Hi. I’m David Barr Kirtley, a fiction writer. You can learn more about me at my website: www.davidbarrkirtley.com |
This past fall, I took a creative writing class at USC with one of my favorite writers, T.C. Boyle. During his office hours, I ended up talking a lot about some of the ways that writers I know are using the internet to get their names out there. T.C. Boyle was really intrigued by this, and kept saying that I should be filling in the other students about this stuff. But there really wasn’t time during the class to do much more than scratch the surface.
So I thought I’d put together this article, so that my fellow students and anyone else who’s interested can find out what I’ve learned about how fiction writers can make use of the internet. First of all, all fiction writers should have websites. Try to make your site as distinctive and memorable as possible, so that people who visit it will remember your name and a bit about who you are. (Any graphics you can add — an author photo, book or magazine covers, illustrations — are a big plus here.) Most importantly, make sure that your site makes it easy for people to contact you. If your contact info is absent or difficult to find, you may be missing out on big opportunities — invitations to submit your work, offers to reprint your work, invitations to speak, offers for film options. You may be saying, “I don’t need a website. I haven’t published anything,” but it’s never too early to start building an audience. Say it’s going to be ten years before your first novel comes out. If you set up a website now, even if only one person a day visits it, by the time your novel comes out that’s about 3,500 more people who’ve heard of you. And hopefully you’ll be getting a lot more than one visitor per day, especially if you start publishing short stories or articles, or if you start up a blog. By the way, make sure that your blog and other web presences list your actual name. Or at least, the name that you actually plan to publish under. If you’re concerned about your privacy, then blog and publish under a pseudonym. But I can’t believe how many author blogs I come across where I can’t even tell whose blog it is. I really enjoy going to bookstores to see authors read their work. Any kind of author, any kind of book. I typically go to two or three such events per week, so over the past few years I’ve probably been to over a hundred author appearances. Most are sparsely attended. An audience of a dozen is about average, and it’s not at all unusual for me to be the only person in the audience who isn’t a close friend or relative of the author. Even fairly well-known writers are unlikely to draw more than thirty or so attendees, and that’s in the most densely populated of American cities (New York and Los Angeles), where I’ve lived. But some authors are different. |
Neil Gaiman readings draw hundreds of attendees. I don’t even know how many hundreds. More people than you can count. Three hundred at least, and easily many more. More than any other author I’ve ever seen. The bookstores always have to stay open for hours after closing time so that everyone who showed up can get their books signed. Neil Gaiman is obviously a well-known writer, but probably not better known than many other writers I’ve seen who draw only a few dozen people. (Certainly not that much better known.) It probably doesn’t hurt that in person he’s charming and clever and photogenic and gives a great performance, but even that can’t explain the numbers. But here’s the thing: Neil Gaiman has a blog — one of the most popular single-author blogs on the internet.
There are a lot of reasons for an author to have a blog, and Neil Gaiman demonstrates one of them pretty well: If you want anyone to show up to your public appearances. If you as an author rely on people to randomly hear from their bookstore newsletter that you’re coming to town, you’re going to be pretty lonely when you show up. But if you have a large number of people who regularly visit your blog to see what funny or interesting thing you’re on about that day, they’re much more likely to notice and care when you mention that you’ll be stopping by their hometown. |
Cory Doctorow gives away free digital copies (both text and audio files) of his work as fast as he can, and he encourages everyone who comes across his work to likewise copy and distribute it. Conventional wisdom indicates that authors wouldn’t make money if they gave away their work for free, but sales of Cory’s printed books actually seem to benefit. What gives?
