I apologise if this is not the right board, but I could not see any other boards that were more appropriate. Please move it if I posted this wrong, and I apologise if I did. Thank you. So I have almost finished a full 80,000-word novel, and I have been looking at options for how to make this available for free on the Internet. However, despite the fact that I do not wish to publish it "for real" - as I am quite convinced that it's simply not good enough for that - I would still like to give the maximum amount of people access to it. I have been looking at websites specifically for this kind of thing, such as writing.com, however it seems that that particular website does not allow any kind of formatting or likewise unless I pay at least 50 $ for a premium membership which, quite frankly, I find ridiculous. Therefore, I would like to know if anyone here might have any ideas for how to upload it online and still get at least some readers? The cheapest option currently seems to be starting my own website and just paying for hosting, which I am getting increasingly tempted to do. I am aware that publishers dislike vanity publishing of this kind, but I quite frankly do not think that I will ever get the chance to work with one, so that is a rather moot point. I am simply looking for the best way to release my novel, born out of my boredom, to the largest amount of potential readers willing to read my story without paying a dime for it. That is, I wish to pay as little as possible, and they should pay nothing, in case I wasn't clear there. Thank you in advance. And again, I apologise if this is not the right board.
If you're looking to just put it online, I've always been a fan of WordPress. You should check it out.
start a blog and put it up there. it's (at least all the ones I know) for free too. You could even put up like, say, a chapter a week and even let people comment on it if you like. That way you would get some feedback on it too. or if you're for a more professional approach just post it and let people read.
I'll take a look at that. Thanks. I've never really done any sort of blogging before, actually, but I'll definitely consider it. I suppose you mean something like LiveJournal or the thing mentioned above? Or something else entirely? As I said, I'm not familiar with these things.
First get it published as a regular paper and ink book, and then make en electronic version available through your publisher. If you can get it published by traditional means, you know it has at least reached the minimum quality level necessary for a mass market. Personally, I would never bother buying a book that has not made it to print. There are plenty of those on my wish list without derdging through cubic yards of the muck of self publihed material looking for the single granule of gold.
I was actually not going to charge any money for it. That was the point. I am going to edit it and whatever else I can do to the best of my ability and attempt to get it up to a professional standard, but I am not willing to go through the whole publication process for months and months. Money matters little to me, what I want is to have people read my story. I've previously used many different mediums for my short stories where they have been well-received. However, for the full-length novel, I wanted to do something where it might hit a larger number of readers than the usual 50 or so that I get upon uploading a story somewhere. Writing.com seemed great until I saw the membership fees. So yeah.
Money for a book is less costly than time. Other than that, same answer. You can easily find ways to post your writing on the Internet. So can everyone else. The result is a virtual tsunami of free reading material, most of which is crap. If your writing is worthy of attention, convince a publisher. And that will be the first step in getting the attention of people like me, i.e. people outside your circle of friends and close relatives.
I am aware of this, but I do not wish to charge money for my writing, and I highly doubt any publisher is going to have the same view when it comes to that kind of thing. I could be wrong, of course, but last I heard, publishers are not altruistic charity services.
if you know your writing isn't good enough for anyone to publish it, why would you want anyone to see it?
An excellent point. Truth be told, I haven't really made any attempts, and I do not wish to try either, as I do not have the confidence to do so.
Try Lulu. It's free, if you don't accept any of their optional 'services'. I just published there, with only moderate difficulty. Once it was all put together right, the process of actual publication takes minutes. If you care to have a look, go to Lulu and search for ' Acres of Mikhail '.
I think Cogito has a point, in the fact that you should get it published first. However, if you really just want people to read it - then give it Scribd.Com. Turn the thing into a PDF file and then submit it on that site. Once done, show people? And hope it gets viral.
Firstly, I agree that you should try and get it published "traditionally" first. It provides a validation and "quality control" to make sure that your work is at a certain standard, and will in turn persuade people that it is worth reading. But since you don't seem interested in that... If I was self-publishing, I'd probably go with Kindle. That said, you still have to make a cover, advertise, etc, etc. From what you've said so far, you seem more interested in simply sticking it on the web and forgetting about it. In that case, I'd recommend something like a free wordpress or blogspot site. But really, I don't see the point: I don't see that anyone would actually want to invest the time to read something that you couldn't put the effort into the get it to a publishable stage and through a publishing process.
