5Ws and 1H: Where

Halfway through our 5Ws and 1H series, and I'm happy about that. Today we tackle 'Where.'

First, a confession. This won't have pictures. At some point I may take part in the "Where I Write" meme and take pictures of the places I create, but not today. I've spent the last week doing stuff around the house to get ready for baby (Her room is finally painted.). So I never had a chance to take pictures of the places I write. Plus, the house is a wreck with all the stuff we've got going on. Gina would kill me if I took pictures of the place and posted them for the world to see.

So instead of going literal with 'Where,' we'll take a quick look at "Where do I see my writing in 5 years?"

I'm betting all my chips on the long tail. It's the theory that you are better off selling a lot of things to a small number of people than you are selling a lot of one thing to a large number of people. Put another way, you're better off building a small fan base who will buy everything you put out than you are trying to make your one offering a blockbuster that everyone will buy.

That theory makes a lot of sense to me, so that's what I'm going to try and do. I'm going to spend the next five years working to build a fan base. Work to get my name out. Continue writing and continue publishing. And hopefully by 2017 I can look back and see that my efforts worked. I'm not a blockbuster writing author with a book in every household, but I've got a nice number of fans who like what I do. They support me by visiting the blog, sending me messages on Twitter (or whatever social media services are around then), and buying my books.

Notice that there aren't any specific sales numbers mentioned? One thing I've learned in the 14 months I've been doing this is that you can't control that. You lead a horse to your book, but you can't make them buy. Or something like that.