It may be, as some have argued, that Cory has benefited from the novelty and publicity of “giving books away for free,” and that this is not a viable long-term strategy for all authors. It’s probably the case that people are more comfortable reading a printed book, so that once they’ve sampled the digital version they’re willing to pay to read the whole thing in print. In that case, the strategy of giving away complete digital works might stop being an effective marketing strategy if the audience becomes more willing to read entire books in digital format. Or it may be the case, as Cory argues, that people are willing to pay to support an author that they know and like, so that Cory comes out ahead by making his work as widely known as possible, even if that means that large numbers of readers do choose to read his work without paying him anything. Note that Cory (as I understand it) typically only gives away work online that is simultaneously being distributed through traditional outlets. Therefore, the free content supplements and serves as publicity for an existing profit-making entity (i.e., a publisher or magazine). This is not exactly the same as someone simply posting previously unpublished work online for free. Though that seems to work out for some people too. Major publishers are inundated with submissions, most of them awful, and it’s not unusual for a manuscript from an unknown writer to languish unread for years before being summarily rejected after a quick glance by an intern. So say you’ve written a book that you think is pretty good. What do you do? |
If you’re Scott Lynch, you post the first few chapters on your blog so that your friends can read it, and so that you can see if anyone likes it. If you’re mind-bogglingly lucky, an editor at a major publisher just happens to run across it, reads it, and sends you a note saying, “This is good. Can I read the rest of it?”, and then, having read the manuscript, offers you a book contract.
Note that this is pretty unusual, so don’t just post a couple chapters on your blog and then sit back and wait for the offers to roll in, but it certainly seems to me that it’s not a bad idea for writers to have websites and blogs where they make available a sample of their work. You never know who might stumble across your page. What and how much to post is a little tricky. Some publishers are less/not interested in work that’s already appeared online, though this attitude seems to be changing fast. Still, for the moment I would avoid posting the complete text of a short story or more than a few chapters of a novel that I hoped to sell later. (If you do want to post the complete text of a short story, either pick one that you don’t expect to sell or pick one that’s already been published — with reprints it doesn’t matter so much where it’s already appeared.) So far I’ve discussed making work available online in the context of cooperation with or in hopes of attracting traditional publishers. But are there models that don’t involve a traditional publisher at all? |
John Scalzi was a successful nonfiction writer whose long-running blog had developed a substantial following. For fun he wrote a novel and posted it on his blog, and asked readers to send him a few bucks if they liked it. He ended up receiving several thousand dollars, which is at least comparable to what he probably would have gotten from a major publisher as a new writer for an advance on a first novel. Obviously this is a gamble, and it’s only feasible if you already have a large following, but it’s an interesting experiment, as it demonstrates an alternative model for publishing — give your work away for free and then solicit contributions from those who enjoy it.
More on this in a bit. |
John Scalzi also posted an article on his blog about what made Robert Heinlein’s young adult science fiction novels work so well. The piece was seen by editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who expressed an interest in reading — and who subsequently published — the novel in which John Scalzi put these theories into practice, Old Man’s War. In a recent podcast, Patrick Nielsen Hayden noted that he’s had better luck finding good new novelists by seeking out internet writers who are smart and funny and who have built up followings and then asking those writers if they also write fiction than he has by digging through the publisher’s slush pile (unsolicited manuscripts), and it seems likely that more and more new novelists will be discovered this way.
My short stories have appeared on two science fiction podcasts — MechMuse and Escape Pod, each of which attempted a very different business model. The MechMuse plan was to set up a really nice-looking website with professional illustrations, and to have contributions from big-name New York Times Bestsellers like David Farland and Kevin J. Anderson, and to charge people a small fee to download each issue. The Escape Pod plan was to have a very simple layout (no illustrations) and to provide a new story each week by (at least initially) writers who were not particularly well-known, and (as with the John Scalzi example above) to give away the fiction for free and then solicit donations from listeners who enjoyed the show. I don’t know the exact figures, but MechMuse only lasted two issues, and Escape Pod just passed episode 144, so I’m forced to conclude, much as I like having illustrations for my stories, that the Escape Pod model is the way to go. (Escape Pod now receives enough in contributions to pay $100 per story — and these are reprints — and also now broadcasts fiction from some of the best-known writers around.) It seems to me that people on the internet are extremely reluctant to pay up-front for content. (The fact that it’s such a technical headache for most people to pay for anything online may be a big part of this, and the situation may change if it ever becomes hassle-free for people to make small payments online.) At least for the moment, it seems to me that writers are much better off building up a loyal following with free content and then nicely asking for financial support. Demanding payment up front — the traditional magazine model — seems at least for now to be a complete non-starter on the internet. |
A few years ago I met Brad Listi, a graduate of my writing program at USC. He had recently sold his first novel, and had been faced with the prospect of watching the book sink without a trace, since he was unknown and he knew there’d be no publicity. His agent told him that he had to get on Myspace (which was less well-known at the time). So Brad got on Myspace, friended as many people as he could, and started a Myspace blog. He quickly realized that most of the blogs on Myspace weren’t very good, and that it should be possible to rise to the top, so he blogged every day — posts that were light on text, heavy on graphics, and even heavier on humor and whimsy. It worked. He got his blog onto the list of top blogs on Myspace, where it started receiving 10,000+ views per day, and his online following was enough to get his novel onto the L.A. Times Bestseller List.
