Welcome to the first part of a series on how to promote your web fiction! In this series, I will be going over the paths that an author can take to generate traffic to their web fiction or serial. First, I will be talking about the most important concept in this series: outreach.
The best way to gain an audience is to go where they already gather. This will be a constant theme in this series. The main principle in outreach is this: you want to foster relationships with others in your niche (preferably those with a wider audience) and get your material on their platforms. This works best in the blogging community, but there are ways to do it effectively in web fiction.
Guest posting:
Keep an eye out on other people’s sites for guest posting opportunities. Writing and updating consistently for a long time can be a strain, and every author could use a break from time to time. If no one is offering up a guest slot, approach them with an email and ask for one, but only do so after you have built some kind of rapport. I would not go to the heavy hitters right off the bat. If you just started posting yesterday it is very unlikely that say, Wildbow will take you seriously. Start with the smaller guys and work your way up.
It is also important that you keep niche and genre in mind when you guest post. Just because Wildbow gets a lot of hits does not mean that his audience is a good fit for you. If you write about sailors singing sea shanty rap battles, it is far better that you find someone with a tenth of Wildbow’s audience that writes the same thing as you. Those readers are far more likely to stay.
The best part of guest-posts is that it gives you credibility to readers on that site. Instead of shouting self-promotion into the void you are on a site that they already trust and are vouched for just by being allowed by their favorite author to post there.
A guest-post can take many forms. It can be a non-canonical chapter in another author’s story, it can be a short story in a common genre, or it can even be humorous and prank like. Once a year The Web Fiction Guide does an April Fool’s Serial swap where authors write an April Fool’s post for other author’s serials. This is not just a good way to bring in new readers, it is also an opportunity to meet and collaborate with writers. That rapport that you want to build that I was speaking of earlier? This is a good way to do that.
Make sure you put a short blurb about your own work and a link to your serial at the end of EVERY guest-post that you do, or else this will all be for naught.
Allowing guest posts on your site:
If you are feeling the stress or life gets in the way, reach out to your fellow serial writers and offer them to guest post on your own site. It is very likely that they are going to tell their own audience that they have posted on your site and it is a good way to keep material in front of your reader’s eyes when you do not have anything to post yourself (hence keeping your promise to your readers and keeping momentum).
Outreach does not have to be directly related to web fiction either. Your readers have more than one interest. I will occasionally write nonfiction blog posts for philosophy blogs (philosophy is a strong theme and interest in my serial) and this too has helped me bring in some readers. Further, places like Cracked.com are constantly looking for writers to create articles for them. Just make sure that you write something that your ideal audience will be interested in. If you write a fantasy, a list article on Cracked about the history of D&D is a good start. But if you write a sci-fi there may be little crossover in an article about the history of cheese (unless it’s a cheese-based sci-fi).
Forums:
Outreach with forums is simple but time-consuming: find the forums that your audience gathers on and be a part of that community. That last part is as important as the first. The last thing you want to do on a forum is self-promote and expect results. You have to give more than you take. Answer people’s question, discuss your passions genuinely and be there for a while before you start dropping links. Most forums will allow you some sort of signature tag and you can put a link there to start.
No one likes the guy who steps into a forum, asks everyone to solve their problems, and then complains about something. HELP people, give them a reason to trust you and they will return the favor in kind.
If you are a lurker, and always have been, don’t feel like you HAVE to join the discussion just for outreach. Forum posting is something that you should do only if you like doing it.
The Bottom Line:
Outreach works because it is a form of promotion that is not gratuitous. Readers tend to perceive self-promotion as annoying, sometimes narcissistic, and vapid. By building relationships and putting your material on other people’s platforms, however, you can circumvent this very awkward form of marketing. This will be a long road, and you have to be tenacious in following it, but the results will stack.
Join me next week as I will show you how to implement outreach on social media!
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