Why Is It Still A Draft? Make It Public
Common concerns and solutions about publishing an article
In this article, we are investigating common reasons people have drafts but don't publish them. For the most common concerns, we are also offering solutions.
1. Are you afraid of rejection?
Do you think people won't like what you wrote? How do you know that? You haven't published it yet... If you are not sure about your ideas, you can use the ideas channel in Hashnode's Discord server to validate them or another online community like Twitter.
From time to time, we all have written an article that we were unsure of publishing. In these cases, postpone it for a couple of days and before you start writing your next article, read the postponed one. Then, if necessary, make a few tweaks, and then hit that "publish" button!
As long as you wrote a good, quality article you have nothing to afraid of. No one will judge you or your article.
“If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” — Edgar Rice Burroughs.
2. Do you need someone to review it?
Review it by yourself
The simplest solution is to review it by yourself. In order to have a successful review wait a few hours/days and then return back to your article.
Tips:
- Read it slowly and pretend it's not yours.
- Read it out loud so you can not only "see" it but hear it too.
- Start reading and reviewing from the last paragraph and move your way up.
Ask others to review it
You may don't like the idea to let someone else check your draft, but remember you do that in order to have a good, quality, error-free article.
a) You can ask a friend: even if she doesn't belong to the dev community it's ok, the main point is to check what you wrote, not your ideas or the correctness of them.
b) Ask people on Hashnode's discord server, drafts channel, to take a look at it. People in our community are active and friendly!
c) Ask people on other social media platforms (e.g. Twitter) to check it!
More tips:
Usually, a good article includes the following:
* a table of contents
* an introduction
* the main idea and the explanation of it (use code snippets, images, or whatever you think is more suitable)
* conclusions/summary
* and if applicable credits or sources.
To make it more personal you can add at the end of the article a way for people to reach you (usually social media links), suggest similar articles you wrote, or ask the readers for feedback.
3. Do you think your English is not good enough?
Do you postpone the articles due to the fact that you are not a native English speaker? Don't worry. Most of us are not. The good thing is that there are tools to help us with the English language. In this section, you will see some of these tools.
Check these options ⤵
Grammarly
If you want to make your article as good as possible, as far as it concerns the grammar and the spelling, you can use Grammarly.
"Grammarly is a cross-platform cloud-based writing assistant that reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement and delivery mistakes in real-time. It uses AI to identify and search for an appropriate replacement for the mistake it locates." - By Wikipedia.
There is a free version and it's very easy to start using it.
Native speakers
Ask native speakers to check your grammar and spelling. Where would you find them? As we mentioned earlier check the discord server, social media platforms, or people in real life.
Google is your friend, don't forget that. If you are not sure about something, you can always Google it. Since you're still in a draft mode you can make as many changes as you want!
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult.
Google Translator / Other translators
We already mentioned Google but don't forget about Google Translator too. If you are unsure about a word's meaning, check it! It will only take a couple of seconds.
And I know Google translator is not The Best Translator, so feel free to check more translators! There are, for example, some translators using A.I. and do a way better job. The problem sometimes with them though is that they don't -yet- support all the languages (for example in my case, they don't support Greek).
“The only way to learn to write is to write.” — Peggy Teeters.
4. Are you worried your article is not perfect?
If you are a perfectionist don't wait to have a perfect article to publish it. In your eyes, it may never be.
If you or someone else have reviewed it and thinks it's ok then just hit that "publish" button. Make it live and you can always go back and edit it.
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood.
5. Are you worried no one would be interested in reading your article?
Your first few articles are probably not going to be read by hundreds of people. But that's ok, we all start from somewhere. However, over time, you will build a bigger audience and you'll get more feedback from readers.
Social Media & online platforms
If you want to acquire more readers, it's quite important to share your articles on social media (it's totally ok if you don't have many followers on social media, no one was born with having thousands of followers, this is also something that takes time).
A few tips for social media:
- Don't rewrite what's already visible from the title/description. Write something different and try to be original. Don't clickbait.
- If you want to make the most out of social media, you can research and see when your followers are active during the day. Thus, you could maximize your reach by posting when most of your followers are active.
- Use only the appropriate hashtags. Tag only the people/communities that should be tagged.
- Don't be a spammer.
Some of the social media platforms where you can share your articles are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest.
Hashnode's discord server
Feel free to share it also on Hashnode's discord server, link-sharing. Our community is quite big 🤗 , there always will be people interested in reading your articles!
Reshare it on other blogging platforms
We know Hashnode is awesome 😍, but you could try republishing your articles on other platforms as well.
Just be careful on how you share the article. Wherever possible use the canonical URL.
✨ If you are not sure what is the canonical URL or how to use it, please read this article written by Catalin Pit.
Use the RFA - Requests For Articles
This method is a bit different from the ones mentioned above.
RFA, which means "Requests For Articles", is a great way to see what the readers actually want to read! This is a simple trick to make sure your articles are going to be read by the people of the Hashnode community.
Pick a theme and start writing!
To sum up
Write, review, publish!
- The first draft is not going to be perfect, acknowledge that and move on to the next step.
- The next step is reviewing it. Either by yourself or by another person. Reviews, especially for beginners, can improve the article's quality drastically.
- The last step, publish it! If you find something you don't like, you can always re-edit it.
If there is another reason why you're not publishing your drafts, please let us know, and we'll do our best to help you.
Contact us on the Discord support channel, on Twitter, or leave a comment with your concerns.