Brad’s success shows the potential of using a social networking site to build an audience (though my impression is that this has gotten harder as Myspace has attracted more and more people — and more and more spammers). Having seen the potential of blogging, Brad started up thenervousbreakdown.com, which is similar in tone to his Myspace blog, but collaborative. Blog readers tend to disappear fast if there isn’t a continuous stream of new content, and a group blog makes it easier to provide that amount of content. Cory Doctorow, mentioned earlier, helped start up Boing Boing, a collaborative blog that’s become one of the most popular blogs on the internet, and which, while not focused on fiction, obviously brings a lot of attention to his novels. |
Another group blog that does focus on fiction is sfnovelists.com, founded by Tobias S. Buckell. Among the younger generation of writers, Tobias is among the most savvy about using the internet to build a following and get his work seen. He runs a popular blog, in which he encourages an unusually high level of reader participation in his projects, and he also uses technology in ways that are unusual for an author, such as posting trailers for his books on YouTube.
Aside from him, it seems to me that YouTube is being underutilized by writers. There are a fair number of clips in which popular authors give interviews or readings, but that’s about it, as far as I can tell. One of the more popular videos I’ve seen is They’re Made Out Of Meat, an adaptation of a short story by Terry Bisson. This video has at least 100,000 views on YouTube. When you consider that most American fiction magazines have circulations of fewer than 15,000 (usually much fewer), and that each story in them is probably actually viewed by only a fraction of that, 100,000 views on YouTube looks pretty significant. (Though of course, there’s no guarantee that any of the YouTube viewers will take an interest in the author. But you never know.) |
One other author who’s doing something interesting with YouTube is David Barr Kirtley, an extremely talented young writer who … hey, wait! That’s me again! Oh well, it’s my article, I can put my face in as many times as I want to. Besides, I’m running out of material. Anyway, I wanted to post something on YouTube relating to my fiction, and a live action short film is a little too ambitious for me right now, so I put together a little “video picture book” treatment of the first scene of my short story “Save Me Plz.” It’s an experiment. Hopefully it’ll pique people’s interest and then they’ll go and read the whole story. This is something I think most authors could do. I taught myself the software and did the graphics and everything in a few days. The fact that after only a few hours my video started showing up on YouTube as one of the top results for “short story” is a testament to how little there currently is on YouTube of a literary nature.
Well, that’s about everything I can think of right now about what fiction writers should know about the publicity potential of the internet. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little article. If you have any feedback, you can find my contact info over at www.davidbarrkirtley.com. Thanks! |
Lynn Barry says
I learned about your blog via the TCBOYLE.COM site.
Thanks for the useful information.
Lynn
Catullus says
Thanks for relaying information about getting “known”; the publishing industry seems to be changing fast and individual writers seem now to have more options to get their work read. Gonna put you on my “favorites” list…
Rob Darnell says
Thanks for writing this. There’s a couple ideas here that I’m thinking to try. I’ve always been uptight about posting any of my fiction online. Now I’m thinking that I might blog an occasional short story, for fun and to see how it’s received.
It now occurs to me that maybe I’ve been taking this writing thing a little too seriously and it might do me some good to lighten up and relax about it.