It’s the end of January and I’ve published 8,579 words so far. That puts me on track to publish more than 100,000 words this year, that’s without the podcast, or any short stories or novels I get finished.
I realise that is hardly NaNoWriMo levels of output, but this is a marathon and not a sprint.
When I was working out how much I wanted to put out on the site it took a while to settle on how much content I wanted to commit to. Ultimately the thing that I looked at was the media that I have really enjoyed. There are a couple of web comic sites that I read, and I wanted to emulate their model of putting something out every day. At first I thought about writing a serialised novel and releasing it over time, but the process of that would be very complicated. I’d have to write the first and second drafts of the entire novel before I published anything. It would have been a lot of work up front for very little return and I need instant, or at least within a couple weeks, gratification.
So I settled on around 500 words a day and a podcast, it would put me across platforms and media types, give me plenty to talk about on social media, and hopefully build up a regular audience that would be eager to buy the less regular stuff I put out.
Looking at Zach Weinersmith from www.smbc-comics.com, the model of releasing short comics regularly and then using that platform to leverage books and other products certainly can work. The question remains however, of whether or not it can be adapted for flash fiction; I guess we’ll see by the end of the year.
While I did look at the way that popular web comics market themselves, there is one point that I will not change: Ads. Ads will never be a part of my website or podcast. Personally I tune out when I hear ads on podcasts, it is a segment that I just skip when I hear it. On websites I get annoyed when a site takes longer to load because of the ads and at last count it’s something like 43% of users use an ad blocker now. So I am not going to put ads on my website which will gum up the load times and which nearly half of the population won’t see anyway.
I look at it this way, I only get so many shill points, why waste them on razors or underpants when I could spend them on my own works.
Anyway, that’s today’s rant. I’ll see you tomorrow.