with WordPress blogs being pretty discoverable. The free ones. The paid ones are not and I am still striving for passive organic growth. I need platforms I can just water occasionally and let them grow on their own while I focus on everything else.
I close out every one of these with a link to my Patreon and I’m pretty sure that’s getting me nowhere. I’m a pretty realistic person and I understand that supporting a Patreon, even at the rate of $3/month is not something you enter into lightly. Reading a free blog is one thing. Subscribing to a free blog is one thing. Giving money to someone every month is a whole other ballgame entirely.
So I get it.
What I don’t get is what I’m supposed to be posting.
I have yet to find a groove with this free platform that will bring in the traffic my previous attempts brought in while also engaging people enough that they will want to go off campus to check out something else. And I have a lot of free content on my Patreon.
I don’t produce enough fiction to be able to spread it around like peanut butter. I would love to. I really would. I would love to have some kind of serial work running on every platform. Something here, something on Patreon. Something on Radish, Kindle Unlimited, Wattpad. While also finishing novels on the side.
What I want is to be able to produce the amount of text that my fingers are able to type. Which would be the equivalent of two full manuscripts each and every five-day work week.
HA!
I know that’s not realistic. Danielle Steel does it but she’s a machine and has been doing it longer than I have been alive. Stephen King is probably close.* But the rest of us have to also work day jobs and . . . sleep.
I actually don’t need that much sleep. And a lot of the time I need sleep because of my day job.
Ideally, I would love to have enough content and support to cut back on my day job. I can’t give it up entirely. I am an extrovert. I need people to stay healthy. But if I could work three days a week in a salon then write the rest of the time, that would be an enormous step in a different direction toward “full-time author.”
I just need to figure out what people want from me. What kinds of content am I supposed to be sharing in each place to get the people to follow me?
Until I figure that out, I guess continue watching me fumble along in the dark.
* Danielle Steel writes up to 20 hours a day on a manual typewriter. The woman is a machine. I don’t have the same statistics for Stephen King (I got the Danielle Steel stats from Jeopardy!) but I do know he’s a pantser like me which is both encouraging and DIScouraging at the same time.
If you enjoy my content, please visit my Patreon.
D. Gabrielle Jensen 