I Am a Writer of Poetry, Short Stories and Novels

I recently submitted a story for publication for the first time - to a website that specializes in the genre I was writing in. It got accepted and published, unlike 95% of the stuff that gets submitted to the site, but it ended up getting bad-but-not-terrible reviews compared to other stories on the site.

I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I like that I actually made the cut and got on the site, and I feel like the less-than-stellar reviews are less about the quality of the writing and more about me failing to take my target audience into account (I wrote it for people familiar with the particular thing I was writing about, which a lot of people aren't. I should have done what any good author does and led the reader into it instead of assuming they were already familiar with it). I screwed up, but not in a way that makes me a bad writer. On the other hand, it feels really sucky to put myself out there and get such a mediocre response - now that I've done it, I get why so many artists are hesitant to show their work to others.