There’s only one reason I post on the internet. It’s just to let my ego come out and play for a bit.

I don’t do it for money. In 2006, Publisher’s Weekly reported that the average book sold less than 500 copies. That means that in order to make $30000, a person would have to charge $60 per book. Or in most cases where a book does good to sell 100 copies, $600 per book.

I don’t do it for fame. WordPress, the host of this blog reports that there are 84.3 million new posts on the internet every month. Each month, people view more than 23.3 billion pages (that’s billion with a bold, upper case, hi-lighted in yellow, B). So the odds of even getting read by a total stranger is .1652% or 1 in 4,956,000 people on the internet. That is mind boggling. All I can say is that 1 person that stumbled onto my site will be one lucky dude.

So why do I keep putting my words out there for the world to scrutinize? It’s the thrill of that instant endorphin rush. When I say  that I’m a comment junkie, it’s true. I  admit it, each time I open my Facebook page, or my blog site www.thebackyardpoet.com my heart leaps a bit. I’m an instant gratification poet. I write my words, put them out into the world through the network of social media and wait impatiently. I am not a patient man. If you don’t believe me, just ask my wife.

I tend to post most things at midnight so sometimes I have also have to spend a sleepless night waiting for you guys to send me some love.

Hopefully, you will give me some likes… maybe even a few of those heart shaped emoji’s. I break out into my happy dance each time I have a comment (it’s not something you would want to see but it makes my wife smile). But the ultimate Nirvana is when (lo and behold), someone has cared enough to share my creation with their friends. To see there was at least one person that ‘got’ what I had to say is as good as it’s ever going to get.

I’ve thought about this a lot… I believe the greatest honor I could receive as an artist (and I use that term loosely) is to have someone know a piece of my work by heart. Or that someone might tell their children about a story I shared. Or I hear a group of friends sharing coffee at their local coffee shop and discussing some piece of my work.

We (the people who push our words out into the world to be criticized, analyzed and dissected) imagine these things even if they don’t really happen. In my imagination, I see a teenager sitting alone in the park reading my poetry and understanding that life is worth it after all. Sometimes, my mind dreams of two young lovers lying on a hillside in the bright afternoon sun, quoting my words to each other as they fall in love. Images like that are what I see with each comment, each like and each share.

So that is what keeps me going. For me, a small group of devoted fans is worth far more than selling a million books. Because fortunes fade, fame is fleeting, but good friendship will last forever.

Jerry Brotherton

The Backyard Poet

http://www.thebackyardpoet.com

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