I have been writing all my life. Ever since I could hold a pen, I have used that pen to record my misadventures and process my feelings. I had a few articles published over the years. I won a couple of prizes that led to physical print incarnations of my work, and I submitted helpful free contributions to activity magazines.
https://www.thebmc.co.uk/club-skills-recruiting-new-members
I didn’t consider “Becoming A Writer” as a career because I didn’t think I was good enough. I didn’t get properly published early on, and I couldn’t imagine ever making any significant money from writing. But I was still compelled to write. On an expedition in Mongolia I sat next to a well known travel author on one of our internal flights. She gave me a complete tutorial about how to get published by the traditional route; how to write a synopsis, send it out to 10 agents, selected from the trade yearbook. If they find your idea interesting or worthy they will pitch it to their favoured publishers. And then if you are chosen, you write the book and hand it over to vagaries of the publishing industry.
I started to blog a few years ago, mainly to share the life lessons I was learning from my journey with the horses, prioritising their holistic needs over my ego. I was writing it all down as part of the processing anyway, and I hoped I might be able to spare other similar minded horse owners some of my pain.
Blogging is both an innovative and disruptive medium. Writing a blog is a weird and different experience. You start off writing for yourself, from the heart, simply because you are compelled to write and the act of publishing a blog allows you to imagine that you have at least one reader. At the beginning you have literally no idea if anyone actually reads your articles or cares.
Then something strange happens and people you have never met, from all over the world, start reaching out, to say thanks if something has helped them, they leave comments and they ask you questions and suddenly you have a family, a readership, of like minded virtual friends. It becomes an interactive process, a conversation. One of my blog posts went around the world, with 42,000 views. I was contacted by a hoof boot company to write a short series for them. This was the first time that a signifiant audience had found me, on my own merits, and and it was the first time that I actually made any real money from writing.
https://scootboots.com/blogs/blog/keeping-the-ridden-horse-barefoot-the-first-step
The real lesson came in the middle of Corona. A British broadsheet is always asking for contributions; there is an email address provided for shared experiences and commentary. My writing friends and I have been submitting both ideas and full pieces for years. I often wonder which junior intern checks that email address? Our various and meritorious submissions have never been acknowledged, except perhaps to have our best ideas coincidentally written up by staff writers, a couple of weeks after submission. Then one of our junior hospital doctors wrote a lovely piece about her trying experiences on the ward in the middle of the pandemic. She sent it to a family friend, who just so happened to be on the permanent staff of said broadsheet, and it was published two days later.
I’m not bitter. It was a good piece of writing and it deserved to be out there. As do so many other brilliant pieces of writing that never see the light of day. This episode illustrated very clearly that publishing is a closed shop, that it all boils down to who you know. The cream will only rise to the top if there is someone from the inner circle ready to help it along. If your perfectly good work doesn’t find its way to the right person, then it may just get lost in the white noise.
There are some exceptions to the rule. There are books which have been heralded and vaunted and paraded around the media like the best thing ever and yet still sunk like a stone, and others that have surreptitiously taken the world by storm, despite the reactionary and antiquated system. The first print run for Harry Potter was 1500 copies, the minimum possible number. There was no marketing budget, no back up and no belief. The book sales were slow initially, and the book’s popularity spread gradually around the world, purely by word of mouth.
The same is now possible with the independent digital publishing market. There is a huge amount of work out there in the ether now, some good, some bad and some frankly ugly. The difference with independent digital publishing, like with blogging, is that the whole world gets to vote; that anyone and everyone can find your work, and recommend it and pass it on easily.
It might be harder to find you, but once found the work is there, a simple link ready to share, and pass on and engage with. Your virtual family will see your work, and if it is good enough, they will make sure it goes around the rest of the world too.
Your writing will get the chance it deserves.
Independent digital publishing is the ultimate test of merit.
