When I started out as a fiction writer, there was only one way to operate: send your work out, wait months and months for a reply, read the reply (a form slip usually saying “sorry, not for us”), send it out again, and again…and so on endlessly.
Could this be one reason why so many fiction writers were (and are) depressives and alcoholics?
But if you write fiction today–and are NOT computerphobic (important!)–there’s a whole new way to operate. All it requires is a little familiarity with digital tools, many of them free, and you can swing some of the power back your way by creating marveous new ways to be seen.
New York writer Nick Faber publishes this blog privately. Here he’s posting a new story, “The Webmaster,” in an innovative manner, using blogger, Google’s free blogging platform, and Scrbd.com, a web-based manuscript hosting service.
And Nick didn’t stop there…
He has made an mp3 audio version and hosts it at Archive.org (again, free). Click the audio player just above the story and you’re hearing him read “The Webmaster” himself (it’s okay, he’s a trained actor).
What’s the future for this kind of “sharing”? Nick talks about posting future stories regularly to reader-subscribers, as a podcast–for which, methinks, if the demand is there, he could bank some modest income by charging a membership fee.
So look at what Nick is doing:
• getting his work out quickly to an audience of readers who already want it
• setting up a platform for future earnings
• operating with 0 overhead, over a planetwide, FREE publishing medium
• controlling his own destiny
• having FUN
I’d say that’s a distinct improvement on the quiet desperation of the traditional publishing’s endlessly frustrating waiting game.
