5 More Ways for Writers to Market Themselves
There are two schools of thought on marketing and writing. Some think that marketing can lead to great success, or that marketing alone is responsible for the success. Dan Brown is someone I hear this accusation levied at from time to time. Others will argue that no amount of marketing will make a bad story good. Bad in this case generally being bland and boring. I waffle back and forth between these opinions depending on the writer and how jealous I feel, but ultimately, I ascribe to a synthesis of the two.
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.
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May 25th, 2009 | Tags: authority, marketing, twitter, Writing
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10 Things Your Website Should Have if You Are An Author
1. Your own domain name.
In this day an age, a domain costs almost nothing, and hosting, not much more. I charge $15 a year for a domain and $20 a year for hosting for my clients, and there might be cheaper (but less feature-rich) hosting available out there. Sff.net might have been cool a decade ago, but it’s not now. It just looks unprofessional. Buy a domain, and if you can, make it your full publishing name. If you can’t, don’t get too clever, by which I mean don’t pick something you’re going to hate 10 years from now. Domain names can be changed, but you should really try to avoid it, to preserve your ratings in the search engines.
2. A biography and bibliography with lots and lots of links.
If someone is coming to your website, it is likely that they want to know who you are, and what else you’ve done. Don’t be stingy here. Don’t publicize anything you’re embarrassed of, such as that mpreg slash fic that you wrote late one night while drunk, but definitely include your bibliography, and if your story is available online, for free in a webzine or for sale in some form, link to it. If you don’t, you’re missing a chance for a sale to a potential fan.
3. A News Blog with an RSS feed. Or a newsletter. Or both.
Note that I said a News Blog. Writer blogs are great entertainment, but they are notoriously cluttered with nonsense quizzes, word counts, whining, and so much other crap that finding out when an author you like has a story coming out can be harder than it should. Maintain a clean weblog that is simply for announcing your sales, appearances, and other professional items of interest. Don’t use it to post pictures of your cats. I’m an RSS feed man myself, and I think they are the future, but perhaps you should do an email mailing list as well. Post the same content to both, but make sure it’s clear that they are the same information, so your fans don’t sign up for both and get irritated for receiving duplicate information.
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May 22nd, 2009 | Tags: advice, authors, web design, Writing
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Why Hasn’t Story Itself Changed with the Web?
The structure and nature of short stories haven’t really changed in the digital age, as far as I can tell. They’re still told the same way mostly, same perspectives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3-7000 words). E-zines are for the most part straight forward adaptations of the print magazine format, to varying degrees. PDF magazines are identical to print magazines, except they’re read on a screen instead of on paper, or even printed off by some. E-zines like Strange Horizons make use of basic hypertext features, but the stories themselves do not take advantage of of any of those features except in rare occasions.
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.
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May 19th, 2009 | Tags: Dr.Roundbottom, ezines, story, structure, twitter, Web, Writing
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