I don’t know if the scarily long archive is putting people off but I have to consider that it might be. And then I have to consider how to solve this.

Of course there is no solution that will work for everyone but I have thought of something that might work for some people (people with ereaders to be specific), and I’d like a little feedback.

Three Chapter Ebooks.

That is ebooks that encompass three chapters each and retail for £0.99 (approx $1.61 or €1.12). Now three chapters may not sound like a lot but given the length of my chapters we’re talking 20 to 25k words a book here. I suppose I could up it to 6 chapters, but I feel there’s kind of a natural break point at the end of chapter three and chapter six (like mini arcs within the big arc). I haven’t checked nine and twelve yet but I know there will be one at the end of fifteen, so I suspect they will as well.

And why the cost when I could post the ebooks on Smashwords for free? It’s a convenience cost – if people want they can read the whole thing on the website for free. The ebook is a convenience for people who want to be able to carry the story around with them and read offline, or who don’t like reading on backlit screens but like/don’t mind e-ink screens. Also the ebook would be ad free – paying for ad free is time-honoured on the web (as much as anything is on the web).

Problems I can see:

I will either have to:

1. Faf around with a load of expensive red tape (and getting a passport)
2. If unwilling to jump through said expensive hoops have the US government nick 30% of my earnings from sales in spite of being a British person in the UK. And #1 is only worth it if the extra earnings with be more than the cost. (note: I don’t deny the US tax peeps the right to check I’m really not American or resident there, but there has to be a less complicated/expensive way to do it).
3. Or maybe sell the books through my own website only. Which may put some people off, because how do they know I’ll send them the ebook? They don’t know me from Eve.
4. People might not buy them – but this is a relatively minor problem as long as I keep the cost of making them down.

I’m itching for feedback on this idea. Is this a good idea? If it’s terrible don’t be afraid to tell me – I need to know. Do you think I should make the ebooks, but have them being free. Can you think of any other helpful ideas to alleviate archive horror.

Her latest release is Code Walker, which you can find on Amazon and Smashwords for 99 cents for a limited time.

–

Playing Goddess of Creation

Since Becka mentioned world building was of particular interest to her, that’s what I’m going to yap about.

One of my most favorite species of characters to pop into the House of Craze is the Katarr. They’re a felinoid species of my creation in the After the Fall series. I love them so much that I named my publishing imprint after them (Katarr Kanticles Press).

Their species and planet name are the same, and they speak Katarran. It’s a jungle planet, and the Katarr themselves can be any normal house cat or big cat colors and patterns, though perhaps a bit more exotic with some combinations.

For example, Pral (the Katarr warrior in A Little Nip, co-written with JC Montgomery) is a black tiger: black furred with white striping.

Part of the world building for them included writing some back-story on their evolution, which became A Brief History:

In the beginning, thousands of years in our past, our race was controlled by the most primitive of instincts: the need to survive.

We were driven by the need to hunt and mate to continue our bloodlines.

The strongest males of that time took as many mates as they could to breed upon.

When one was challenged and defeated, his progeny was slaughtered by the new leader of those groups.

Bloody as that time was, it did lead to the seeds of the culture we are proud to claim as our own today. The weak were weeded out; our strength increased, as did our intelligence.

Our females are the ones who planted the seeds of the Creed. Their instincts to protect their young formed; as a result, during battles for domination of a group, some of them left, taking their kittlings with them. Others faced and defeated the successful challengers.

As this grew to be more common, our males took notice and our females held a great Council. It was decreed that they would no longer allow themselves to be seen merely as breeders; instead, they’d accept only one mate, who wouldn’t be allowed to hunt and claim other females.

Some males immediately saw the wisdom of this decision, and so began the formation of the twelve great Clans. A new age dawned, where those who worked together began building cities. The twelve Clans developed into the twelve Great Houses.

There were bloody wars for territory during that period of our history between the Houses. Eventually, however, peace fell upon Katarr and our time of reason began.

