Writers Hate “No Milk Today!”
Their skin is just not that thick
Their skin is just not that thick
For a minute, let’s say you’re a milkman.
You get up every morning way before dawn.
You spend your morning delivering the very best milk and dairy products right to the front door of each of your customers.
Deliver the goods
Rain or shine, you deliver the goods, even though there are more enjoyable things to do some days.
You are there.
You pick up the empty bottles and leave some full ones on the front porch.
Any given household uses a certain amount of milk each day and week, barring some circumstance like a birth or death, so your route amount is pretty constant.
Then one day…
Then one day you get a note “no milk today,” which means there has been one of those occurrences and you haven't been keeping up with your customer base as you should. Or worse, maybe they are trying a different dairy.
A “no milk today” can shake up your route a bit.
Several of them, and you start to wonder what you are doing wrong.
It works the same with creators. Book sales are slumping from normal. Readers are unsubscribing from the newsletter. Your articles don't get reads or claps like they used to. Your Twitter account is losing instead of gaining followers. Record sales wane with this new album.
Any of these things can hurt the artists' feelings, some more badly than others. Some of these in a significant proportion can make a dent monetarily.
Circle of life
The evolving truth here is that there is an interconnectedness of the public to the artist in ways unknown and unsuspected to the average person. A member of the audience may even think an artist is whining.
The fact is, it’s so easy to support a creator you enjoy. Buy his song download. Subscribe to her website mailing list. Buy that kindlebook or read that article to the end. Clap for it. Follow. Support those who make you feel good.
They may tell you they just don't care, and that they are in it for the sake of the art. When they say something like that you know they must be a fiction writer because they surely made that stuff up.
Thank you for your time.
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