And yay, I convinced you to do something! :D Hopefully the antholozine we were working on (at Weblit.us) will get started again once the lives of the people who know what they’re doing have calmed down–maybe you can participate in that.

As for joining: you have a point. I’ll sign up for an account. I don’t see the need of discussion there, for the most part, (barely have even enough time here and on WFG!) but if they ever start a community-based project, and I can help, I’ll chip in.

P.S. My first name does not have an “i” in it.

If there is something to do there, though, a specific project I can contribute to, a codebase, or something, I’ll join, no problem.

Readers, I think, will soon be the key, the glue that holds future community sites together. Where they are, the community will follow. At least, that’s what I think would happen. Need to straighten my head a little before I can make a coherent argument justifying that thought. (Psst: you’re already doing one of that, Jan, with ErgoFiction … it should be interesting what we find out about new readers …)

Even with the birth of weblit.us, which I believe had the original goal to unite forces to promote web-fiction, I feel nothing has really materialized there yet. Let’s cross our fingers they will.

What I’d really really love, is some sort of CON web-fiction package. I think we’re missing a huge possible crowd by not having something general available about Web-Fiction.

So to conclude this tl;dr reply: I think what you do is less important than how much you commit to it … be that $$ or in time and effort, you are going to pay for promotion somehow.

Not necessarily, Isa. It’s also time, and effort in the right places, with the right mediums. True?

But I thank you for the point about LiveJournal. That certainly is another place with a high density of potential web fiction readers. It’s certainly taken more time, though, to attract them to Fluffy seme. Lots of work.

@Dary: Furry comic is a remarkably cool genre name. I, too, have no idea why I’m compelled to point that out to you. ;-)

As for the livejournal thing, it’s not a strategy that will work for most. It worked for me because I started out with a very content starved niche (girls who love hockey … no I’m not kidding). I found a nice fanfiction community, checked the rules to make sure I wasn’t going to make a pest of myself, and started posting parts of Season in the Red. With each part, sometimes a couple of days before, sometimes a day after, I would also post a piece of fanfiction.

I think what most writers miss about readers is that people open your story not to read the story you want to tell, but the story they want to read. If your story is not something that interests them, they won’t read. If your story is something that interests them but does not play out the way they want it to, they won’t read it. There’s this shared delusion that as long as a work is well-written it will convince people not interested in the content to become interested, this is very very rare.

Anyway, in this sort of self-serving environment people are more willing to read fanfic than they are to read original fiction because fanfic cuts to exactly what they want. They don’t have to wait, someone else has done all the character development and world building for the writer, you can skip straight to the juicy stuff.

So I used stories that I knew would get read to promote myself to my target market. They would read the fanfiction, love it, than because new quality content in the niche is hard to find, scroll down and read Season in the Red too. The first book of Season in the Red came in over 300 pages and that core of fans that found it through my LJ followed it religiously all the way through. Now that I’m prepping the second tome (lol) in the series I get comments asking when it will be coming out.

I don’t crosspost Season in the Red on LJ anymore, I haven’t in almost a year (I feel like there’s only so long you can post a long ass original series in a fanfic community before you wear out your welcome) but I do post previews (with appropriate links of course) of both Season in the Red and Split-Self on my LJ and I often repurpose fanfic memes to let people request Season in the Red fiction on my LJ. Every time I do this I get a whole bunch of quality hits back to fluffy-seme. Just yesterday I was amused to find Google Analytics tracking someone reading through Season in the Red from the very beginning who had come in from digging up one of my old posts on LJ. They spent over an hour reading, then came back the next day and spent another hour reading.

So to conclude this tl;dr reply: I think what you do is less important than how much you commit to it … be that $$ or in time and effort, you are going to pay for promotion somehow.

See, I’m the opposite XD Which proves there’s no one method that will work for EVERYONE. In terms of webcomic advertising there are several common sense things to keep in mind, such as:
- what are the demographic you’re advertising to?
- does your advert appeal to them?
- does your front page appeal to them?

If I didn’t illustrate my story or segue into actual webcomic territory at points, I doubt I’d have had nearly as much success as I did. BUT that also doesn’t mean everyone should go out and get themselves an illustrator. I’m just lucky I can tap into that audience (and my stuff is likely far more appealing to those demographics than those from the webwhateverficserialthing scene). And it should be considered that there are hundreds of webcomics covering different topics. Well, maybe. A lot of them filter into “furry comic”, “comedic fantasy”, “manga spoof” and “bad geek humour” XD

ALSO I’ve not seen that many ads for webfiction around, and of those I’ve seen a lot just aren’t that appealing. For one thing they tend to be VERY SERIOUS. Also people seem to stick with one for months. I have a policy of changing my ad design at least once a month, if not more. It keeps things fresh and alerts people who may have seen a previous ad that you’re still forging ahead.

What I’ve been thinking would be a good idea lately is to pool resources with writers who are doing things in the same genre as I am. Finding some way to promote all the “superheroic fiction” serials at once would probably be easier than separately. We could even do big crossover events…

Similarly, I’m reminded of the early days of web comics. Back then I remember noticing groups of comics that linked to each other as a group. I don’t know how that worked for them, but I know I discovered several comics that way.

@Becky: For some reason, I just love the word Tweeps, and am compelled to point that out to you here. (I should go to bed now, it’s 5am).

There’s a lot of good stuff in this post and it’s going to take some time to digest it all. So I’ll be back later to comment in depth.

But, yeah, the scattershot approach to marketing doesn’t work well. I’ve been thinking about this, because my Tweeps have finally persuaded me to launch a web fiction serial of my own. I’m trying to come up with a promotion plan in advance of my launch sometime in January. This is interesting given my limited funds. I’ll come up with something, and it will be something coherent. And yes, it will probably involve webcomics.

Thinktanks to identify sympathetic sites are a good idea. A list of popular sites which might be willing to accept guest blogs, review online fiction, or otherwise give us the spotlight would be a welcome thing.

The funnel sites are also a good idea as long as they can actually attract the new readers to funnel.

Promoting web fiction in general, or in particular, is very much a learning as we go thing.

So another thing we could do with is for people to talk about what they are trying individually, and if it works (and if so how well) or not. Collating information on activity, investment and return would reveal what works best for which genre (it may not be the same after all) would be useful. Once I get started I’ll be happy to contribute to such a project by blogging about my experiences.

Anyway I’ll be back with more coherent thoughts later.
Becky

… one person has some luck with one strategy and suddenly everyone tries that strategy expecting instant results

To be honest, I don’t think even one person has had some luck. They just thought it to be a good idea, as in LOOKIE! YOUTUBE VIDEO! and so on.

PS: No worries, ideas have always been more important on Novelr, regardless of how they’re written.