It’s “the little drops of water, little grains of sand” system that creates wonderful writers.
It’s writing one sentence after the other and doing it over and over until you have 10,000 sentences and your book is done.
It’s writing a couple of comments every single day for a whole year until you have left your thumbprint on 100 blogs and over 700 posts.
It’s tweeting a tweet when you don’t feel like it, but you do it anyway and after days and weeks and months your name becomes known, your face becomes known and what you are writing about becomes noticed.
Consistency happens only with conscious, deliberate effort.
It takes an idea that is grand and glorious and breaks it down into steps and actionable moments. Step by step, day by day, in season and out of season you keep at it until the dream is manifested into reality.
Every author needs an author platform. This is the visible, viable proof through which people know you, follow you and buy your books. It is more than just a one day splash on the front page that is read and forgotten. It must be a steady accumulation of showing up and providing content that matters.
The best way to provide consistency is to make a public commitment to something that forces you to stay the course. Make it definite and visible. One person that comes to mind in doing this is the writer, Julie Powell, who made a bold commitment to cook all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year. It was a challenge that took her out of the wading pool into deep water and it resulted in a huge following, a book deal and a movie.
Ask yourself what simple, consistent thing can you do every day for a year? One thing. Not ten or twenty. Keep it simple and stay the course.
“Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.”—Bruce Springsteen
