How to pressure yourself

Back in January, I wrote a book. It took me about three weeks of furious writing to get the first draft down, and then I decided to speak with some agents about getting it published.

The agents all told me the same thing: in order to get represented and get paid something real for the book in advance, I needed many more fans online. Here, on LinkedIn, I needed to add about 10,000 followers to start the conversation (I'm at 4,400 today). I also needed to build up a presence somewhere else, like Insta or TikTok, that I'm not on today. And I needed an email list.

It would cost me about $500 - $1,000 to cheat my way up there if I wanted to, which kinda makes it... silly? To be clear, I'm not mad at those agents - they are just responding to the publishers, who in turn are risk-adverse. Every metric can be gamed really easily.

One of the things that's freeing about what I post here everyday is that I don't much care how the posts do. As long as at least one person likes it (or texts me or DMs me that they liked it), I don't really feel like I'm wasting my time. Not everything needs to scale. But I don't know... maybe I should listen to those agents and expand? What do you all think? I have been playing with starting a website for these doodles at Hopara, just to have an archive.

Originally published around March 29, 2021 on LinkedIn.