Where does one draw the line between quality work and the quantity of work? It's an argument that has been around since the beginning of human society… and we still struggle to find a balance. And for a writer, it's a question of personal standards vs the desire to make money.
Let's face reality here. If you want to get recognized for your efforts in any industry, you need both. You need the body of work to provide a range of products that you can sell, but you need to produce quality products or no one will want to buy what you have in the first place. BUT if you spend all your time on creating quality products, you won't have the quantity needed to build a back catalogue. AND if you pump out the work, focusing on quantity, then you are likely to slip in your standards and start producing sub-standard work.
It's important to find that balance. But it's not easy.
For many years now, I've been spending so much time on building my online presence and my overall platform. I'm proud of what I've accomplished. But when I started to look at what I had built vs where I would like to be, and compared it to what I still need to do, I started to cry—and not in a good way. I had fallen into the quantity trap. While I was still producing quality work in what I was doing, I was trying to do too much of everything that the most important parts of my platform were falling apart before my eyes. The things that I really wanted to do—the reasons why I became a writer in the first place—had completely disappeared from the equation.
My platform was in desperate need of an overhaul.
Step 1: Recognize where I was falling short.
