Talent and genius are not all that is required to succeed in writing.  Sure, they’ll take you places a lot of the time.  But there’s a problem that doesn’t have anything to do with how good you are.

There are a lot of other talented people out there doing work just as good, if not better.  And they’re all vying for the attention of the same people you are.  Sure, you can segment the market a bit, and narrow your niche, but ultimately, we’re all looking for readers, and there are only so many (and apparently growing fewer by the year).  Forget the national deficit, we’re running one hell of an attention deficit these days.   Luckily, there’s no shortage of appetite for good stories.  Human being are voracious consumers of the stuff.  But each person is presented with a veritable buffet of choices, and until they try a dish, they have no idea if it will be any good.  It’s  such a big buffet that they might not even know your dish is down there, next to the green bean casserole and the candied yams.  They may fill up on bread.

Okay, I’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it will go.

Writers don’t want to be salespeople.  If we wanted to be salespeople, we wouldn’t be writing. There are no shortage of jobs for salespeople.  Maybe you’ll win the publisher jackpot and get a great marketing deal with your three book contract.  Or maybe your publisher’s internal process will hiccup and the book sellers won’t really know what your book is about, and will have a hard time pushing it to the chains and you’re dead on arrival.   Or, maybe you’ll publish in high quality, but somewhat obscure markets that not nearly as many people read as you might wish.

A lot of the time, the work falls to the writer to market themselves and their work.  You’ll have help along the way, from the editors and publishers who buy your work, but not always.  Then you need to step in, and market yourself.

It’s a bad word though, isn’t it?  I feel slimy just for even saying it.  I’ve had to come to terms with the notion that what I do isn’t really information technology any more so much as it is a form of marketing.  I have the negative stigma attached the idea as well.   But I’ve come to know some excellent and effortless self-marketers in the writing world, and it’s convinced me of the overall value.   They had the talent first, but even talent can use some help.

I’ve talked at length about how to use your website/blog to market yourself.  I’d like to discuss some alternative methods, or at least tangential ones.  So without further wind-up, here are a few more off-the-wall marketing ideas for writers and aspiring writers.  Use at your own risk.

1. Get Em Young

   Volunteer as a speaker for your local school system.  This will probably go over best when you’ve got some credits to your name that you can show to teachers and administration.  Offer your services, explain that you would love to talk to kids about writing.  Bring along age-appropriate free samples (ARCs, magazine issues, and so on), and give it away to the kids.    Hey, if you’re a genre writer, you’re not only doing yourself a bit of a favor, and helping kids, you’re also increasing the exposure of the genre as a whole.   So it’s good marketing and it’s just good karma too.

2. Twitter Away

   You already know about Twitter, right?  I’ve blathered on about it enough.  Here’s the thing… Twitter is infected with self-marketeers, marketing gurus, and all manner of social snake-oil salesfolk.  The Twitterati can smell a marketer from a million miles away.  I can tell from a glance at someone’s stream whether or not they’ve basically created a Twitter account to blare about their work, or product, or whatever.  They’re not subtle.  You need to be subtle, and you do this by not being an asshole. Twitter’s for socializing.  This means you talk to other people, you listen, you participate.  You don’t use it as a broadcast medium.   It’s cool if you plug things now and then, really.  But retweet stuff too.  Answer replies.  Tell people how cool they are.  Be a genuine human being. And stay the hell away from anyone telling you that they have the sure-fire method of gaining you 16,000 followers in 24 hours.  That stuff has to be bogus.

3. Become an Expert (or share your existing expertise)

   This goes back to something I wrote about yesterday, which is that I believe writers should have passions outside of writing itself.  Few of us make a living at this, and I hope some of us have day jobs that we kind of like.  So, make yourself an expert on your passion, and share it with others through online media.  An audience member is an audience member, and no, I don’t have any hard figures to support the notion that a blog reader turns into a book buyer, but a blog reader is one less person who has never heard of you.

   Call it becoming an expert, or establishing authority.  Either way,  you do so by offering something of usefulness to other people.  Like I have been so desperately attempting to do with this blog for the past several weeks.  You can do this by a blog, but you can also do this via find-an-expert sites.  Join a community around the subject and be helpful to others.  Project good energy out and it comes back to you, I have found.

4. Manufacture a Controversy

   Tension sells in fiction and it sells in real life too.   And I’ll be damned if this doesn’t actually work sometimes.  Now, whether or not you do this depends on whether or not you think any publicity is good publicity.  Manufacturing a controversy, even if your outrage is true and heartfelt, can backfire.  Controversies inherently bring emotions to the table, and discussions can turn into flame wars in a second when emotions are at the table.    I’ll be honest.  I wrote some of the things I wrote in yesterday’s post because I knew some people would take exception to them, to the degree that they would be compelled to write a reaction.  That’s not to say I lied, because I believed what I wrote at the time.  But I knew that the “hook” of what I was writing was that some people would disagree with me.

   In the end, I feel bad about it though, and I won’t be using it as a blogging technique again unless I’ve put a lot of thought into my position.  Nick took me down yesterday in about fifteen minutes, and gave me trouble, rightfully so, for not researching before I wrote.    So if you want to manufacture a controversy, keep that in mind.  Do your research and make sure you feel strongly about your subject.

