Welcome to the third part of my 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. In this part: online resources!
This will be the “miscellaneous” part of my series. I have listed these resources in order of importance with the most important one at the bottom.
Before we begin, I just want to reiterate (yes, again) that the cornerstone of a successful promotion is outreach. I have also written up an article on how to implement that concept on social media.
TV Tropes:
TV Tropes is an open wiki dedicated to listing every single trope in every instance of media ever. As such, it is a good place to have a page dedicated to your creative works. This you might want to have grow organically, but there is nothing wrong with dropping your serial in for an example of a trope. Make a list of the tropes that you employ (purposefully or accidentally) and then go to those trope’s pages. For example: if you have a damsel in distress (because you are presumably a time traveler from the nineteenth century) you can list an example of your character on this page and then leave a link to your site.
TV Tropes generates a constant trickle of traffic to my site, with twenty being the most I have seen in a single day. I have never created a page for my works, however, that came organically and was done by fans.
Get Free eBooks:
You can submit your serial’s page to https://www.getfreeebooks.com/submit-your-ebooks/ This has only given me a few views every once in a while.
Tuesday Serial:
Tuesday Serial is a site dedicated to growing visibility to online serial writers. It allows you to submit a link to a chapter once a week and can be a decent resource in your arsenal. This site is designed to work best with twitter (of which I do not use) but it can be good exposure for new serials as they do take the time to highlight newcomers. The site opens their submissions for links to chapters every Tuesday, which can be found here: http://tuesdayserial.com/collector/ They also accept guest posts!
The Top Web Fiction:
The Top Web Fiction is a sister site to The Web Fiction Guide and lists serials by popularity according to reader votes. You can join the list by submitting your web fiction to the Web Fiction Guide. Adding a voting link with a “Call to Action” at the end of each of your chapters can help you climb the list, however, I have had more consistent success by asking my mailing list subscribers to vote in my newsletters. Once a week (when I update) I add a CTA (Call to Action) for a vote at the end of my newsletter. Those that do not vote in the newsletter already have it in mind when they go to read my new chapter and are way more likely to vote with the chapter’s CTA having seen it once already. This kept me on the list for almost a year, landing between #45 and #20 easily. Just being on the list brings in people daily for me.
Web Fiction Guide Reviews:
Being on the front page of The Web Fiction Guide is good, and you can achieve that by either having your serial reviewed or by reviewing others. Keep in mind though: reviews are for the readers. Though a review swap can be a good promotional tactic, it does the reader a disservice if you are only doing it for the sake of promotion. Write compelling and thorough reviews that are fair and have something to say. Keep the readers in mind and write it for the sake of reviewing something first. The exposure it brings is just an added benefit. (Also: I have never seen a giant flux of traffic, just a trickle, so don’t think that the exposure is worth doing it just for promotional reasons). There is a whole discussion of reviews here.
MAILING LISTS
By far my most prized and useful tool in promotion has been the audience that I have already captured and turned into fans. Energizing and fostering my fans is by far the most effective thing I have found to do. All of the traffic generating would also be for naught if I did not have a way to keep them coming back. What use is a 10,000-view spike in a day if it bottoms back out to just ten the next? Get your reader’s email addresses, it is a direct line of communication to them that you cannot get on any social media.
Building a mailing list is simpler than you think, and it is something that the self-publishing community has been doing and championing for years. Set up an account with a service like MailChimp (the first 1000 subscribers or so is free) or Converter Kit (a service created by and for authors) and create an opt-in form for your readers to join your mailing list (there is a link to a tutorial on that at the bottom). Then, and this is important, offer and deliver something of high value upon sign up (your reader magnet). This can be a short story, a book you wrote, or even a highly detailed world map of your setting. The better and the more tempting the offer the more likely your readers are to sign up.
I did not have anything off of the bat when I started my serial to offer. So, I offered a weekly “Nihilist’s Horoscope” that only subscribers could see. Once some time had passed I was able to offer ALL of the horoscopes compiled into a book. Sign-ups nearly tripled with the better offer.
Now, each time you update have a link in your newsletter to your chapter, which ensures that it will be read by your audience. Further, you can then leave a link to your Facebook page, guest-post, or voting page on The Top Web Fiction. It also allows you to build a rapport and relationship with your audience that is incredibly valuable. You can turn a reader into a FAN, and a fan will proselytize their friends for you. Learn how to build one here.
Bottom Line:
However you generate traffic to your story, be it through outreach, social media, or the methods outlined above, it is important that you keep it, and the best way I have found to do that is through a mailing list.
Come back next week as Unice5656 describes in detail how you can build and audience and be famous on Royal Road Legends!
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