Each Great House was allowed to form twelve Lesser Houses, so that every Katarr has a House to claim allegiance to. Our cities grew and our race made great advances in science as the Creed was taught to all kittlings so that they would learn to control their primitive natures and be more than animals battling for survival.

This has led to what we are today.

We have fought our worst enemies – ourselves – and we have won.

We are warriors, fierce and strong. We strive always to be just and honorable in our actions. We do not view love or succoring those weaker than ourselves as weaknesses.

We must never forget the countless numbers sacrificed along the path to achieve this goal, and we must never lessen those sacrifices by reverting to the violent beings we once were.

We are stronger together than separate, and our race will survive regardless of what may befall us as a people because of that.

Another thing was written that acts as a guideline to how Katarr behave (JC helped with this as well).

Some highlights from The Katarr Warrior Creed:

•A warrior must always be prepared to fight until his last breath to defend females, kittlings, and House.

•Females are the means of continuation of our kind, therefore must be protected above all others, even before kittlings, since they themselves will fight until their last breath to protect those kittlings.

•It is a matter of honor to protect those who are unable to protect themselves, regardless of species. As Katarr warriors, we are strong, and the strong should always protect the weak.

•Kittlings are to be raised with kindness, patience and understanding. Our young represent our uncontrolled instincts; it is our duty to teach them to control those instincts once they are old enough to begin understanding.

•Kindness and love are not weaknesses; they are our greatest strengths.

•There is no dishonor in failure to succeed, only in failure to act. We may not always win the day, and must understand that our sacrifice(s) may allow others to do so in the future.

What I wanted were knights who actually adhered to a code of chivalry. Fortunately, the Katarr Voices in my brain were quite happy to be knights.

These knights just happen to be furry, have fangs, retractable claws, and tails.

We also have a list of worlds and more alien species we’ve come up with for this universe. World building can be a lot of fun, no matter how you go about doing it. These are just a couple of ideas of useful building blocks.

Thanks for having me here today, Becka! =)
–

Just a reminder G.L. Drummond’s latest release is Code Walker, which you can find on Amazon and Smashwords for 99 cents for a limited time.

So it’s Read an E-Book Week again, which is kind of cool. And who would have thought ebooks were 40 years old?

But while I was buying ebooks and sending them to Aldiko and Kindle for Android I had a thought.

Do we want/need a “Read a Weblit Week”? I have a number of reasons for thinking that it’s not a bad idea.

1. It gives us a shared platform to get behind. One not based on reviews. Even though I’m setting up The Weblit Review I think that a platform that isn’t review based would be helpful. People have a natural inclination to avoid supporting places where they’ve been panned – we don’t want to limit either our support or our honesty.
2. In my experience people are more likely to try new stuff during special events. And if we can get a whole bunch of people to try weblit some of them will stick around.
3. It gives a short period of time to focus attention on. Meaning we can make a concentrated burst instead of diluting our efforts by spreading them out.
4. I think it would be fun. Er, yes, never say fun isn’t important.

—

So that being so how do we go about it?

1. We need a website and domain name. Neither of these is hard to obtain. I’d recommend weblitweek.com I think.
2. We need to decide on a date. Do we put it close to Read an E-Book week to try and piggyback off its success (which would leave us waiting until 2012 since it’s too late this year)? Or do we put in autumn so as not to exhaust people with to many things? (In which case we can possibly do it this year).
3. The site will need a good design. Beyond that how much do we emulate the ebook week site’s structure? Sections on “History” and “Benefits” definitely. The “Readers” and “e-book store” sections are a bit pointless for weblit. “Partners” – um, yes, well. Not sure how those would work here. “Promotion” – well, obviously.

–

Now between writing my serial, trying to get The Weblit Review set up and launched, and working a full time job I don’t really have time to work on something else, and I can’t really afford to setup another new website. But if other people are willing to pay for the hosting and work on the design etc I am willing to pay for the domain name and research and write the “history of online fiction” article for the site.

And, of course, to put my all into helping to promote it.

We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say, because it’s total crap.

