You know you can’t help it. You know you keep track of how many followers and friends you have on social sites, and you know when they go up and when they go down. And when they go down, all you can think is: oh, my gosh! What did I do?
When you’re an author and you have a newsletter, that obsession with numbers becomes even bigger—especially when you get an email that specifically tells you how many subscribers and unsubscribers you have.
How do I know this? Because I’m guilty of it. I watch the numbers on my various social sites and I get the emails that tell me how many people have subscribed or unsubscribed to my newsletter. But I don’t let it get me down.
I’m sure that it should bother me when people quit following me or don’t want to read my newsletter any longer. After all, the more people following me, the more potential readers I have and the more opportunity I have that they’ll buy some of my books. More followers means a bigger audience.
The reason it doesn’t bother me is because I don’t let it bother me. I could spend a good portion of my day wondering what I did wrong to make someone stop following me and trying to figure out ways to get them back, but I just don’t have the time. And maybe they don’t have time either. Maybe their day is chalked full of happenings and they don’t have time to read my tweets or my Facebook page or my newsletter. And that’s totally okay.
Throughout the day, we all have to pick and choose what we’re going to expend our energy on. I only have so much, so I choose not to worry about why someone stopped following me. It makes me a little sad, but at the same time, I only wish them the best.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to have the friends and fans that follow me, and I look forward to adding more in the future. Hell, maybe I’ll even win a few deserters back. There will always be those who stop following me for one reason or another, and that’s fine. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because that’s what I have the energy for.
