http://aprillhamilton.blogspot.com/2009/11/indie-call-to-action.html

Now that is the sort of negative review you don’t want to be stumbling. It’s no more use to a potential reader than a gushy positive.

I wish weblit people would stop being so scared of anything like this. Reviewers are not publishers – them not liking your work will not kill it, only you can do that.

Re self-promotion:

I think we need to look at combinations rather than ONE big thing.

I have only played at advertising Refuge of Delayed Souls – probably no more than 6 weeks’ worth if it was all added together. I did include web comics and they were an excellent source of new readers.

My traffic increased dramatically with the Blog of Note mention – an immediate 5,000 unique visitors in the first 24hrs. Currently running at approx 1,500 visitors per day from the Blog of Note source at this stage. I expect it to tail off soon.

Stumble web fiction, Stumble reviews – why not? As I said above, combinations.

On a personal note, I do not believe that web fiction should revolve predominantly around reviews. The idea that a crop of super reviewers and their reviews should drive web fiction is, to my way of thinking, a step backward rather than forward.

In 2010 I hope to be working with a group of people, from a variety of backgrounds, within what has been referred to as “one of the most deprived areas of the UK”, to produce a web fiction project. (fingers crossed).

The idea is for the group to produce web fiction, create videos and work together with local musicians, artists and creatives to produce a mixed media web fiction project.

Now some hot shot reviewer may come across the eventual web fiction site, form the opinion that the fiction showcased there is crap and write a damning review. Other people may believe that is what web fiction is all about – a web based literary elite. That would be a shame because as far as I am concerned they are missing the far bigger picture of what web fiction CAN be given half the chance.

@JanOda — Eli’s helping me redesign WFG, at the moment, and he’s being a great help. He’s the perfect foil to my tendency to put too much information on a page. And you’ll be glad to know he’s got a nice big “New to web fiction? Click here for a primer!” link on the home page.

WHY aren’t webfiction people more active at CONS? If I were in the states and a webfiction author, I’d spread some WFG and Web-fiction love all over those places. But I’m in the wrong country, in the wrong timezone and only one person.

First, I think it’s about time that Youtube implements links to the rest of the internet in their vids. ATM you can link in your video to other video’s, but I want that expanded urgently. Then real interactiveness can be born.

MCM once called me a superuser, but I never really agreed, because I don’t currently reach a non webfiction reading audience. Not that many at least. I know I have converted a couple of people via twitter, and have guided a lot of writers to the WFG (I’m still proud that once, 14 new listings in a row where all people I sent over), but I’m not a real converting superuser. (YET :p )

As for interactive stories/writing, I think MCM’s use of the medium is EXCELLENT, and is what more people should do, instead of just dumping all the text online. The internet has such great possibilies, I wished more people where more inventive about posting it.

Another great example was the Arab Bank by Jim Hanas, a story set in Cannes, and he updated it every day during the Cannes Film Festival, which was an excellent idea in my eyes. Never found out if it worked out though. (http://jimhanas.com/thearabbank/)

I have been thinking about advertising Web-fiction for a while, because I had an epiphany when I first started reading online fiction, and I have been trying to promote it for a long time now, because I feel the need to share. So far my various efforts aren’t leaving that much of a trace.

I have said it here before, web-fiction authors urgently need to fish in fresh lakes, because now a lot seem to be fishing in the same small pond, stealing readers of each other (because people can only follow this much webserials at the same time). Authors need to start thinking about CONVERSION.

People read online ALL THE TIME, in fact, people have never read this much in history (sms, email, internet…), so that isn’t the barrier. It’s the idea that they can also read fiction online that needs to be ephipanied. The reason why webcomics work well, is because those people already know they can read fiction online.

I do believe that now that E-books are definitely here to stay we are very close to a turning point. People finally read fiction on a screen, so that barrier is almost down.

After that it’s breaching the self-publishing barrier, and that’s a whole different matter.

To ephipafy web-fiction, and to slay those barriers, you need to promote what makes it different and better than regular fiction. For me this is the addictive possibilities (there is always a next button :p) and the interactiveness, in general I think the short chunks and regular updates are important factors too.

These are the qualities we need to spread all over the place. And the time is now.

