In maintaining this journal through the years, along with its many and varied predecessors, I’ve made one small observation about what people want from writers and their blogs. On a blog people generally don’t want fiction. They do want things that are interesting, but for fiction they read books, not blogs. On occasion I think people will read fiction if it comes in a dedicated package built just for carrying the fiction–such as Down in the Cellar, or Southern Fried Weirdness (two sites that just happen to host stories written by yours truly), websites that are built just to entertain people with their fiction. But for blogs, readers seem to want slice-of-life vignettes, informational stubs, a few essays and some news.
One reason I say this is because through the years I’ve posted numerous stories on my blogs, but for some reason, while people will read my work on another site or in a book, they don’t want to read it here. It’s not necessarily that they don’t like it, they never even give it a try. It makes me wonder if building a site just for fiction alone would be worthwhile, if people want it that way.
If you are posting fiction on your blog, I’m not telling you to stop, I’m just saying that in my opinion, that’s not where people want to read it. Maybe I’m wrong; what do you think?
If you liked that post, then try these...
The Big Idea: Matt Mitchell on July 1st, 2008
Writer's Web on February 7th, 2008
Writing the Near Future on April 23rd, 2008
Modern-Day Mythica on March 24th, 2008
Indie Author on March 13th, 2008
March 11th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
I don’t care Matt, I’m still posting my pathetic first novel until it’s finished! LOL Even though it’s available all over the internet as a dedicated page and as a pdf file. There is the small chance that someone who stumbles upon the blog, might not know it exists and I sucker them in by reading chapter 12.
Actually, I think you are right about long fiction. But I still post short, short fiction like flash fiction on Fridays at my blog. When I have something cute or interesting that I know is not worth selling. Getting one dollar for a flash fiction piece at some web site is just about pointless. I give my flash fic away. But at least a person can read it in as long as they spend reading a short blog post.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I actually think you can get by with flash fiction and even poetry (although good poetry, in my estimation, is a very, very rare thing).
And as for long fiction and your novel; I do have an observation and I hope you’ll only take it as a suggestion. Why don’t you build a new page for your blog, title it “Starstrikers,” and then use that title page to link to each chapter of the book. The title page could also be the parent page for the chapters, so each chapter wouldn’t show up with your pages at the top of the blog, but if someone clicked on that page, they would see all the chapters lined up for them. That, to me, would be one solution that would make a kind of dedicated mini-site just for your book. It would make it easier to find for folks who wanted to just read the book (I’m telling you this, too, as a potential reader of it…because I do still intend to read it…) What do you think?
March 12th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Actually, it’s been online in a perfectly readable fashion for years now here –> http://www.w0pht.org/starstrikers.php I just have not mentioned it lately.
I’m not going to be making much of a deal about Starstrikers for the time being. I just wanted the text searchable in the blog database. If you click on the Starstrikers category you can find all the posts about that novel including the novel. I could just dump all the chapters on-line at once, but that would make for boring Tuesdays.
I do like your idea of showcasing it on the blog, and I have thought about it before, but because it’s my first novel and not especially great, at least in it’s current state, I just don’t want to draw that much attention to it yet. In fact I will take it off the blog sidebar as soon as Barren Worlds comes out.
Someday, probably years from now, I will come back to it and fix it up to make it presentable. By then, I hope to have a publisher who might buy it. Otherwise, it’s just part of my million words under the bridge.