Have uploaded a short story to various Facebook groups. Been waiting for a day now. Zero, zilch, nada response. It is a bit disheartening, but I suppose my backup plan is still in the works. How do you guys deal with no interest and or failure to reach an audience? What tips and tricks do you have to get an audience? How do you keep motivated to continue your stories when there seems to be no interest in them? I am giving out my short stories for free, sure I am no professional writer, but it would still be nice with one or two comments and some interest. I guess the problem is that there is already so much free stuff out there that is many times better than what a novice like myself can cook up. Thoughts?
Do you have peole you interact with there frequently? Those would be the main ones to take a look at it. Just like here, it's mainly people you've already interacted with (if it went well) who will bother to give you a critique, that plus new members hoping to get their stuff critiqued. That's why it's set up that way here, otherwise it would be a deafening desert of crickets. I don't know why people think the ineternet is different from real life—you have to get out, mingle, and be friendly if you want friends (or the internet equivalent of them). Otherwise you're another drop in a vast digital ocean with no connections.
I'm not really looking for critique, that I do here. On social media I'm more looking for interest in my work. I have mingled a little and posted some work before that got some comments and interest. I do not expect to be fameous over night, but it would be nice with a few people just commenting or showing some interest. I understand that there are no free get popular quick hacks.
I was just using critique as an example of ways people interact online. If there were no 2 for 1 rule here nobody would talk to each other, we'd just all be posting stories and nobody would be reading them. Except for those of us who come here for the socials.
I have no idea. Good on you for trying some stuff. What kind of groups did you try? Is there a way you can narrow your efforts to a particular audience? Did you try incorporating graphics to help catch eyes? In what timeframe are you expecting results? Also just one short story seems like very little content, in my opinion. If I were marketing that way, and again I don't have any experience in that area, I would get a half-dozen or so short stories written up, then release them for free periodically—maybe with some fanfare. I think it takes a lot to build readership.
I appreciate that you would like to read it, I may post it on the workshop for critique in the future. For now I just wanted to get some ideas as to how to get your work read by strangers. Good ideas. I posted it in a general writer's group. Maybe I should try my luck in a genre group. I'm in it for the long game, so if I get results in a few years, that will also make me excited. Waiting for an illustration from an artist as we speak.
Have you considered posting your stories on Medium? I haven't really been active there this year, but in 2021 I put a few things online there and found it an interesting experience. Readers can "clap" for stories they like as well as leave comments, so there's an easy way to measure their engagement, and you get stats on how many viewers a piece gets, how many read to the end, and how they found it, which can be valuable information. Most pieces have a brief spike of readers for the first week or two and then die out, but if a piece gets a little traction, the algorithm will continue recommending it; one story that I published in June 2021 still gets about 7-10 views a week. It's no easier to build an audience there than it is anywhere else, but it's definitely possible. Quite a few Medium "publications" are basically pass-throughs that will publish nearly anything you submit to them, so you can easily get a foot in the door, but getting into one of the more selective publications definitely makes a big difference in the audience. I mostly published humor shorts there, and the pieces in Slackjaw got significantly more readers than the (essentially self-published) ones in The Haven, for instance. You can also just post stories to your own page without going through a publication, but then you're counting on the algorithm and/or human curators to pick it up. That's possible, but probably more likely once you're already got a few followers. But who knows? Lightning can strike anytime.
@AntPoems Thank you for the recommendation. I will check out Medium and see how it is. I posted a poem on wattpad a long time ago, but I have heard bad things about that site, so I am wary of using it. Anyone got experience with that or other places to share your work?
You might consider submitting your stories to ezine markets that publish the sort of thing you write. Some pay for content, others do not. But, if accepted--it may get an edit, depening on the market--but would be published to a readership that supports the ezine. Of course, not all are created equal, but if your goal is to have some eyes on your writing efforts, this may be a way to go. Of course, read the contract offered, ensuring that rights revert back to you and what rights you are granting to the publisher.
Thanks for the recommendation. I don't know if my work is good enough for such publication, but it might be worth a try.
As I recall, Medium seemed mostly focused on essays, but there were certainly people writing (and presumably reading) poetry and short stories, too. I know that when I was active in 2021, a lot of people were talking about vocal.media as an alternative, and many were cross-posting pieces to both platforms. I checked it out briefly, and it seemed pretty similar to Medium, but I never investigated in depth, and I don't know if it's still popular these days. The other big option then seemed to be Substack, which I never really looked at; I've also heard of WattPad but never used it so can't comment about it. Good luck in your search!
Sure. It's basically just a blogging platform. You create an account and can write and publish anything you want, and the all-powerful algorithm decides if and when to push your work to readers' feeds. They also claim to have human curators who can pluck a piece out of obscurity and decide it should be widely disseminated. As with any social media system, people argue incessantly over how best to game the system. You can just push your work out on your own profile, but there are plenty of publications hosted on Medium, and they're probably the best way to get your work noticed from the start. As I mentioned earlier, some are more selective than others, so you'd have to do a little research to find the right ones for your style; I mostly know the humor publications. The officially-recognized Medium partner publications get a lot of traffic and algorithm advantages; the two pieces I had accepted at Slackjaw both got selected for wide distribution and received over a hundred views, whereas the ones I published in smaller venues mostly got a dozen or two, with two exceptions. The first was accepted by a much less-selective publication but got selected for distribution anyway (woohoo!), and the other was never officially distributed but has maintained a small but steady amount of traffic, apparently just enough that the algorithm keeps it in continuous circulation. That one's up to 435 views as of today! By default, whatever you publish is available on the web and can be linked to and found through search engines. Unless you specify otherwise, everything goes behind the Medium paywall (and most publications require that), but you can get friend links to share with people who aren't paid members (and they get 3 free stories a month anyway). You can view stats about your stories' activity and see how many viewers they get, which can be disheartening if you're getting views but no reactions, but also surprising and informative. Many of my pieces show traffic from several different searches engines, and I wonder what the hell people were searching for that brought them to my goofy stories.