He’d made this joke many times before but this time it hit the papers. Once it did it looked like he was saying that Ratners was making its money by fleecing its customers. He’d unintentionally called his customers stupid and they were not happy. He lost his job and the company nearly went bust.

People don’t like it if you call them stupid and they vote with their feet and their pennies.

Now Ratner insulted his own customers, and he didn’t even mean to, but the same applies to insulting your competitors’ customers. If you call them stupid they are not going to buy off you.

Over at Novelr Eli has posted a couple of posts about the success of indie author Amanda Hocking (Here and Here), the posts are interesting but the comments are shocking. There are people denigrating Hocking’s writing and suggesting her readers buy it because they are only borderline literate and don’t know how bad it is. What’s worse these people are writers.

*Facepalm*

Look, I don’t care if her writing seems to defy everything they taught you in creative writing class. Her readers are your potential readers as well. You do not call them stupid for reading her stuff, that will just make them avoid your stuff, because you come across as a pretentious prat who doesn’t want them.

The venom about Hocking’s work got so vicious that I became curious and went and looked at her excerpt. Its really not as bad as some of the comments insinuated, I think I’m going to buy the ebook and read the whole thing. Paranormal Romance isn’t my normal thing (inspite of the number I seem to end up reviewing), but I’m curious as to why it’s getting panned.

Which, I guess, just proves that Zoe Whitten’s guest post over at Michele Lee’s Blog is absolutely true. Hate hype only makes people curious.

There is another thread in the comments on the Novelr posts that does bear more serious consideration, and that’s why do publishers say they want original stories when the public seems to like more of the same thing they liked before.

But that’s a topic for another post.

Webcomic Promotion: Reach Beyond Comics

Reading it I had one of those ‘not just yes, but hell yes’ moments of agreement. The writer put into words something I’ve been trying to express for some time with varying degrees of success.

On the web, comics are just one more fun thing to look at. It’s all part of “the web,” and people don’t get their guard up so quickly. They go from blog to animated cartoon to webcomic to photo-sharing site to social network and back to blog again, without paying attention to the differences between these things. It’s just one big mush of fun. They don’t feel like they have to be “comics fans” to read a webcomic.

See that sentence there, the one about how people go from one thing to another without paying attention to the fact that they’re all very different animals? There is absolutely no reason that Weblit can’t be a part of that as well. We already are part of it. The internet is for fun, and we’re part of the fun. A small part for now, but that just means we have to reach out.

The post then goes on to explain how webcomics can reach outside the comic book community. For us this would be reaching outside the teensy-tiny weblit and indie community. What he suggests, though, can be applied to us as well (just swap weblit for comic).

So what are you waiting for? The plan here is obvious. Get your head out of the comics community sites like this one, at least for a little while. Get yourself out there into the rest of the web — or even the rest of the real world. Don’t be a pest (that should go without saying), but find the communities whose obsessions intersect with the subject matter of your comic, and participate in those communities as a useful, helpful, friendly face. And eventually some of them will follow you over to your comic. And then more, and then more. Maybe. If you do it right. And if your comic is great.

Go and read the whole post and the comments. There’s some good stuff in the comments as well (especially when he uses a specific comic as an example of how to do what he suggests).

There’s really nothing else I can add.

Webcomics are Weblit’s close cousin and advertising on webcomics, via Project Wonderful generally, is one of the few things that really seems to work for gaining readers in weblit at the moment. But advertising costs money and I’m sure most webcomic artists are working on a shoestring budget – just like most of us.

I must therefore assume that at least some of those webcomics that don’t languish unvisited in dark corners of the internet due to lack of promotion have gained their visitors by other promotion methods.

This is why I’ve been wondering about webcomic promotion. We need to ascertain what they do, so we can ascertain if any of it is directly applicable or somehow adaptable to Weblit.

My first port of call in this investigation was the great oracle of modern life known only as Google.

I typed “webcomic promotion” into the search box, and as I suspected a whole lot of results  of variable usefulness fell out.

Here’s a couple that did strike me as useful.

Top Ten ways to promote your webcomic?

