I have a extremely difficult time finding friends to earnestly read my material. The amount of times I’ve sent a PDF and heard… nothing. I guess it is at least partly because of your second suggestion—I write about topics that interest me but probably aren’t that important to anyone that isn’t me. I don’t know anyone who has any interest in the use of Pantomime in Cinema.
That means finding people to read and critique my writing is already an uphill battle, because unless I’m a “good writer” already how can I possibly convince them that this topic is interesting or important?
That’s a difficult question. I always tell readers that the number one thing I’m interested in is where they got bored and stopped reading. I ask them to be brutally honest and not feel like they need to keep reading to flatter my ego or because they are afraid of being harsh on me.
If they aren’t interested in the topic in the first place it’s harder. You need to be able to at least find an audience that is interested in sitting down to read it. Can you like join a hobbyist club for this stuff, or find a subreddit for it?
Here’s a kind of galaxy-brained idea that might just work for finding your crowd:
Go onto reddit and find the subreddit community closest to the thing you’re interested in/writing about
Go to https://subredditstats.com and enter the name of that subreddit to see which communities it has the most overlap with.
Go to meetup.com and see if you can find a local group dedicated to one of those related topics (or better yet, the topic itself)
Go to the meetup, pitch your thing, and see if people are into it. Maybe just TALK about what you’ve written first and if people seem interested offer to send them what you’ve written.
If you decide to actually give the above a shot, tell me how it goes. I’d be very interested to hear whether my idea works.
Who do you recommend asking to be a reader?
I have a extremely difficult time finding friends to earnestly read my material. The amount of times I’ve sent a PDF and heard… nothing. I guess it is at least partly because of your second suggestion—I write about topics that interest me but probably aren’t that important to anyone that isn’t me. I don’t know anyone who has any interest in the use of Pantomime in Cinema.
That means finding people to read and critique my writing is already an uphill battle, because unless I’m a “good writer” already how can I possibly convince them that this topic is interesting or important?
That’s a difficult question. I always tell readers that the number one thing I’m interested in is where they got bored and stopped reading. I ask them to be brutally honest and not feel like they need to keep reading to flatter my ego or because they are afraid of being harsh on me.
If they aren’t interested in the topic in the first place it’s harder. You need to be able to at least find an audience that is interested in sitting down to read it. Can you like join a hobbyist club for this stuff, or find a subreddit for it?
Here’s a kind of galaxy-brained idea that might just work for finding your crowd:
Go onto reddit and find the subreddit community closest to the thing you’re interested in/writing about
Go to https://subredditstats.com and enter the name of that subreddit to see which communities it has the most overlap with.
Go to meetup.com and see if you can find a local group dedicated to one of those related topics (or better yet, the topic itself)
Go to the meetup, pitch your thing, and see if people are into it. Maybe just TALK about what you’ve written first and if people seem interested offer to send them what you’ve written.
If you decide to actually give the above a shot, tell me how it goes. I’d be very interested to hear whether my idea works.