Has anyone self-published their work using a site like wordpress or blogger? My girlfriend brought up a decent alternative to the novel tonight, and I'm seriously considering giving it a go since I really don't care about making money nor publicity with this story. If you're familiar with the synopsis of Rain When I Die, you know it's the diary of a heroin addict who (by the later stages) contracted HIV from a dirty needle and committed suicide as a result. Being that it's in a diary/blog post format anyway, I was thinking about changing the successful suicide to a failed attempt and posting the entries & short stories that would have made up the novel in real time under the pseudonym of the MC from the novel (while making it very clear all post content is a work of fiction.) The advantage of this is, unless I buy a domain it's free, advertising is relatively easy, and whereas a novel has a finite ending, a blog is perpetual e.g. as the MC faces new challenges and situations, the story line can easily be expanded and added on to. Opinions?
if that's what you want to do, why not do it? just keep in mind that if you later want to try to get the work published as a book, no paying publisher will take it on, unless your blog has gone viral...
It is, but you'll be perpetually dependent on Blogger's or wordpress.com's terms of service, which are changeable without notice, and they owe you no duty of care, and (at least at Blogger) it's even possible for blogs to disappear in the night without any breaches of their terms of service, and so on. And if you ever want to put any advertising/promotion of any kind on your site at all, you wouldn't be allowed to do that at WordPress (I know people do, but they're living very dangerously indeed!). A better plan, if you need it to be free, might be to use self-hosted WordPress but host it on one of the good, reliable, well-established free hosting companies who don't put their own advertising or any "buttons" on your site there? Three good ones to look at are byethost.com, 000webhost.com and freehostia.com. If you'd rather be a paying customer instead (and there's a lot to be said for that, especially when "something goes wrong") you might try hostica.com, which costs only $1 per month for a single site. You can install WordPress blogging software at any of those place, of course, also free of charge, if that's what you want to use. And any of them will give you a free subdomain of your own choice, just like blogger.com or wordpress.com will. Either way, you'll be much more secure for the long-term than you would be by starting off at either blogger.com or wordpress.com.