As for Becky’s remark about Stumbleupon, Digg and Reviewers, I cannot agree more. It boggles my mind that no more webfiction authors have thumbed up the WFG. After all we all love it, we all think it’s a great site, and we all think more people should see it. I’m a regular Stumbler, and the thumb up reaction is almost automatic whenever I see something interesting. I really don’t understand why not more people embrace this. (Chris, I really think the WFG needs a better ABOUT page though, for people landing at the WFG unknowingly, there is too little info and conversion material in my eyes. I often think the WFG seems to be designed for people who already read online fiction, but I think there is room for more Ephipafying Content) (I’d also love it if people could add a twitter account to their profile, so I could finally get a hold on the readers, but that’s probably a too big strain on your time)

But as Becky says, it’s important to pimp the reviewers. If I could I’d add every well written review at the WFG and E-fictionBookClub, however, since adding the same sites all over again has bad results, I stopped adding them. If other people would do this I could thumb up reviews more often. ALAS.

I really think authors need to quit the self-promotion a bit, and start on the Format-promotion. It boggles my mind I don’t see tweets in my feed about the WFG every day. Sometimes I want to smack some authorheads together :p

Sorry for the very long post, the bad wordplays with ephiphany, the possable spelling and grammar mistakes, and the incoherent order of my remarks. I have the worst hangover in AGES.

We need to start stumbling and digging the reviewers, and not just for positive reviews.

Let me explain:

I’m a bit haphazard about blogging. I run out of ideas and grind to a halt, but on Wednesday I posted a review of webfiction urban fantasy serial “Black Alice” on my blog. The next day I noticed a blip in traffic. Initially I assumed this was because I had announced the post on Twitter but when I checked the stats over half the blip was coming from Stumble. Somebody – I think it may have been the authors of “Black Alice”, but that is mere supposition – stumbled my review and people came to see.

Now it must be said that my blog doesn’t see much traffic at all – the blip was an extra twenty-odd visitors on Wednesday and about half that yesterday, but it still got me thinking.

Weblit writers target other writers because that is the circle we hang out in. These are the people we know and breaking out of your circle is always hard.

The question being asked is how do we do this? Well my point above is people don’t trust weblit and they won’t until a trusted source tells them they can, but with the odd exception the trusted sources ignore or ridicule us – which doesn’t help at all.

So what can we do? We’ll have to create our own trusted sources. This of course is a twofold problem.

1. How do we make people outside our circle aware of these sources
2. How do we get people to trust them once they are aware of them

The answer to #2 is simpler. They have to be trustworthy. This means they have to be willing to talk turkey about the bad attempts at weblit out there. We do ourselves no favours by not being honest. If a reviewer only posts positive reviews it looks suspicious. If something is bad we need to say so, or outsiders will never trust us.

This leads into my answer to #1, and why I said above that we need to start stumbling and digging the reviewers.

To break out we need to promote the reviewers more than the individual writers. More importantly we need to promote those reviewers who are reliable posters (so probably not me at the moment) and who are informative and honest.

Digg, Stumble, and similar are a good way to do this. If you read a quality review, which you find accurate and useful in deciding what to read, hit the social bookmarking sites with it. And it’s important that this not just be positive reviews, to persuade potential readers that weblit is worth the risk, we have to show them sources who not only tell them when it is worth reading, but when it isn’t.

It’s a certainty that not everyone who comes to look will decide to trust this new source of information, but a percentage will. It’s not a quick solution, nor even the sole solution to breaking out, but I think it may be an important part of the long, rocky road to generalised acceptance of our medium.

Becky

Like I said exactly how it would work is a bit beyond me.

But what I’m thinking of is if there is some way to collate all the times it’s happened into an attractive and hooky package will hold a person’s attention long enough for them to get the message.

On blogs/superusers linking and boosting traffic: well yeah, that’s pretty obvious. It’s been like that for a some time now – even Novelr has had occasional boosts from large blogs linking to it.

But one of my contentions is that we’re getting the short end of the stick: not many mainstream blogs (think – kottke.org) link to webfiction. So either you convert them, by selling them an epiphany, that webfiction doesn’t suck, or we the community begin to find and create platforms where the emphasis is on readers, not writers, and using that to focus attention on good web fiction. I’m sorry if this a little rambly, because I’ve thought about all these aspects of web fiction only recently. You may well have a point when you say that:

There’s the place to leverage an Epiphany if anywhere – find the times (those can’t be the only two) when a source a lot of people trust has approved of a piece of weblit and use them to make the point.

I find that very interesting. Would you care to elaborate?

