Hi, all —

Well, it’s been a fun and interesting 14 months or so since I started Vision & Balance in October 2024.

I started writing V&B with the idea that it could provide the service of letting other library managers and leaders — especially newcomers to leadership — learn lessons the easy way that I’ve learned the hard way. My plan was to write twice per week.

At the beginning, I had two main concerns:

First, how soon was I going to run out of topics worth writing about? As a hedge against this concern, before starting the newsletter I compiled a several-pages-long list of topics that seemed worth addressing. Counting them up, I found that I had almost a whole year’s worth of subjects — enough to convince me that it was worth giving the experiment a shot. And as time went on, I found that writing these posts tended to generate more ideas, so that even as I crossed topics off the original list I was adding new ones almost as quickly; my current list of potential post topics is nearly as long as the one I started with over a year ago.

Second, was anyone going to feel any need to read what I wrote? This was by far the bigger risk, and the question that has remained somewhat unresolved. When I started V&B as a subscription newsletter — with one of the two weekly posts offered freely to all and the other restricted to paying subscribers — I found (unsurprisingly enough) that a fair number of people were interested enough to sign up and that relatively few were willing to pay. But at least there was some interest! I ended up making just enough money to cover my up-front costs in publishing the newsletter on the Ghost platform. Frustrations with that platform, however, eventually led me to reconfigure the newsletter as a blog, at which point I also decided to just make the whole thing free to everyone. I don’t really need the money — or, at least, I don’t need the very small amount of money subscriptions were generating.

In recent months, though, I’ve started wondering whether the number of people reading justifies the amount of time and effort I spend writing. I’m keenly aware that I’ve done next to nothing to market this thing, and that’s probably one reason for the relatively low readership (which ranges from the single digits for some posts to the several hundreds for a handful of others). Another reason may simply be that the insights and ideas I’m sharing aren’t especially interesting, useful, or insightful. Up until a couple of weeks ago I was feeling ready to just let V&B die a natural death and move on with other projects — and then, with very odd timing, a reader reached out to me to say thanks for one of my posts and offered the observation that he had just completed a graduate management program and found that the stuff I was writing in V&B was “right up there” with some of the best things he’d read in his program, and said “please keep going.”

So there goes my easy out. 🙂

Anyway, this has all given me plenty to think about as I head into the Christmas break.

More to come, one way or another, in the new year.