This week is the big splashy exciting bewildering confusing ending of coa//014. Little by little, layers of the City are being pulled back to reveal the truth. Or in this case not so little by little, more like jamming a meathook in there and yanking hard.
Next week I’ll be taking a break, so I can plan the next story and maybe do some editing to prep vol//002’s inevitable book publication. Speaking of which, now you can get a free eBook version when you buy a paperback of ANY of my books. Some authors are being douches and double-dipping you on that, offering a ‘discount’ for buying both. Nuts to that; you own the story, you own the story.
It’s NaNoWriMo time, which I did technically accomplish a few years ago, but I think I’ll be skipping it this time around. November’s a lousy month for this sort of thing since all the hot new video game releases happen now, family holidays have to be arranged and attended, and it’s also Desert Bus for Hope time. Still, I’m hoping to have some of coa//014 for you in November, starting on the 16th. Although something has me curious…
A reader gave me a shout-out the other day, just to say Hay Lo and thank me for my writing. Whee! He also, however, mentioned that he was still in the middle of reading anachronauts. Which is surprising to me, but that’s because I’m mentally fixed on the idea of “reader = up to date on everything” which often does not seem to be the case.
Webnovels are a strange beast. When you become a fan of a webcomic, usually you skip the early strips and just start reading what’s hot and current. Even a narrative comic can be picked up pretty quickly, or you can consume the back catalog in an afternoon. But a webnovel, well, they’re NOVELS, and finding time in your life to read an entire novel (much less eight of them) is difficult.
This means that the vanguard of the readership is small, with a silent army marching some distance behind them, working their way through earlier stories or patiently waiting for the paperback release. If you’re reading this now, you’re in the vanguard, for instance. What I need to do is adjust my perception and make some plans to support ALL of you guys, at the cutting edge or deep in the back catalog. Something to chew on for a bit, I suppose.
Back again in two weeks, with a longtime reader requested story focusing on a guy who knows a guy. Enjoy! Love to know what you think.
These sorts of comments make me think that a discussion forum might be the way to grow your fanbase. Blogs and Facebook pages are fine for those who are in the vanguard, but a well-organized discussion forum–we’d definitely need rules for [SPOILER] tags!–would let even the stragglers ask/answer questions, post fanfics for older universes, etc. I remember seeing how the UE Open House was set up, and thinking it could have worked better as a Fanfiction subforum, or maybe as people posting in an Unreal Estate forum with an [OPEN HOUSE] tag.
Another angle to consider is the current setup for the site. The index page for City of Angles, to me, looks more like what you’d get from clicking the “Archive” button on most other webcomics and serials: a list of chapters, starting from 1, with no up-front notification about what and where the newest update is. Contrast this with, say, Tales of MU (which, despite being marketed many places as fantasy porn is very well written): http://www.talesofmu.com/story/ and you can see the difference: your eye is drawn right to the date-stamped newest chapter, which lets us refresh-junkies instantly get to our new updates, but also reassures new readers that the story is in fact still under development, fresh, new, exciting, etc, and not something dead and abandoned to the wilds of the internet.
Good points, all. I have been meaning to take another look at CoA’s front page design; I’ll keep Tales of MU in mind when pondering what to do with it.
A forum is also possible. I had one ages ago, back in the Unreal Estate era. My concern is that it might get barely any foot traffic whatsoever, and an empty forum with nobody posting reflects badly on the site itself. But if there’s enough call for it (anybody wanna second the motion?) I do have the technology to do it now, thanks to having my own website host.
One way to float a trial balloon is to do what HPMOR (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a VERY interesting read that puts rationalists into some of the main character slots of the Potterverse) does: set up a Twoflower sub-Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/new/
I can’t imagine it takes more than five or ten minutes to set up something like that; it’ll probably take longer to leave a link to it in all of your old works (I’d go all the way back to Sailor Nothing and set up links at the bottom of each chapter, and in each collection’s home page). That way if it turns out kind of dead, hey, no big deal, but if it starts to grow you have the option to graduate to a full phpBB setup or whatever, and edit the links accordingly, and take the time to do it right.