Do you have a strong foundation for your writing career?
If you do, you probably know it. If you don’t, you may be asking: a what?
I got to thinking about this after I found this nest (pictured below). I think it’s a robin’s nest, blown out of my cottonwood tree one day when we had strong winds.
The nest is so intricate and creative. I love the addition of the blue baling twine! The robin must have traveled quite a distance from my place to find that. I’m guessing she got it near the potato sheds about a mile down the road, as that’s often where I see discarded baling twine.
And the soft material in the middle! I don’t know where she got that. But it looks so comfortable for little eggs and certainly for baby birds.
What a shame she put all this work into creating this beautiful nest, only to have it blow out of the tree.
That means that something was lacking in this structure: namely, a strong foundation that would have held it in place no matter the weather.
I don’t know how a bird might have been more successful at this. Maybe she needed to find a more secure location. I don’t see that she would have been able to “tie” the nest to the branch!
But I often notice something similar with writers—they have immensely creative, beautiful works, but their business is built on a shaky platform.
I was one of those writers. I was so focused on creating the best book I could create—which is good when you’re first starting out. But I neglected to build a strong foundation so that when I published that book, it would have a secure footing from which to take off.
To avoid the same mistake, make sure you have the following elements making up your secure foundation.
Foundation for Your Writing Career 1. A Powerful Website
About a year ago, I redid the Writing and Wellness website. I had a couple of reasons for doing so. One, I felt like the current site looked out of date and needed a makeover. Two, I wanted to make it clearer on the home page what the site stood for, so that I could attract people who would be most likely to benefit from the information.
I also redid my author website for the same reasons. Since then, I’ve had better luck attracting new subscribers without having to do anything else. That lets me know that the new sites are working for me.
Your website truly is your writing home. Imagine how it might look to a brand-new person. Click on the site and see what you see in the first five seconds—because that’s all the time you have to make an impression.
You want attractive graphics, with a simple design that loads fast and provides small chunks of information useful to your viewer. It’s worth it to read up on best practices for today’s websites and to put some time into yours so that it is more likely to attract new readers.
2. A Regular Writing Practice
As a writer, you need a regular writing practice, whatever that may look like to you. Maybe it means you write every day, or perhaps three times a week.
When we’re first starting out, this can be hard to establish, but it’s critical. Figure out when your energy is at its highest (for many people, that’s first thing in the morning), then take advantage of that time to do some new writing as often as you can. Repeatedly facing the blank page is the key to growing a strong writing career.
Even if you’re an experienced writer, it can be easy to get away from this regular practice. We can get caught up in all the other facets of book writing—editing, marketing, etc.—to the point that the writing practice is ignored.
If you’re not regularly writing new material, you’re hurting your future as a writer, no matter where you are right now. Keep a regular writing time as part of your writing foundation.
Foundation for Your Writing Career 3. A System of Self-Education
Over the past six months or so, I’ve been upping my education when it comes to the writing industry. I’ve been listening to more podcasts (find a starter list here), subscribing to more video creators who are helpful to writers, and reading more books. This has become a regular part of my day.
I’ll listen to a podcast while walking my dog, for instance, or listen to a video while getting going first thing in the morning.
The publishing world is ever-changing, which can make it difficult but also exciting. There is no time to rest on what we’ve learned, thinking that’s going to sustain us as time goes by. We have to be constantly learning about what’s working now, in terms of book marketing, social media, platform-building, and even writing itself.
Learning new things is exciting, I think. If you want to make sure your writing career continues far into the future, it’s critical to continue to educate yourself on a regular basis.
4. A System of Self-Care
Self-care is extremely important in a writer’s life. That includes taking care of your physical, mental, and emotional self—what Writing and Wellness is all about!
You need a system in place to help you do this because you will encounter times when you feel:
- Tired and lacking energy
- Overweight and unhealthy
- Discouraged and ready to throw in the towel
- Burned out and lacking ideas
It’s a lot easier to prevent these outcomes than to deal with them once they occur. To do so, you need the following systems in place:
- Physical health: A healthy diet that you eat most of the time, a daily exercise regimen that you enjoy, and a commitment to getting a good night’s sleep on most nights.
- Mental health: A schedule that allows you to work at certain times, then rest at others, with activities included that help inspire and motivate you.
- Emotional health: A go-to set of activities that you do when you’re feeling down and discouraged. These may include talking to writing friends, journaling, going away for a couple of days, and engaging in other self-soothing practices.
Most of us know that we need these sorts of systems in our lives, but we pay little attention to them until something happens that reminds us—like an illness, a poor book launch, or a period of burnout.
For a strong, lasting writing career, it’s best to commit to those activities that help you stay well so that when you do struggle, you know just what to do to help yourself recover.
Foundation for Your Writing Career 5. An Attraction System
Unless you’re already a celebrity, you need some way of attracting new readers to your platform. That typically involves some sort of content marketing. If you have money to spend, you can try advertising, but content marketing is often the best way to build an audience.
That means you’re regularly producing content that is somehow related to your writing work. You may have a blog, for instance, or a podcast, or a YouTube channel. Maybe you attract people with your writing on Medium, or your newsletter on Substack.
It doesn’t matter which type of content you put out. What matters is that you are committed to a regular schedule of doing so—that it’s part of your writing foundation. When people discover and enjoy your content, that opens the door to them signing up for your email list and becoming a fan of your work.
Conclusion
If you can put these five things in place, you will have a strong foundation on which to grow your writing career. If any of these are missing, you will likely flounder along the way. You may become so discouraged that you quit—and I don’t want that for you!
Take some time to review each of these areas to see how you’re doing. Remember the robin’s nest—no matter how creative your stories are, they won’t be able to mature and fly if you don’t take care of the foundation on which they stand.
Truly exceptional advice for writers to better realize and then to actualize building a strong foundation for their writing careers.
Thanks, R.J.!