5. Forget Everything I Just Said

   Sometimes, the best marketing a writer can hope for is to be a nice, helpful, genuinely interesting person.  Someone who gives as much as they receive, and who loves meeting and talking things over with new people.  Those people do well because they earn it.

   I’m trying to be that kind of person, but I’m also twittering, sharing my expertise (what little there is), and sometimes, not necessarily by accident, manufacturing a controversy or two.  To the point where I don’t get nearly enough writing done outside of the blog.

   I honestly write these posts out of a desire to be helpful, and to feel like I am engaging in the community around me.  If I’m trying to market anything, it’s my services as a freelancer.  I don’t have a book and my short stories are rare lately.  Maybe the best policy for a writer regarding marketing is honesty and authenticity.

Flash fiction, or stories under 500 words, has seen a boom online, with electronic magazines such as Brain Harvest specializing in them exclusively.   Personally, I don’t find such short stories very satisfying very often, despite my involvement with the Daily Cabal, (which you should check out if you do like flash fiction).  I don’t think I’ve ever written a really successful flash fiction story.   I would argue that flash fiction is even less popular than regular short fiction, which is pretty unpopular in the first place.

You might think that the internet would lend itself to shorter stories, on the assumption that the internet has shortened our attention spans.  I don’t really believe that. I think we have mostly the same attention spans we did before the web began to dominate our entertainment time, but we’re a lot better about evaluating content quickly to determine if it’s worth our attention.  Scanning is the new reading of the 21st Century.

Early on in the web days, there was a lot more experimentation with the idea of hypertext fiction, which in my experience is basically a glorified “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) made with links rather than “turn to page X” instructions.   I’d argue that for “choose your own adventure” stories, the web is a better format than print, but– choose your own adventure stories were just a relatively crude form of interactive storytelling, and video games are a more evolved form of the same thing.  CYOA  books are not printed in nearly the same quantities as they were when I was a kid in the 80s.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the rise of video games has corresponded with the fall of CYOA books. Wikipedia’s article on CYOA references a company called Chooseco that purchased the rights to the original CYOA books, but when I tried to visit the site for said company, all I found was a GoDaddy redirect. I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Choose Your Own Adventure format is effectively played out.

Stories told in an e-mail-like format are really no different from the epistolary format, which has been around since the letter itself.   Wikipedia puts the first epistolary novel appearing in 1485 or so.   Over 500 years old.  So the e-mail format nothing much new, just a slightly different take.  The language might be a bit different, but that same back-and-forth exists, generally written in alternating or single-thread first person present or past-tense.

Some have experimented with Twitter and its 140 character limit.  “Twitter zines” like Thaumatrope publish these stories regularly.  I wrote a serialized story in the twitter format, using the nature of Twitter itself as an aspect of the story, called #futurejer, to what I think was probably varying degrees of success.  Ultimately was the form of story changed by this?  Not very much, I suspect.  It’s just an extremely serialized tale, probably.

I suspect that the ideal format for telling stories online may be the online comic strip.  It is:

• easily scanned, generally read very quickly
• serialized in bite-sized chunks
• visual-rich multimedia, using images to convey ideas faster than words alone can.

Except in maybe a few rare instances, however, it doesn’t take advantage of the hypertextual nature of the web to tell stories, however, so perhaps there has really yet to be a story told that truly utilizes all the strengths of a web format.

I played around with writing comedic comic strips in college, and while my strips generally weren’t great, I learned a lot about rhythm and comedic timing, especially in the 3 panel format.  (I also learned that rarely do two people have the same sense of humor. )  But the comic format as it’s used today mostly gives words over to pictures entirely.  Dialogue, maybe some very basic exposition text, but otherwise, the story rests in the artwork.

What about alternate reality games (ARGs)?  Are they a new form of storytelling?  Or are they simply more interactive fiction or gaming, rather than stories?  As much as I have read about them, I have yet to be fully engrossed in one as it played out, so I can’t really describe the experience.  Have any of you?  Where do you think they fit into things?

In a sense, my Dr. Roundbottom project (currently shamefully fallow)  is a bit of an ARG, leaning more towards an illustrated storytelling style.  Where it differs in an interesting way is that it’s open to audience involvement.  I encourage the readers to adopt characters and personas, to communicate with the characters of the story via the website, and the story changes and adapts to their suggestions, incorporating them into the more traditional narrative aspects.

I don’t know what the ideal format in which to tell a story online is, and this post hasn’t gotten me any closer, but I am nearly certain that it’s not the same format as the print short story.  We read the web differently than we read magazines or text on paper.  Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I leave as an exercise for the reader.  But there are definite differences, and I think we should be considering, as writers, how to better utilize the format to share our tales.

Then again, maybe stories have been honed into the format that they are in because it’s the most “fit” format.  Natural selection has discarded everything else and left us with the ideal specimen?  What do you think?  Have I left out any attempts to use the web to tell stories differently?  I’d love to hear about them.