The Grasshopper # 23: Niches
The value of zeroing in
I’ve discussed specialization and choosing niches here several times. If you write non-fiction, you have a choice between being a generalist or a specialist, aka a subject matter expert or SME.
I’ve identified two niches of my own that do not have a lot of crossover. But I dealt with that by creating this newsletter to focus on writing about the writing lifestyle and creativity in general, while on Medium my focus is on current events.
Splitting the two has turned out to be a wise choice as evidenced by the article below, published on Medium last week which got very few reads compared to my political stuff. Just a reminder that your followers on one platform are likely there specifically for the kind of writing and interests you do regularly.
When I started on Medium I wrote about all kinds of stuff with varying degrees of success. Only when I zeroed in did I start to see my follower count rise rapidly and my read time rise in parallel. Read time determines how much you get paid with the Medium revenue model, so this is a big deal if that is your goal.
My subscribers to The Grasshopper have been steadily rising since I figured out that many of my Medium readers are writers or would like to be. I started adding an invitation to check out the newsletter if you are a writer and it has worked very well, leveraging my following there to increase readers here even though the focus is very different.
That simple thing has made a big difference. The lesson here is that when you write on these kinds of platforms where you have to earn attention to earn readers and money, you have to test out what works.
The following article originally appeared on Medium.com.
Writing as a Personal Conversation With the World
One on one with thousands of readers
It’s the oddest thing we do. We write, put something out there, and move on. And if we’re lucky it speaks to someone or many someones. Most of whom we will never know and who will never respond.
It is a way of connecting in a disconnected life. I’m not disconnected by any means, but I like the idea that I can put a conversation out there even when I have little idea how it goes over. Maybe it’s like that Speaker’s Corner in a London park where anyone can have their say to whomever decides to stop and listen.
It’s a lovely fall morning in Western New York and I’m taking a break from my usual political writing for the day. I just can’t muster any outrage right now, though I am going to write about the travesty that is Ron DeSantis. But not until tomorrow.
I write and publish everyday, not because it is a tactic to maximize revenue or get more views, but because I enjoy it. In the last year, after that surrealistic pandemic period, my writing found a rhythm it was lacking a lot of the time. I also watched a favorite writer lose her rhythm and felt her pain as life got to be a little too much. We’ve all been there.
In that last year I launched my substack newsletter, The Grasshopper, about writing and the creative life. Info follows. Though it essentially doubled my output, I’ve been enjoying every minute of it. I’m a believer in finding your niche(s) in life and writing and the newsletter lets me focus on a very different one than my writing here.
If I had one piece of advice for newer writers here on Medium it would be this: don’t copy what you think works for others. You’ll never progress as a person or a writer. And one more: don’t view this as a monetary escape route, because you’ll probably be very disappointed, especially if you’re in a hurry.
Getting anywhere in life takes a while. You may think there is a fast track but things built in a hurry often collapse just as fast.
Enough elder philosophizing. I am surprised by how many writers talk about fear, fear in life generally and when writing. One of my favorite books about creativity, Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic, opens with an entire section about creative fear, the one part of the book that genuinely puzzles me. Writing opens lots of veins but for me fear is not one of them. Exasperation, yes.
When I suck it is irritating. So I try not to suck and keep my standards up. That is actually a really important aspect of being creative for me, constructive self-evaluation. Am I getting sloppy? Am I leaving a sentence I know needs work, as is?
Fixing that stuff is another of the great pleasures in doing this. It only took about a million words of scribbling for me to learn this and that is not an exaggeration. I told you this stuff can take awhile…
In the three years I’ve been writing regularly on Medium, I’ve done an estimated 400,000 words, maybe more. That’s about four books worth. Stack that on top of my ten or eleven actual books and there’s a graduate education there, along with about twenty years of work experience.
I’m still a beginner. I learned that when I discovered Joan Didion after her recent death and watching her nephew’s film about her, The Center Will Not Hold (Netflix). After seeing the film I picked up her book on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, and was confounded by her mastery while writing about terrible personal loss.
It was uplifting and humbling, which seems a conundrum, but the topic is life enlightened by the presence of death. Whew.
Ok, time to get off my ass and out into the world. That’s where the stories are.
I’ve been describing my writing here as being about the writing lifestyle and the above piece is a good example. ‘Lifestyle’ may sound lightweight, but when you are a self-driven creative, getting your work lifestyle into order is much more important than you might think when getting started.
The day to day practice of writing builds a habit that I believe is essential to success and getting things done. But you need to be careful that the habits you install are habits that really work for you because uninstalling habits can be very difficult.
Personal productivity guru Tim Ferriss coined the term ‘lifestyle design’ in his huge bestseller The Four Hour Work Week. It's the idea that consciously fine tuning work routines and habits is critical to both enjoying your work in the long term and maximizing the benefits you get out of it.
This tuning process is not a do-once thing, it will be a constant. The tech platforms we use to publish, the interests of readers, and your own interests are constantly evolving and we must evolve with them. That evolution is the key to finding your own optimized writing lifestyle.
1170 words
Random quote:
“In contrast to an unhealthy positive body image, a healthy one focuses not on how good the body can look but on the good it can do.”
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “Under Your Skin”