The blogger said that apparently its against thier terms and conditions. How do you use the donate button withuot this kind of issues.

But I completely agree with many of the points here – since I moved my online serial (The Astonishing Adventures of Lord Likely), stripped the site of widgets and gadgets, changed the donations links and so forth, I’ve seen a big rise in both readership and donations. Hooray!

Wise words indeed, sir! Good work!

Some details on getting your novel noticed would also be nice.

Now to figure out how best to apply it to my serial.

Thanks for giving us the skinny.

@Sebatinsky: Thanks! VCG was a really fun project for me, and also connects happily as a kind of unrelated prologue to the Vector. Glad you liked it!

Oh, and MCM – The first “page” of VCG is almost an excellent self-contained story, even without the rest of it. I was impressed.

The problem, as I see it, is effort and risk. Too much friction between idea and execution, and it leaves time to worry.

One thing the community is missing is really robust software that does what they need. I know WordPress can do it, but WordPress is much too heavy for what most authors need/want. To put the fundamental navigation elements on every chapter is a major hack on its own, and often not very visually appealing. There needs to be something simpler to execute, and more targeted to authors.

That’s one of the things I’m working on now… turning my system (with all its hacks) into something other people can use. Something that lets you try a button in one place, or an ad in another, and gather stats on how it works, so you don’t need to worry so much. So you can say “I have this feeling that this feature in this place would be great”, and execute the idea yourself in minutes. If everyone could do that, I think you’d see a lot more variety out there.

ALSO, the other thing authors need to keep in mind is that sites and features are just like elements to your book. Just because someone had a lot of success having a comic Rastafarian flamingo in one of their stories, doesn’t mean you put one in yours. You might adapt it… make it a comic Swedish flamingo, or a comic Rastafarian parakeet… you’d look at what fits your specific situation, and adapt. People like MeiLin Miranda have figured out a system that works for them, but it won’t work out-of-the-box for most. It’ll take some massaging. So try to find an angle that connects with your project, and do that instead.

Which is to say: I’m rambling.

I know that for a lot of people it’s just a hobby, and they are juggling with jobs, family and other types of things that need to be done. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But the people who are trying to earn (a partial) living with their writing online could in my opinion often make more of it.

I may just be speaking for myself here, but I struggle just to write what I write in the course of the week. I’m not unaware of how things work online (I’m a web developer).

I’ve been thinking of creating a new theme for my story blog for the longest time, one that oddly enough, shares many of the features suggested in the article. Have I done it?

Er… No. Mostly because if I do off hours programming, I’ll be doing that instead of off hours writing. I should though. My readers are suggesting that I should put up ads and a Paypal link, which ought to tell me that it would be worth doing.

The other thought is this: What you’re saying about authors is actually similar to what I’ve observed as someone running a small business. Business people are copycats too (and oddly enough indie authors are business people. Many just haven’t noticed yet.), but in this case, they’re really excited about the writing part. They never really gave the same level of thought to the business part and in many ways don’t really want to.

Anyway, there’s my thoughts (for what they’re worth).

Authors are copycats. One person finds out that incentives work great to get more traffic and people more active and BAM, 30 author websites start the same. What bugs me there isn’t the fact they are copying a system, but that they are copying too thoroughly, without thinking about their own audience. I would expect creative people to be creative about such things. It gets tiring to see the same donation-buttons, same website set-ups and same advertising everywhere.

Authors are lazy and conservative. In my quest for promotion I have tried out various ways of promoting authors and websites. After a while it struck me how few of those social media or other tools are used or at least tested by people publishing online. I’d espect people who are ‘nerdy’ enough to publish online to try out every online way of promoting their fiction possible. I’m not saying all of these social media ventures work for online fiction, in fact most don’t. But a big reason some of them don’t is because not more like-minded people are using them.
I know the internet can be baffling and that people just want to stay in their comfort zone and write on that gorgeous story they are writing. But you’ve chosen the internet as your battlefield, so make use of it, experiment, learn and have fun with it. Don’t stick with what you know.

I’m testing a lot of new features that I’m hoping will give me more stats to share in the future. Glad I could be of help!

@Nancy: Glad I could be of help! It’s never an exact science, but I’ve tried enough permutations to be able to say what DOESN’T work, at least :)