What You Really Do When You Hit Publish

To publish an article or a book is an exciting thing. Over time, it becomes routine. But do you realize what you actually set in motion when you publish something?

We writers rarely get to know our readers. We publish our books and articles on large Internet platforms or sell them through large online stores. The readers usually only appear to us in the form of statistics in our dashboards.

The few readers who take the time to review our book or comment on our articles are a minority. They don’t really give us an idea of who our readers are.

So it’s hard for us to understand what happens to our stories and articles once we publish them.

What impact do our words have on the world? And how does publishing change us and our lives? This is the question this article is about.

You expose yourself to criticism

Anyone who has been publishing for a while knows that criticism is inevitable. In the beginning, when hardly anyone reads what you write, it might not happen yet.

Only a small percentage of readers bother to give you feedback. This is why newcomers are often so shocked when suddenly the first adverse reaction comes from a reader.

You must be aware that negative feedback is inevitable as soon as you reach more people. It will never happen that all readers like what you write.

Many authors then complain publicly that readers are stupid or unfair because they don’t understand what is meant. But this complaint is naive and wrong.

As soon as you make a public statement on a topic by writing an article, you are challenging opposition. As soon as you publish a book, you must expect that you will not make every reader happy with it.

Negative criticism, no matter how harsh, is part of the business. You must be prepared to accept it as feedback. No one is asking you to agree to criticism, but you must take it.

Be aware that critics never mean you as a person, even if they are offensive. People do not know you.

So they can’t mean you at all, but only what they’ve read from you. Never take criticism personally, even if it seems very personal to you.

You influence the way other people think

The written word is powerful. As soon as a reader reads your words, you’re in their head. As an author, you can never know at what moment something you wrote years ago will enter a stranger’s mind and change his thinking.

While you are lying in your bed and sleeping, you may be making someone angry, touching them in their deepest soul, or making them question their worldview.

While you are standing at the checkout counter in the supermarket, two strangers may be thousands of miles away from you, discussing your latest article.

While you are cooking your food, your book may be helping someone to forget their worries for a while as they immerse themselves in the world you created long ago.

To publish something written is like magic. You trigger something in people you’ll never meet that you’ll never know. When you are a writer with a broad audience, it happens practically every second.

When I look at my dashboard on Amazon Kindle, some days, I see that I have sold over a hundred books, and fifteen thousand pages of my books have been read. On the same day, my articles have been read a few hundred times around the world.

Every book sold, every page read via Kindle Unlimited, and every article read represents a moment when my words have made an impact in some person’s mind.

Realize that you are changing realities and understand what a miracle it is.

You give up control over your work

Once you publish something, it’s not yours anymore. You still collect the royalties and have the right to cancel the publication at any time, but you give the authority to interpret your words to the public.

You do not influence how the readers will understand and interpret you. You cannot determine whether your words will be ignored or discussed controversially.

Authors who want to convey a message with their works should know that they can never completely control the message they wish to send.

Therefore, it is vital to be able to let go as soon as you have published a book or article. You cannot control the effect your words have.

The reader makes what he wants out of your words. You cannot dictate to anyone what lessons they learn from what you have written.

The moment you hit Publish is the moment you realize that you and your work exist independently from now on.

You are changing your future

Every book and every article you publish has effects that you may never know about.

But sometimes something happens that you never expected. An article you wrote six months ago suddenly goes viral because someone with a huge follower base discovered it and shared it.

Ask the old hands among bloggers. Most of them will be able to tell you a story like that.

You may get an email from a publisher who discovered your book and is now interested in working with you.

One of your articles may lead to you being invited to speak at an event. This has already happened to me. I’ve written about it:

By the way, the same man who invited me to this event contacted me again a few months ago. He was looking for authors for an anthology that will be published by a big publishing house. I accepted and wrote a story. There is a fixed fee for the publication.

The more you publish, the more chances you have of something unexpected happening. If you have been in the business for many years, you will almost inevitably encounter a chance at some point that you never expected.

Conclusion

As a writer, you make a difference even if you believe that nothing is happening. With every time you publish, you release a part of yourself into the world that will continue to exist without your intervention.

Not a word is lost. No thought is in vain. All you have to do is to hit publish.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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