I would like to ask for your help today. Can you share your reaction to the possible title of my next book. Here it is:
Share Like it Matters.
Please email me directly (dan@wegrowmedia.com) or comment below to give me your gut reaction, tell me if you love it, hate it, where it is confusing, or bad, or great, or whatever. If you need more context, here are some possible subtitles I am playing with or others have suggested:
- Share Like it Matters: Why Sharing Your Writing and Art is an Essential Part of the Creative Process
- Share Like it Matters: Use Human-Centered Marketing to Connect Your Writing and Art To Those Who Will Love It
- Share Like it Matters: How Writers and Creators Can Use the Human-Centered Marketing System to EnsureTheir Work is Seen
All of this is a big work in progress, so any feedback is useful. If you want to know more about the title and what it represents, keep reading…
Why “Share Like it Matters”?
The phrase, “Share Like it Matters” was originally a chapter title in an early draft for my new book. When my friend Jennie Nash saw it, she flagged it as a possible title for the entirety of the book. She’s an amazing book coach and basically a genius, so her suggestion quickly turned into action for me. I have a long list of possible titles, but this one kept resurfacing. It seemed to capture the narrative crux of the book.
The title reflects something I worry about: how will writers and artists ensure their work truly connects with someone in a meaningful way? Writers create because they are driven to, there is a message or story that they need to get out there. I love — LOVE — working with writers because they create for the best reasons: they believe in their work fully. This is the gift I receive in working with writers, every single person I work with is all-in with their creative work.
But…
I see too many writers and creators share their work as though it doesn’t matter. It pains me to even write that. Instead they:
- Share too late. They justify that they should wait until their book is ready to be published to begin thinking of sharing. By then, it is often too late to develop the communication and trust you need to really give your book the shot it deserves.
- Start at the wrong place. Instead of really defining their messaging, their identity, understanding their ideal reader, researching the marketplace, and creating a cohesive strategy, they instead blanket their book promotions on social media. They share the same message again and again, instead of looking for opportunities to truly connect with readers. What often happens is they find that few people engage, and they conclude, ‘Well, I guess I’m just not good at marketing. Oh well.” And they give up.
- Focus on the wrong goals. They measure how many followers they have, how many subscribers they get, and then when they don’t see much growth, they move to a different social network or stop sharing their newsletter. It’s a process where they constantly feel bad about themselves, and hop from tactic to tactic with no real overarching strategy.
- Share the bare minimum. They are so worried about overdoing it that they underdo it. They barely share, and when they do, they start by apologizing. So they may send a single email to those they know about their book and it will begin, “Hi everyone. This is the obligatory email I have to send to ask you to buy the book. Sorry for bothering you, but I was told I needed to do this.”
- Half bake it. They copy a copy of a copy of a strategy that another author used, and then just do 1/4 of what that person did.
- Make the wrong assumptions about what will work. I hear this all the time: “Everyone hates newsletters,” “Social media is dead,” “People are sick and tired of Zoom,” “Bookstore events don’t sell books,” “Aren’t podcasts over?” and so on. Each one makes an assumption and ends with the conclusion that it’s not worth it to bother trying.
- Hope someone else shares their writing and promotes their work for them. They abdicate this responsibility with the hopes that it simply lets them off the hook. Then they are shocked that others don’t share their work with the energy that the author hoped for.
The result? Their writing and art languishes. It doesn’t get shared, doesn’t get read. It doesn’t live in the mind of a reader. And the writer feels disappointed. In that process, their voice grows even quieter.
But what if you shared your writing with the same passion by which you created it? What if you shared with verve and vigor? Not because you want to be self-promotional, but because you know that what you create can truly change someone’s life for the better?
What if you shared like it mattered?
Writing is Complete When it is Shared
The book I’m writing presents this idea that what we create is complete when it connects with someone. So the idea behind the title is to not avoid sharing because one is scared of it, but to embrace it because it does this beautiful thing of connecting people to ideas and stories.
Too often, writers dismiss the sharing part. Possibly because they don’t feel they know how to do it well. Possibly because they don’t want to look like they are trying to hard. No one wants to be “that person” who is always self-promoting and annoying others. Remember Ned Ryerson from the movie Groundhog Day who is constantly trying to sell everyone insurance. This is what writers fear becoming if they share their work:
I grew up as the art kid. I started going to art lessons when I was 5, in the basement of Ms. Flannigan’s house. There on the cement block walls were murals she had painted with her students. It was an average basement of a house built around 1970, with one long table for her students, and an area for art supplies. There I painted each week.
As I grew older, I expanded into other art forms: illustration, photography, poetry, pop up books, sculpture, and yes, writing writing writing.
My favorite class in high school was Creative Writing with Ms. Adams, where I constantly overdid it with my projects. When we were assigned to create a small “book” of writing, most students just stapled together sheets of paper. But I went to a friend’s house who had tools, and I created a spine out of wood, pounded out a sheet metal cover, with the book opening via hinges I bought at the hardware store.
Yes, I was a dramatic teenager. But I loved creating.
Throughout the years I have created countless artistic and writing projects. Along the way, I was surrounded by creators: dancers, photographers, actors, writers, visual artists, and the like. If there was an “artsy weirdo” who came across my path, I was going to befriend them. Of course, for the past 12 years, I have worked with writers full-time, helping thousands of them share their work.
What I have found in my experiences is that magic happens when someone shares their creative work and it truly connects with someone. It is something beyond what the writer or artist could have ever created on their own. It is a co-creation of sorts. The writer intended one thing, and the reader brought their entire life experience to it. The result… magic.
That is why I believe in sharing.
As someone who grew up as an artist, who feels immersed every day in the arts, I genuinely believe that marketing and sharing are a creative process.
It could be that Share Like it Matters isn’t the right title for this book. But that is the story behind it. Your feedback will help me determine what happens next. Please reply back and share your thoughts on the title!
Thanks.
-Dan
P.S.: Last week I shared an updated version of my Creative Success Pyramid, which is the system I use to help writers get clarity in their work, develop an audience, and launch their work in a meaningful way. You can download the PDF here, and watch the video replay of last week’s workshop here.