Word of the Week: Audience

Image from Di Coke's Superlucky blog. I've been featured in a Q&A with Di this week!

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster of a week this week – but definitely for all the right reasons.

After what feels like forever I finally got around to finishing the book I’d been working on in little snippets of time here and there for the best part of 2 years (within that time there were whole chunks of time – the longest being around 6 months - that it didn’t even get looked at but I was conscious it was there, unfinished and waiting) so it felt good to finally get it on Amazon and ‘out there’.

It is a book about what has become my main hobby in recent years; entering competitions or ‘comping’ as it is often referred to. And whilst on the face of it, it may seem a happy light topic, the book is written within the context of certain struggles in my life too.

If I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t expect too many people to be interested in it. After all it is a relatively niche hobby amongst the general population (although in the online world I think there is a lot more awareness and involvement in comping) and to make it even more niche, it is based on my own experiences of comping, and only over a 3 year period of my life.

However, when I’ve met people who I’ve told about my hobby, many of them do take an interest in wanting to know more – so I knew it would be of interest to at least a few people. But I’ve been blown away by the kindness, comments and encouragements I’ve heard from so many people. Including my first amazon review!!

What has made a huge difference is the support of the wonderful Di Coke. Known well in the comping and blogging world, Di loves to tell others about this hobby and helps promoters run successful and engaging competitions. Di kindly wrote the foreword for my book – which was a real honour – to me she is like comping royalty so it was amazing to be able to include a foreword from such an expert in the topic.

This week Di posted a Q&A with me about my book as part of her ‘Meet the Compers’ series. That again has been incredible. Di has a huge following on social media and is so widely thought of as the go-to person when it comes to all things comping related.

Ordinarily I dislike being the centre of attention. I don't like big parties. I'm an introvert in my day-to-day life and I even think of myself as a blogging introvert as I don't like to publicise my own blog or blogposts very much. I blog for myself because I want a record of family life and memories to look back on but I'm genuinely not worried about whether a post gets one view or one thousand views.

But when it comes to sharing an important message that I care deeply about - relating to Juvenile Arthritis - then it does matter how many people that message gets out to.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Perceptions and awareness haven't changed in the past 30 years about Juvenile Arthritis. Miss T gets the same response that I did all those years ago...'I thought only old people got arthritis' and the notion that it is just a few aches and pains rather than the cruel and debilitating disease that can rob children of their ability to walk and sometimes even cause blindness with uveitis affecting their eyes - if left untreated.

I owe massive thanks to the hugely talented Neill who blogs at Gary Wasabi's Golden Luck Muscle, and who very exceedingly kindly put in many hours to edit my book. He had the wisdom to take the information I'd written about Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis and stuck at the very back of the book and bring it to the front of the book. So even if you want to have a peek at the sample version which Amazon allows you to download for free, you'll understand a little about JIA and my motivation for writing the book. (With proceeds going to the Juvenile Arthritis Project, if anyone did want to buy a copy of Overcoming the Odds it can be found on Amazon here. It is available as paperback and on Kindle.)

I told you I was a blogging introvert - anyone else would have put call to action to buy the book and been shouting it from the rooftops right at the top of the blogpost. As for me, I add it inside brackets!!!

But thanks to the Q&A Di published it has meant that my book, and therefore the message about JIA has reached a far bigger audience - and I'm so grateful for that.

Reaching a bigger audience means greater awareness, greater awareness will lead to quicker diagnosis and treatment, and early treatment is so important for getting better long-term outcomes for children with JIA to prevent joint-damage and needing joint replacements later on as I needed with my hip replacement due to the irreversible JIA damage that had been caused when I was a child. 

So I've chosen my word of the week to be: Audience

Linking up with Word of the Week at its new home on Raisie Bay: