The Fruits of My Labor

My least favorite part of the writing process! And since I intend to self-publish for the foreseeable future, it means I have to get used to it. That meant expanding beyond my comfort zone to a site I dislike: Facebook.

Facebook and Twitter were my main focus, and Reddit and a niche writing community were minor targets.

In the past, I only relied on whatever platform I was using most at the time, sites like Tumblr and Twitter. It’s been a few years, but I can safely say neither netted positive results. I actually find Twitter horrible for anything other than gaining tons of (often incompatible) followers.

I have a strong dislike for the “follow for follow” mindset, or the notion that you need a large following to be a successful author. This seems to be the case for small presses in particular, as major publishing houses care more about a book that sells. And as someone who has had a large following in the past, having followers who actually read your genre is more important than sheer numbers. Those two or three followers who were jazzed about my stories meant more to me than anything.

But I gave Twitter another shot out of curiosity. My pinned post has 9 retweets and 3 likes. And that’s as good as it gets; I was ignored in writer lifts. I also noticed that most people only care to show off their work and not pay it forward.

I’ve had drastically different results on Facebook. My individual posts get little to no interaction, but commenting in posts encouraging fellow writers to share their work did the trick. That’s where most of my reads and likes are coming from.

I was lucky with Reddit and had one upvote from my post there, as well as my first follower. I’m not sure if they’re currently reading or not.

Overall results thus far:

Compared to my first project, which was mostly organic and barely promoted, but available for five months:

That older project had the perk of being in a popular genre (isekai), which helped a lot I think. But my newer story is in a bigger genre (paranormal romance with vampires), so it would probably grow a decent following on its own, in time.

Anyway, the takeaway for all of this is that Facebook is superior to other methods I’ve tried. So while I don’t like it, I see the value in it. I’ve also gotten some rather nice feedback in exchange, which really warms the heart and reminds me why I started my writing journey in the first place: to be read.

Oh, and for an example of what these bonuses look like:

That’s all from my first story. I won’t know how Fluid Bonding and my other stories fared until next month, on the 15th or so. I am very excited to see how it goes, cause I expect to have doubled my stats by the end of the month!