I wrote an article on that very question of whether writers should want to have a large audience (link below on the perils, if you're interested).
What to do about our ignored pieces? It's disheartening to discover that the media platforms aren't perfectly meritorious. Good things fall through the cracks. Many flowers that bloom are never once seen or smelled.
Of course, maybe we're deluding ourselves and we're biased judges. We writers may think that everything we touch is gold, but perhaps we've lost some of our grip on reality because we're absorbed by our artistic perspective. Or maybe the fault is with the audience, as I suggest.
Either way, in another sense, authors have to be the best judges of their work because they're likely the only ones who've read all of it. We know when we've hit our stride and when we've phoned it in. We know when we've broken new ground, compared to what we've already written. So we should be trying to awe ourselves most of all. Damn their eyes if the rest can't see it.
