ALAN ASHTON-SMITH

Going Public

This will be the first blog post that I actively publicise.  I’m writing that not just as a statement of fact, but as an instruction to myself.  Yes, I have to tell myself to solicit readers, so slight is my natural inclination to do so.  It’s not that I don’t want anyone to read what I’ve written; it’s just that I feel uncomfortable asking people to read it.

Of course, one can maintain a blog without seeking out a readership, and it’s theoretically possible that such a blog will acquire readers of its own accord.  There is a chance that people might enter a specific chain of words into Google, hit the search button, and find themselves directed towards my blog.  But unless the chain of words being entered happens to be my name, it’s a fairly slim chance, and it would be naïve to rely on that possibility as a way of generating a readership.  Moving swiftly on from the Field Of Dreams school of blogging (If you build it, they will come), the obvious thing to do is to plug the blog through social networks.  Better to post links to posts on Facebook and Twitter and let people read them that way.  They might even pass the links on to other people.

But this is the point where the sense of disquiet kicks in and I feel funny about sharing the blog.  Why, then, am I so reluctant to give people to opportunity to read something that I want them to read?  The trouble is that it has to start with people I know.  I don’t particularly like the idea of people I know reading my blog.  OK, that’s not strictly true.  If you know me, I don’t want you to stop reading now.  I just don’t like thinking about people I know reading my blog.  This is partly because I’m anxious about their judgement.  There are a lot of very clever people on my Facebook friends list (I’m not saying that to butter up anyone who’s come here via Facebook; I really mean it) and I wouldn’t like them to perceive me as foolish or trivial.  But it’s mostly because I feel that beginning the quest for readers by foisting the blog upon people I know is cheating.  For some reason that I’m unable to explain, I hold the view that I should be able to bypass the stage of building an audience of friends, acquaintances and online contacts, and jump straight to the mythical realm of the ‘wider public’.

So, here goes.  Once I’ve finished writing this post, I’ll upload it to my website and then dutifully share it on Facebook and tweet a link to it.  I might not be going straight for the ‘wider public’ but I’ll take some comfort in the fact that I have ended up using a rather unorthodox strategy for procuring readers: the first post that I’m sharing is all about how I don’t want people to read my blog.  Talk about how to alienate your readership from the off…