"Comics reading" by JR Paris. Used under Creative Commons License.
There’s a term in baseball, “manufacturing runs,” that refers to using methods other than powering the ball out of the park to score — taking walks, stealing bases, getting singles, bunting, sacrifice flies. It’s especially useful if a team, like my poor beleaguered Oakland A’s, has a relatively weak offense but good pitching. Recently, I started thinking about this strategy in regards to writing. Say, like me, you’re not a well-known writer with a published novel and a huge readership, but over the years, you’ve come to have some credibility in your field and have steadily published work here and there — enough to be able to say, “I’m a writer,” when people ask you what you do. Say you have some pieces that you know are good, but you haven’t been able to find the right market for them, and you still want people to read them. What do you do?
Well, you manufacture readers. You pick them up one at a time by writing well-thought-out comments on blogs with larger readers than yours, by writing good blog posts, by using social media, by publishing short stories and articles, and, as in the case of the piece you can’t find a market for, trying something new. That’s why I just published my essay “The Eternal Loss of Beauty” at BlogCritics.com. We’ll see how this experience goes, and if I think it’s beneficial, I’ll be publishing more there!
