Inspiration-in-Waiting

When you’re a writer, particularly a writer who offers workshops and works with clients one-on-one as a coach, you have a mailing list. The addresses on this list were accumulated through visits to your website and classes you taught at writers’ conferences – if you remembered to put out a signup sheet. There are other ways harvest addresses – some perfectly legal, some maybe not so much – but I for one have limited myself to the above options. I have taken a least-effort approach to marketing, which is my favorite approach to just about everything.

That doesn’t mean I am not above judging my efforts and their results. I met an author a few years ago at a conference who had an email list of 10,000. How is that possible? I asked her. She shrugged. She’d offered classes, taught here and there. My list, I decided, was useless. It’s was a child’s list. Someday, maybe, it would grow up and be a real list, but in the meantime, it was good for little more than allowing me to answer, “Yes,” honestly when someone asked me if I had one.

So it went for several years. Then, recently, I noticed how many addresses I’d accrued. It was a number well, well south of 10,000, but by whatever numerically emotional logic under which I apparently operate, I decided what I had was a useful, adult, respectable total. No sooner did I think this, than I had an idea: I would send out an email to these good people offering “one-on-one fearless writing” sessions at a discount for the month of January. I would also offer a six-week memoir class. Let’s see what happens, I thought.

What happened is that January has been one of the busiest months of my life. I attribute this not to the number of people to which I made this offer, but to the wording and the nature of the offer itself. However, there is a direct correlation between my evaluation of the number and the arrival of my idea. I’m all for understanding the market, and learning how to use social media, and connecting to your readers, but all of that is useless if I believe my efforts will be for naught. Inspiration does not arrive for the ungrateful. It waits until you are ready, until you accept that what you already have is enough deserving of more.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

William KenowerWriting, William Kenower, Marketing, InspiraitonComment