Promoting Your Fan-fics, your ideas / suggestions please

[kacangpool]

we want more members here to read your fan-fics. that said we are open to suggestions to improve readership.

we can do our bit, we can provide banners (like the ones at the top of the page) linking to your threads. we've done this before for feral and en. so do drop us a note, and maybe we can arrange with our artists to work on / create your banners.

other ideas that we've tried include featuring some of your works on our newsletters, we also had a writing challenge sometime last year. we could work on regular polls for best fan-fics, youtube promos like we are doing for our webcomics, etc.

we really need your suggestions, so don't hesitate to share with us. thanks.

[Feral Female]

Those are all great ideas KC. The polls would be a way of sparking interest and getting people down here to read. Another writing comp. with open voting is also a good way to get members familiar with the many talented scribes here and thier styles.

I`ll keep pondering.

[comixkid2099]

i think a large part of it is taste. If it is a story that doesn't interest me, then i am not likely to read it. Which is why comics like Epileptic or Jimmy Corrigan just don't click with me. Fortunately, since 99% of the tavern populace are comic book fans, specifically superhero fans, then it is really just a matter of exposure, like you've already pointed out.

When i still wrote fan fics at marvel, i noticed that many people would only read a fan fic if they were asked to. Likewise some people would actively seek out people to recruit into reading their fics. I don't think we should do that because it could venture down the path of spam very quickly.

Furthermore (i'll make this short so it doesn't look like i'm rambling.) we should all do our part when we're asked to read a fan fic. If we read a story, the worst thing we can do is stroke the writer's ego. We need to do our best to tell them what needs work, what was done well, and what could use improvement. Since none of us are professionals, we're not perfect. Everyone's technique could use tweaking. Heck, even pros aren't perfect.

[kacangpool]

that's good feedback, ck. we tend to cut some slack seeing most fan-fic writers aren't full time professionals. also we read only to enjoy the story of fellow fans and not to nitpick about writing techique and stuff. that's prolly what the writers expect, likely the reason why many aren't too critical.

what you wrote has merit though. i've been to writing sites where the focus is to help the aspiring writers improve their craft. as you've suggested, on such forums the more experienced members give critical reviews with the intention of getting stories good enough to be published.

maybe we can add some bit of that here. at the very least, it would encourage interaction between writers and readers. giving the right exposure so that other members read the work here is the difficult part, how to interest them to want to read.

[Feral Female]

Thats a very good point CK makes. Over at the Repos thats our goal- to help each other become better writers with honest well-intentioned comments. If you check the numbers here you`ll see a good number of stories are read but scant few readers take time to leave comments.

Of course that being said not all stories appeal to everyone of course but without feedback we writers can`t know what we`re doing right or wrong. Feedback is crucial to an aspiring writer since we don`t have sales figures to tell us what the readers like.

KC though has the hit the hardest nail on the head, encouraging people to take the time to read. Its a problem thats world-wide sadly, but like CK pointed out the majority of us are comic fans and so should be thrilled to get free tales of our favorite heroes. Not that any of this is a solution but perhaps if the members read this dialog they`ll see how important thier thoughts are to the fledgling scribes here.

This post has been edited by Feral Female on Mar 31 2009, 03:22 AM