John Gruber linked to a Q&A with Simon Willison about writing a blog from Cynthia Dunlop's "Write That Blog." How's all that for a little blog linking soup?

Links aside, I found the article and Gruber's commentary encouraging and timely. From Willison:

"My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else."

You have to ship. If you don't put it out in the world, then you won't get better at your craft. You won't learn. You won't get "Fireballed".

When I don't publish for a while I feel a pull build. I get antsy. Sometimes I have a big piece, I just keep polishing without publishing and that starts to aggravate me. "Get something out there!" my brain yells at me.

On a recent train ride, I decided to look at every draft in my essays folder. I wanted to remember why the idea was there in the first place: to re-familiarize myself with past Max's interests and infatuations. I also pruned ideas I didn't think had juice worth squeezing out anymore.

This experience was invigorating. I dug up two old, near-finished essays and have spruced them up. They'll be out very soon. But first, I wanted to clear the linked deck and this was a part of that. Here's Willison on starting a blog with Gruber's commentary:

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers. If the only person who reads your blog is a hiring manager that you send a link to, and that gets you an interview, your blog has already paid itself off many times over.

That’s the hard part about getting started, or at least it was for me. When you already have an audience it’s easier to take it seriously, to concentrate, to focus, to strive for perfection even though you will fall short. If you’re playing music in an empty room it’s harder to do that, to play the same way you would with an audience of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in front of you.

But just imagine they’re there. They will be if you keep it up. That’s one of my bits of advice to new bloggers: I firmly believe all blogs eventually get the audience they deserve, if they keep going. Write for the audience you want, not the audience you have.

This has been on my mind quite a bit lately and a topic of conversation amongst my family and friends about my writing. The timing of this could not be more spot on and is the impetus behind this very article.

I have been writing online since 2013.1 It all started from a piece of advice from Greg Miller to get out there and do The Thing™ to help get a job in the video game industry. That was seeded in the home goods stock room at Kmart while I listened on my iPod. It shaped my college degree and many early career ambitions.

The biggest problem I have had in all my years of creating online—whether that be writing, podcasting, or videos—is understanding my audience and a perceivable lack of feedback.

The silence is deafening.

That's a hard reality to surmount for me. I mean, my number one love language is "Words of Affirmation," for Pete's sake. I enjoy the conversation, the critique, the pat on the back, and more. It's probably why I was hooked on the likes of Twitter. It was a direct line to heroes and friends alike. I try not to think of all the blog posts I could have written if I wasn't tweeting so much in my teens and 20s.

But I write and publish anyway. Not in spite—that'd be a rotten foundation to build anything worthwhile atop. I write because if I don't that aforementioned antsy feeling would cause me to crack. If I didn't write, I'd probably podcast more or make more videos or talk my four-year-old daughter's ear off about the loss of physical video games.

When I stop and think about the feedback and audience though, when I quiet the dissenting voice in my head, I realize and know it's not actual silence out there. The signal back may not be frequent, but it is strong. You get the email from a reader. I have opportunities to speak to folks I admire on the show. I get the occasional review code. I get "Fireballed" again.2

Friends and family ask me and offer ideas of how to get my work in front of more people because they think it is good and worth exposure. I promise it's not because they are my pals and kin. And that's the kind of feedback I should be tuned into.

"...what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers."

But just imagine they’re there. They will be if you keep it up. That’s one of my bits of advice to new bloggers: I firmly believe all blogs eventually get the audience they deserve, if they keep going. Write for the audience you want, not the audience you have.

If I had any advice for new bloggers (or creatives in general), I'd echo Willison and Gruber's first, but if you'd like third piece, I'd say don't let gear or knowhow be the deterrent. You can write on a phone. You can record with that same phone. It is easier than ever to get started. The most important step is starting. The second is to keep going.

Let's keep going.

There was one other bit Willison said that I found personally timely. I have been struggling back and forth with it for the past month or so.

"Set up an email list as soon as you realize that your blog is going to be an ongoing thing. Way more people want to subscribe via email than via RSS readers. I didn’t realize this until 20 years into my blogging journey and I’ve been kicking myself for not getting email subscribers sooner than that! I use Substack and literally copy and paste my blog into it, which keeps my cost of sending email at zero."

A friend out of the blue asked me if I had considered Substack after I published my essay Moments. Then another friend brought up doing a Kickstarter. And then I heard a discussion about it on a podcast. And now this.

I am not a fan of Substack. But maybe the selfish artist in me is railing against business sense when I'm not really in a position to. When you don't have an audience of scale, how do you get in front of one? Platforms and algorithms that put your work in front of others might be the way to do it.

If I were to go the "replicate the blog in a newsletter" route, I'd prefer to use Buttondown. But that kind of work would require paying for a tier beyond 100 subscribers and probably wiping Memory Card from their servers. I'm not in a position to really pay that kind of money without a form of permission from a paying slice of the audience. There's this fine line between permission and validation I've been wrestling with the last few months. If I had 10 people paying me $10 a year, I'd use Buttondown. I don't know if financially I can make the move without the cash first, just given the current season.

So there's a little mental inside baseball. I'll flag Willison's comment as another blip on the mental radar. Takes me a long time to chew through this stuff.

Footnotes

  1. Although, I did recently backdate a post to 2008 for my Mario Kart Wii review. ↩

  2. A very encouraging piece of advice I found from Craig Mod is to keep a file of encouraging words from folks. Mine is called youdontsuck.md and is probably the most powerful 5KB on my computer. ↩