So I have only begun to start promoting this website. I installed stapress on Jan. 10th as I figured out that the regular stats program was completely useless. In those 12 days, I have had 108 visitors who looked at 275 pages.If that stayed the same (which it will certainly increase as times goes on), after 3 months, a relatively average submission turn-around time, I’d have 810 visitors, with 2,062 page views. As I think about what I want to do, is it better to have had 810 people looking at my stories, maybe coming back for more, plus all of the tags and search terms that might have brought more visitors to my site, or is it better to have one editor read my story over and reject it in that time?
Let’s look at another way. I wrote a bass scale manual and submitted it once. It was rejected by Mel Bay. I put it up at Lulu.com, and didn’t really promote it, as I was working on a follow-up that I’d promote alongside it, and a lot of other projects. You’d think it would get hits, but in possibly a year, I haven’t sold a single unit. I put the same text up at scribd.com and in 19 days, had 408 people view it, 8 people favorite it, and a comment sent saying:
This is wonderful, I’ve been playing bass for a long time and I’ve never came a scales book so detailed for the instrument. Great!
What did me better?
I’m in the market of promoting myself. I’m in the market of promoting my novels and podcasts. I want to find an agent. If I have a following of 5,000, an agent or two will be among them. I can prove how many viewers I get, my following. I can show comments, actual input from fans, and interaction. I can prove that I have a core following that will translate into sales, and isn’t this all about sales in the long run? What do I gain from submitting a story to a siminishing market that is largely backwards in its practices? Sure there’s a point to getting paid, and there’s a point to getting industry recognition. If I put a story up here, it doesn’t go out for a Hugo Nomination or anything like that. But that can come with time. I can bypass the slush pile by having a following, to a certain extent.
In my thoughts, the scales are tipping towards just releasing my stories when they are ready here. Does anybody else have an opinion? Leave me a comment. Please. Somebody play devil’s advocate.
Recent Comments