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Quick Links: The Painful Practice of Putting Your Art Out There

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

What is worse – when people dislike your work or don’t even pay attention? A fear most writers can appreciate.  Amy Crumpton, guest posting on Goins Writer, shares how she deals with this very emotional issue. What is your best tip for dealing with the emotional traps that writers face?

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The Painful Practice of Putting Your Art Out There

Workplace headacheby Amy Crumpton
After years of blogging for a small email list, I’d finally slipped through a door at The Huffington Post with a story about discovering my purpose. In it, I offered a free trial for a course I’d created to help others discover their own callings.

I was excited like a kid at Christmas until I saw the first comment:

“As I read your article, I found myself entertaining hope again. Then I got to the end and saw you were just trying to sell me something. I want to judge you but God says I am supposed to forgive you. I don’t know if I can, but I hope God will.”

Shame rose up in me like steam from a whistling teapot as I turned the comment over and over in my head.

The blistering effects of criticism

Criticism can blister us like a red burner. The wound will heal, but it’s unnerving to keep working so near the hot stove.

I thought The Huffington Post door would open the door to a lot more opportunities. But as they expanded their blogger platform, readership dwindled and became divided.

I continued to post there, but I focused primarily on my own list. I blogged steadily, asked for feedback, invited comments, ramped up social sharing, and offered free stuff. I did everything I knew to do.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Comments have been updated

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settings-symbol-icon-set_fJTuzqPu_LIn continuing to try and make this blog better, I am trying to balance between open communication and some of the problems that plagued Publetariat before.  With that said, I have updated the way comments work. You will still have to log in, but you can use a couple of different methods to do so and no longer need to be a member of Disqus.  So we shall cross our fingers and see what happens!

Thank you for your time and patience!

Paula

Why We’re Removing Comments on Copyblogger

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This post by Sonia Simone originally appeared on Copyblogger on 3/24/14. As longtime readers know, Publetariat had to take this same action when the site was brought back following a hacker attack last year.

“Would you ever consider taking comments off Copyblogger?”

When the question was posed during our editorial meeting, my immediate reaction was, “Absolutely not.”

I wasn’t even interested in considering it, because I like conversations. I enjoy seeing what people think of different posts. I like the quick view of what people react to (positively or otherwise), and what seems to need more explanation.

While the comments on the big CRaP websites are mostly pretty awful, I’ve always enjoyed managed comments on real content blogs. Conversations, after all, are typically more interesting than monologues.

But the team and I got together and talked about it. And as we talked, I started to see it differently.

Here’s the distillation of that conversation — the one that led me to say, Okay, let’s do this.

 

First, the conversation doesn’t end

If you’ve been running your own blog for awhile, you probably noticed that comments started to become less frequent when Facebook and Twitter really started to come into their own. (And that’s only picked up speed with the incredible growth of the other social platforms like Google+ and LinkedIn.)

Why? Because the conversation moved to a wider public platform.

 

Click here to read the full post on Copyblogger.