This is a short post – I’m here to say just two things. First, I’m going to be gone for two weeks or so; I’ve got my end-of-semester exams in a week and I know I should be studying. Second, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about self-promotion in online fiction. I believe that there is a need to be serious about this – to do serious thinking in the sense that we should be talking about the whys before talking about the hows; i.e.: just because you can advertise in Facebook doesn’t mean that you should.

When Novelr first started the main problem we had was on how to publish/write online fiction – the best methods of presentation, the best platforms, the nuts and bolts of the medium, if you will. That problem has largely been solved. Today, most of us know how to publish and write online fiction, and that is a good thing (it has been 4 years, after all). What we haven’t solved, however, is the old problem of the writer/reader divide: most of our readers are other writers. Most of our marketing efforts are centered into getting other writers to read our work. This is a little silly, and a little sad. There should be better, more efficient methods of finding new readers, that aren’t based on randomly yelling on ‘any and all’ social platforms.

I’m fairly certain that we’ll all have a lot to say on the topic. To that end, I’ve created a new category on Novelr – Marketing – to help reflect this focus. But before we do all that thinking and wrangling, there’s a video that I’d like to share (don’t worry – it’s short and it’s rather cute):

Tell me what you think of it, when you’re done watching. See you in two weeks.