How to Promote Your Webcomic by NOT Promoting Your Webcomic

The second link is certainly applicable. You might be doing it in different places (or perhaps not, since it’s not about spammage you could probably self-promote that way anywhere).

The first link requires some thought and raises some questions. Which I shall proceed to ennumerate. (I’ll only be quoting the points which raised my interest.)

1. Free Sample Comic Posting.

The point here is to put up sample comics on various free art and comic hosts. This method doesn’t immediately seem applicable to weblit, but there are a couple of places it might be feasible deviantArt’s lit gallery is notoriously undervisited but it does get some visits, and then there is the infamous fictionpress.org which has a shedload of visitors. I have been considering slowly posting The dragon wars saga on both these sites in the hopes some readers would get impatient and visit the site to read ahead. I’m fairly sure that dA would be fine with this, but I’d need to check fictionpress’s ToS, I recall something about not posting primarily to promote a rival site. I’m not sure it would do any good, but it may be worth a try.

In a similar vein getting readers to post tropes on TVTropes can score a few hits as well.

2. Forum and Group postings (on all major comics sites)

My first thought was that, sadly, as of yet we don’t have any really massive reader forums yet. All our forums are mostly other writers. My second thought, and second thoughts are often wiser, was ‘but has anyone asked the moderators on any of the webcomic forums if they mind weblit authors posting in their self-promotion forums’?

3. Online Press Releases (pressbox.co.uk, articlebase)

Online Press Releases? I never thought of that? Does it work for web comics? Would it work for us? Is it worth a try?

8. Free newsletter adverts

Free adverts? Where? Someone point me to these free ads! Even if they don’t work they’re free, so there’s nothing to lose! Or does he mean paid ads in free newsletters? Yeah, probably that… still if the pricing is reasonable it’s worth looking at.

I’m going to continue my investigations into webcomic promotion and how to adapt it to weblit. More posts soon.

I’m sorry for the delay in posting but I was sick and then I was on holiday, but I’m back now and moving on with the idea.

I have a local server setup on my desktop which I use for testing out layout tweaks for the main site. I’m going to setup a second wordpress installation on it tonight and start looking for a theme that gives the right impression. If anyone has theme suggestions please comment with links.

I’d really like to respond to all the comments on the previous two posts but there are so many, covering so many aspects of the project from ethical consideration to monetary ones that it would make for a confusing post. So what I’d like to do is start a forum or group where we can discuss the issues. Blogs aren’t really designed for this level of discussion. I’ll also post screenshots of potential designs, so people can express opinions. Would people who want to be involved in the project post a comment on this post, so I can send you an email with the link, please?

Thanks,

Becka

Why do I think this is a good idea?

As I said in the previous post the WFG is in many ways the Web Fiction equivalent of Goodreads (or it could be, it’s not quite there yet). It’s a hybrid of directory and social networking site, it’s not perfect, but I believe it’s getting better. It’s already a good place to find a new story to read.

What it isn’t is a “credible source” and it’s highly unlikely it ever will be. This isn’t a flaw it’s just the nature of the site.

Think about it. A traditional author might quote positive Amazon and Goodreads reviews as testimonials on their websites, but they wouldn’t generally use them as publicity or blurb material. (I say generally because if a big name happened to post a review in either place you can bet they would – but that’s based more on the name than the site).

It’s the dedicated reviewers from both paper and web based sources that get used for that. The ordinary reader is the lifeblood of any author, but when it comes to reviews they just don’t cut the mustard.

And here’s the thing. If we want to be taken seriously we need to project just as professional an image as dead tree authors do, and this means that reviews from sites like WFG have their place but we also need reviews from places which outsiders to the community will take seriously.

We don’t have any such places yet. So we need to create them. That’s what I’m hoping to do with “The Weblit Review”.

Of course simply creating a site, populating it with reviewers and putting it online won’t magically make it credible. The reviews will have to be rigorous, balanced, fair and, above all, professional standard. And it’ll take time.

