Blogging, me, and you

What the hell am I doing here?

What in the world would possess an intelligent person to spend about an hour a day on blogging?

The answer is simple: me, and you.

Let’s start with you

I have a very clear idea of who you, my audience are. You are an author, or someone who hopes to be an author, or someone who works with authors. Or you are a person who wants to be thoughtful about the uses of written language to communicate. Or you are just someone for whom stimulating ideas about writing, communication, logic, and truth are entertaining, useful, or rewarding.

I also know that you are expecting something new from me every weekday. Of course, this is generally not true. You have your own priorities and if reading my blog is even on your list, it’s far below other important things. But perhaps from time to time you think, “I wonder what Josh is writing about,” or more likely, you notice that my daily topic is something useful to you.

So, given my (likely illusory) belief that you’re waiting for content, I must always be thinking of you. That means that whatever I am doing — working with author clients, watching events in the publishing space, having an insight based on some pattern in my work and what I observe — I am always thinking, “What does my audience need to know about this? If they were sitting alongside me right now, what would stand out for them?”

That audience-orientation is more essential than the blog post I create. You can’t blog every weekday without that attitude. But if you have that attitude — and a little writing ability — you’re in a position to throw the audience something useful five times a week.

What about me?

The first 60 years or so of my life, I was extremely egocentric. Having been born with outstanding writing and math talent and encouraged to develop it, I received constant reinforcement that I was smarter than everyone else. People like that are extremely productive, but often a pain in the ass to be around.

A few things changed when I left the working world, most notably that I had to win and satisfy clients, which is a humbling experience. I learned to listen better and to package my insights in the best possible way to help clients. And, frankly, all the previous emphasis on me, me, me had gotten pretty tiresome (for me, that is — it had always been tiresome for those around me).

Even so, a lifelong egotist doesn’t just stop being self-centric overnight. So there is still an awful lot about me in this blog, because you can’t write a thousand words a day for nine-and-a-half years without sharing a lot about yourself.

While there are few posts that are just about about me — like the posts about my recovery from prostate cancer — the “me” in these posts is different from what it was in those first 60 years. I share things about me and my experience that I think may resonate with you. Even the cancer posts were intended to be helpful and instructive for men in my age group, and it seems that they were.

So the “me” in these posts comes down to “This is my experience, is it helpful or interesting to you?”

Blogging content

The intersection of those two parts of my blogging experience — what I have experienced, and what you might benefit from knowing — is an endlessly fruitful place from which to blog.

It means that every insight and experience I have — about changes in the publishing industry, about authors’ struggles, about freelancing, about productive ways to use technology, about just about anything — is potentially worth writing about.

Whether it’s a freelance job I really wanted and failed to get, a experience editing AI-generated text, an attitude that seems obvious to me but is mystifying to clients, or a pattern I notice in books and online content, if it’s potentially helpful to you, I’m going to write about it. In thousands of at-bats like this, I’m going have some strikeouts and some dribblers through the infield, but I’m also going to have some home-run insights that resonate with a lot of people. And that’s worth doing.

So how does this post help you?

If you are a blogger, a podcaster, a video producer, a TikTokker, a YouTuber, a pundit, or an author, perhaps you can learn from this.

Are you always thinking about your audience? If you produce content on a regular basis, you ought to be.

Is what you share about your own experience mostly instructive to others? If it is, great. If it’s just about you, frankly, almost nobody gives a crap, so please reconsider.

Are your channels and your content dedicated to the constant search for insights and the best ways to share them? If so, thank you. You’re making the world a little better.

If you learned anything at all from this, I’ve succeeded. If not, well, tune in next time when I’ll try to do better, as I do every weekday.