You know that feeling whether you’ve been mulling something over idly, not actively focusing on it, but then something lands in your lap to make you sit up and yell: “THIS!!”?

Maybe, if you’re a writer, it’s something you’re worried about too: growing “your market”.

I am old enough to remember when you didn’t have to have an online audience built-in to attract the attention of an agent or a publisher. The field is changing, very fast, and I am slow and not social-media savvy and I already feel lost and far behind.

Part of my reason for starting a blog was to “grow my market” but a bigger part was to write about my feelings about writing, my woes and successes. Trouble is, who is listening? Who am I writing to? A lot of blog advice out there is SEO-related, and that’s not what I want: I know I am a niche artist, and I want to organically develop an audience who are here because they have found something that speaks to them. So now what?

Earlier this week a friend of a friend of mine on FB posted some advice and I ended up browsing through her site, coming across this pearl of wisdom and sitting up to yell “THIS!!”. (The article starts a bit click-baity, I know, but stick with it, it’s good advice.)

What am I trying to achieve with this? What do I want to be different in the world as a result of me doing this?

Marsha asks a simple question but I don’t know how to answer it with my blog. I do with my fiction: I want to see what I want to read available in bookstores. I want some 21st century Babby!Biku to walk into a library and find a book that leaves her entranced and excited. I want her to see herself in a story, not a boy version that she has to measure herself against. Maybe that won’t lead to financial success, but I’ve gotten letters back in my fanfiction days about how excited they were to find something exactly like what they wanted: weird, character-driven, and feminist–characters that they saw themselves in a very niche fandom. And that’s what I consider success: that excitement in someone else.

So my fiction’s focus is clear to me.

But who am I writing this blog for? Other writers? Readers? Myself? To function as a therapy outlet or to grow my market?

I’m not sure.

Gonna need some time to think about this. I’m not going on hiatus like last year but I might skip the odd week or two. Redesigns might need to happen. I don’t know. But I do want to find some measure of clarity.

I’ll let you know what I find.