Writing
 Thought
for the Writer's Day: Marketing Your
Online Novel
I'm still looking through previous NaNoWriMo
entires, and the exercise is proving instructive. I
had always assumed that people publish novels online
because they want other people to read them, but now
I'm not so sure.
I certainly want my books to have an audience, and
whenever I can think of a way to attract more people
here, I give it a try. The more the better.
But it looks to me that the good folks who write fiction
for the annual NaNoWriMo contest are content, on the
whole, to remain unread. NaNoWriMo's list of winners
(defined as people who made it to 50,000 words) runs
to 118 pages, each of which appears to list 50 authors.
Yet many of those authors don't have a link to their
site, so all you see is their user id, location and
the title of their book. Happily, NaNoWriMo provides
a set of search filters, and I discovered that the list
of writers who provide a link from their NaNoWriMo biography
entry to their site or blog runs to just 54 pages. So
more than half the people who wrote books no longer
let you read them. Perhaps they never let you read them.
Nevertheless, let's focus on the 54 pages of people
who do link to their own site. Multiply 54 by 50, and
you'll get a number larger than 2,500, so I was expecting
to see links to 2,500 novels, some of which, I hoped,
I might like.
Alas, no. Blogs come and go, and many of the links
that I clicked led me to blogs that had gone. Other
links led me to blogs that were tricky to navigate around.
If they had ever included the text of a novel, it was
hard to find and, after a fair trial I gave up.
Just a very few links led me to actual books. This
is a rare example of one that did. It really is so simple
to make life easy for your readers.
In the past I've mentioned write-only memory (WOM)*,
the technology used to store many blogs. It is half
the price of regular memory, because the read circuitry
can safely be omitted. I find it rather strange that
people go to the trouble of writing a story 50,000 words
long, publishing it worldwide, and then doing absolutely
nothing to attract an audience. The publishing industry
will never take notice of struggling writers if we behave
like this.
* If you happen to need WOM, incidentally,
I have a better deal than any blog currently offers.
I'm selling lifetime subscriptions for 50,000,000 terabits
of WOM for just $9.99. Get it while it lasts. (Offer
expires 9/16/05. Errors and omissions excepted.)
Reading Sequence: There is now three years of material on
this site. Click here for a suggested reading sequence.
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