I could say a lot more about this subject, but I’m not sure I’m explaining myself very well this evening, so I’ll save it for another post. I’ll also try and deal with some of the objections I suspect will come up (mostly because I’ve seen them come up before

Timeline:

1. I want to have decided on hosting, purchased the domain name and started building the site by the end of October. Possibly the masthead as well if I can afford. If not that will be November.
2. I want to start gathering reviewers and putting together the logistics and similar immediately.
3. Ideally I’d like the site to go live early January 2011, but it depends how long the previous two points take.

In it he asks an important question:

what have we done in the past couple of months, in the past two years? What have we done that has fundamentally changed the way web fiction is read, the way it is written?

It’s a very good question. He goes on to set himself a task – to get web fiction mention in the New York Times within a year.

It sounds like a tall order, but you don’t get for not asking.

Still I don’t have the confidence to shoot for that particular moon. I do however have my own personal low orbit satellite to aim at.

I’ve been mulling over this for weeks, but Eli’s post has finally got me to start to put thought into action. You see in the post he pointed to this thread I started on Weblit.us.

I still think the warchest idea is a good one, but that thread made it clear to me that there is currently no funnel site that everyone would throw themselves behind.  (Somehow this community is fractious and insular at the same time).

Suggestions for a site we could all get behind flew right and left in the thread. One idea was a standout for me – that we needed a more formal review site.

WFG is kind of like a miniature Goodreads for weblit. It’s a social site where anyone and their aunt can review. This is a good thing but it can also be a bad thing for the reasons outline by others in that thread.

What web fiction lacks is a site like this one where a group of reviewers get together and write reviews.

The nearest we had was the now sadly defunct “e-fiction bookclub” (damn I miss that site). If that site was still active I’d gladly put it forward as the place to point any warchest at.

No one else seems to be stepping into the gap. So I’m going to.

Or at least I’m going to try. I can take ownership of setting things up, but I can’t do this alone. I’ll need other reviewers to make a go of this.

What I’ll do:

1. Pay for a domain name – I’m leaning towards the-weblit-review.com.

2. Organise hosting either self-hosted wordpress on my own webspace or a hosted solution like wordpress.com

3. Pay for a masthead for the site once I’ve decided on a template

4. Fantasy weblit reviews

5. Once we’ve launched have a start on the project I’ll do some initial advertising from my own advertising budget.

What I need:

Reviewers for other genres – especially non-speculative fiction genres, since I rarely read those and I want this site to be inclusive.

At least 4 other reviewers preferably more, since we’ll want to put up reviews several times a week if this is to work.

Discussion – I need lots of help making this happen. I await your comments with baited breath.

(Next Post – Why I think this is a good idea, and setting public deadlines for myself)

Told in the style of classic pulp fiction and film noir, each week you can catch up on the latest in the adventures of none other than Samuel Swift, a private eye with a penchant for cases that are dark, dreary, and fraught with more than a touch of the supernatural.

Sam Swift: Occult Investigator by Deklan Green stands at just six parts as I write this review, but it’s off to an interesting start. As the synopsis says it’s really supernatural pulp fiction. There’s no great depth here but it’s fun and it isn’t trying to be anything else, so that’s okay.

At first blush a Paranormal Private Investigator might sound a bit like a clone of the Dresden Files, but that wouldn’t be fair. It really is it what it says on the tin, a pulp serial about a Private Eye with supernatural elements as well.

So far the first case is developing well, if predictably and reminds me of those Saturday Morning Cinema club serials they had when I was a kid. You know the ones which had a cliffhanger at the end of every installment to make sure you came back to find out how the hero escapes even though you know he will.

The biggest problems I have with it so far are the layout and colour choices. It’s another thematically appropriate but hard on the eyes white text black background site. The newer and and older links are below the ads which is a little annoying. And there isn’t a consistant line of whitespace between paragraphs. At times this lack of space leads to wall of text. Once again hard on the eyes.

Verdict: Pulpy Urban Fantasy of no great depth so far, but entertaining enough to pass muster. The presentation on the site needs work, but it’s worth a look for urban fantasy fans.

One final thing – I think I caught some Lovecraftian hints so Lovecraft haters may want to avoid it.