Public impact: track your efforts

Like journaling but for getting your work in front of your readers

Consider keeping track of your public impact efforts. You can treat it like a journal, chronicling the marketing efforts you’ve made around your writing, a tracker in a spreadsheet noting the actions you took to pitch/promote various pieces of writing and what resulted, or some other form that works for you. You might track how many agents you query, how many words you wrote per day/week/month (I do all three), or even your pitch-to-acceptance or pitch-to-rejection ratio. Whatever feels important to you.

To track the effort you’re putting into your writing work helps take some of the mystery-frustration out of recognizing the impact of your work and helps give you some data about what created traction and what didn’t. It also helps on days when you feel like you’re doing your creative work into a void.