Let me try this again, because I’ve been thinking about it.

When io9.com said “The Vector” was worth reading people arrived at MCM’s site in droves because a trusted source said it was good.

More recently when “Refuge of Delayed Souls” was featured by Blogger as a blog of the day @Miladysa said on twitter that her traffic shot up. Again a trusted source said it was worth checking out.

So it’s not a thing we have to wait for – “superusers” have already pointed some weblit writers out.

There’s the place to leverage an Epiphany if anywhere – find the times (those can’t be the only two) when a source a lot of people trust has approved of a piece of weblit and use them to make the point. You’ll need someone with a better advertising brain than mine to work out how to present it, so people actually stop long enough to receive the message, but I think it could work.

And I have a question – how did the first webcomics build themselves up? What about the Podcast novelists? Is there anything we can learn from the way they got readers/listeners interested?

Isn’t this just effectively a Role-Playing game?

PS: brainstorming in this thread is perfectly alright.

I need to spend more time looking at the Amanda Project, but from what I remember it was a little too loose for me. I want to see (or create) something that is very author-driven (creating a story world, even if it uses links, pictures, videos and emails) yet allows the audience to actively interact — so they become characters in the story, too.

Maybe I shouldn’t be brainstorming this here?

Plus, if you would finally enable comments on your mini-posts, I’d gladly discuss the postmodern need to identify writer with book, and award with genre, etc.

http://www.level26.com/about/

The guy who created CSI has a “digi-novel” where you read a text book, and are given access to an internet site with movie clips bridging between chapters, and also you can input a phone number and get called by the story’s killer character.

Videos would be immensely helpful because they will quickly get across the point of web fiction, without expecting someone to sit through an article about it. It’s fast, it’s shareable, and it’s effective. I just like making meta-commentary. I’ve been doing it my whole life — if there was a movie about me, there would likely be more voice-overs than dialogue.

BTW, Gavin, if you want to check out interactive web fiction experiments – The Amanda Project might be something you’d like. It certainly came to mind when you suggested email for readers helping to solve a mystery – TAP is a little like that.

@Becky: That’s not necessarily true. Consider this: Google alone cannot make non-geeks use Google Wave. So what do they do? They get Epipheo to make a vid. Note that linking/sharing culture online is governed by people sending other people simple explanations that ’cause epiphanies’ – Novelr’s experienced this kind of linking a number of times already, with some of its better articles. But since this is on Youtube, and is cute, and provokes epiphanies, people begin to post it to their blogs. (This is far more effective than anything I’d ever write.) A superuser links to it, sooner or later, and this begins a viral education campaign – exactly what Google wants to happen.

Now take Apple. In 2001, Apple had a core group of fanboys, and Jobs was confident that Apple’s quality was superior, that if they were given a chance, people would choose Apple over other products. But they didn’t, because they couldn’t give Apple a try (add that to the semi-insular nature of the then Apple fanboy culture …). So what does he do? He starts up the Apple retail stores, and puts them in places where ordinary people would drop by, and designs it well enough so that people try it out for themselves. And only then do the superusers kick in – more people buy Apple, more non-geeks talk about this amazing experience they’ve had, more people buy Apple – and it becomes viral.

So arguing that a web fiction needs a superuser to first to sell the message is wrong. It is wrong for two reasons: 1) who’s going to convince the superuser in the first place? and 2) who is that superuser anyway? The answer is that we don’t know, and if we rely on picking out superusers, then we’re limiting ourselves to only niches and communities we can think of. There are many more (stay-at-home moms? office grunts?) that we may never know of, and targeting superusers within each community is a gross waste of time.

The article you’ve linked to has a good point, and it is this: if you want to convince people – superusers, even – to take up a cause, then you’ll need to start convincing them now. And while videos may not be the best format, like you say, the idea that epiphanies make people share and link is a useful one. It’s one that I’ve not thought of before, and it came as an epiphany to me, and therefore I posted it on Novelr. Now how’s that for a viral marketing campaign?

How will they believe it? When someone they trust (what MCM calls a superuser) says so that’s when.

We have the message – now we need to find the messenger, and that, I suspect, may be the hard part. We need to find someone with reach who is willing to tell the world the message. After that the medium – be it a youtube video, a blog post, a mention on a show or something else is secondary to getting the right person to say it.

Or to put it another way – Weblit needs to find its “Frank Zappa Link”.

Becky