Welcome back, my fellow creatives!

After veering off into some sources of inspiration these past few weeks, I wanted to return to…well, returning. Earlier, I spoke about the struggles of balancing teaching and writing, of maintaining realistic expectations as far as a creative career goes for me (and my daughter), and embarking on the latest chapter of my twins’ growth since they’ve been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum.

It’s time, I think, to look at what passed for content here in the last year.

Or was it my crutch? That’s the question.

Think about what platform is–it’s VISIBILITY. So a book without a platform is just the opposite: inivisible. -Chuck Sambuchino, Create Your Writer Platform

When it comes to marketing, a creator needs to embrace something between harsh skepticism and clear-eyed reality: No one is better suited to market your project than you. -Eric Nuzum, Make Noise: A Creator’s Guide to Podcasting

Writers–especially indie writers–are constantly on the look-out for opportunities to network and market their stories. We attend conferences and markets, we host events at libraries and book stores. We build websites, social media accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts.

Podcasts. That was the route for me! I could create one under my pen name. I could create the content at home even with kids around. And I wouldn’t have to worry about how my face looked in public or on a camera. Granted, there are hundreds of podcasts about books and book reviews, so I took a different route: reviewing first chapters only. That way, the work level to create the content would not be super time-consuming.

Unfortunately, that was as far as my planning stage went for Story Cuppings (aka You’ve Got Five Pages to Tell Me It’s Good). Oh, it was neat getting recommendations from fellow authors and friends, recording episodes with my daughter about her favorite stories, and sharing the works of my fellow indie authors, too! But that haphazard approach did not do the podcast’s platform a lot of good, so by default, it didn’t expand my author platform a whole lot, either.

Success ultimately will depend on how valuable potential readers view whatever it is you are blogging about, tweeting, etc., so one of the biggest mistakes is not spending the time and resources to craft an appealing message and content in a very crowded and noisy marketplace. -John Willig, Literary Services, Inc.

Still, I kept going, finally settling on the plan to use new releases at the local library. Sure, whatever title I pick will no longer have the big hullabaloo of releasing online or in bookstores, but libraries are worth supporting, especially when you’re a picky reader who doesn’t finish every book you grab. That route also challenged my reading tastes with books I would not have typically picked up–I HAD to use something from that shelf. And since I’ve always wanted to read for audiobooks, podcasting would be a great way to build up some good demos of my narrator voice. A Win-Win, surely!

It wasn’t the most polished, professional production, but it was fun sharing raw reactions to first chapters of westerns, fantasies, mysteries, suspense, and the occasional science fiction or romance. I set a time limit for myself, and the podcast episodes only took a couple hours to record, document, and post. Surely much less time-consuming than those long, tedious analyses I used to write for my “Lessons Learned” posts, right?

So I kept making the podcast.

It was so easy, you see. And hey, I was still reading, still critiquing, still sharing.

But–and this is the most important part–I wasn’t writing.

Platform building can be considered “easier” than writing because it’s less complicated than, say, crafting a comprehensive book on the history of gun laws. So it may be tempting to dedicate a disproportionate amount of your time and energy to things like Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogging–but don’t forget that platform must be paired with good writing. –Chuck Sambuchino, Create Your Writer Platform

I can feel that now, in my fingertips. I lost that all-important stamina of holding oneself to the keyboard, to the text, to the tale, and typing until all the words in the mind are exposed to the eye at last. Yes, I was already tired of screens due to teaching, but that’s a professional fatigue. When one’s writing for passion, for need, all that bloody fatigue fades.

It’s no different for a professional runner who stops running or for a musician who stops playing. If you stop, you lose. The skill may remain to a degree, sure, but the stamina will not.

And that is something I am determined to get back. It’s mine, dammit, and I won’t let it go again.

Perhaps you find yourself in this kind of conundrum. Whether you have family or not, whether you are in academia or not, the simple balance of writing and marketing is not so bloody simple at all.

All we as indie authors can do is allow ourselves grace and rejigger priorities when able. Like the podcast–I enjoy it, sure, and it’s easy to make. But it never really gained much of a following over two years, and I don’t like how I used it as an excuse to not write. So as I find my footing, the priority to podcast is no longer urgent. Let’s try once a month, shall we? It’s a structure that won’t allow me to use podcasting as a “content crutch,” and the monthly installment still gives me the opportunity to try new stories and see how they strike me.

Have you ever had a creative experiment crumble on you? Let’s see what we can salvage from it as we journey onward together!

And now that I’ve mentioned my Lessons Learned series, it might be time for a new installment with a character quite popular in the United States right now…only I don’t intend to focus much on him. Let’s look at where he goes instead…

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!