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The Servant Authorship Mindset
Why It Matters, for Your Readers and You
4 min readNov 10, 2020
What motivates you to write, and how do you know when you’ve achieved success?
The world offers writers all kinds of proxies for success:
- For book authors, sales numbers and best-selling labels
- For bloggers, the number of subscribers, amount of engagement, or reshares of posts
- On social media, likes and follows boost our sense of success
These basic metrics are important to understand, but we often get caught up in them.
What if you measure success based on the what happens in the reader’s world, rather than yours? Instead of clicks or sales, you might look for:
- The impact your writing has on someone’s personal life or the way an organization functions
- The behaviors or beliefs that shift in people who read your work
- The person who shares your work with others they think will benefit from it, amplifying your impact
Sure, these things are harder to see and count. But aren’t they the real reasons you write?
How would a focus on these results change your approach to writing?
