How the heck to market a story?

[RepresentingWrath]

What fandoms? Oh. MCU/Star Wars crossover. With blatantly stolen AI art. Why not?

So you yourself understand Ranma is less popular, but want more readers.

 

[winterwhereof]

What fandoms? Oh. MCU/Star Wars crossover. Might as well throw Harry Potter and Naruto in there for maximum whoring.

Yes. The issue is audience. What do you expect people to say? You have run into the oldest plight of authors ever: that what they want to write isn't necessarily what people want to read.

 

[AnneOminous]

SH doesn't deny fanfics any promotion.
Current top 2 trending. A fanfic of a web novel.

Maniac’s Mayhem: A guide to being a corporate slave

Caught as a little kid hacking into a corpo server, Evelin Vance was forced into indentured service. Disposable and 'employed' by New Hope LLC to penetrate the security of other corporations, usually by dangerous and less than legal means, one day, she is sent on a mission that is a...

www.scribblehub.com

Current top 4 trending. Another fanfic, this time Naruto.

Ninja World: I Have a Life Simulator

Reborn as a Uchiha; only one year left until the night of the clan's massacre? It's over, I'm done for. With Uchiha Itachi taking action, there's no way to survive! However, fortunately, I have a life simulator. Initial simulation begins... [After half a month, you enroll in the Ninja Academy...

www.scribblehub.com

Current top 6 trending. Harry Potter fanfic.

Harry Evans: Memoirs of a well-lived Death (SI)

Harry Evans faces a magical world that is both familiar and different from what he remembers. Is it worth the risk of losing everything to try and save it? Does he even have a choice? What binds us to a place are the people that inhabit it and Harry is...

www.scribblehub.com

Three works on trending today are fanfics. That's a fact.

What else do you want? You've tried easier ways to gain more traction, they failed. There is no more easy ways to get bigger. You either sink even more hours into it, or give up. Even if there is, and I highly doubt it, even if there is a super easy way to get bigger, only really big, succesful authors know it. And they won't share it with you. They don't need competition. But you can try asking every big authors, PM them. It will be better than asking us.

Which all hide the fact that they're fanfics up front. And whore some of the biggest fandoms in existence.

So you yourself understand Ranma is less popular, but want more readers.

I am willing to bet none of the trending fics on there are written such as to appeal to and welcome in people who are not fandom-aware.

 

[Deleted member 84247]

Which all hide the fact that they're fanfics up front. And whore some of the biggest fandoms in existence.

I am willing to bet none of the trending fics on there are written such as to appeal to and welcome in people who are not fandom-aware.

Stray Cat Strut is not a huge Fandom. Also this site says Home of Original Stories, yet fanfics commonly get trending. You're just arguing for argument sake. You cherrypick what people say and don't actually care to hear facts.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

Which all hide the fact that they're fanfics up front. And whore some of the biggest fandoms in existence.

Top 2 trending is a fanfic of this web novel.

Stray Cat Strut

Waking up to the fact that you’re a one-armed, one-eyed orphan? You get used to it. Being sent to some museum with a bunch of brats because some heartless corporation wants pictures to convince middle-aged women that they truly care deep down inside? Pretty lame, but that’s Tuesday...

www.scribblehub.com

How is this the biggest fandom I don't know. Also, I can't even understand what you want to say anymore. How is this even related? Top 4 trending blatantly advertise it is Naruto fanfic. Cover is from Naruto.

I am willing to bet none of the trending fics on there are written such as to appeal to and welcome in people who are not fandom-aware.

Again. How is this even related to your questions?

You ask us how to grow. We give you threads, we give you advice about schedule, we give you adivce on writing two stories. You keep saying it's not enough. Can you please tell us concrete goal? How much readers and comments you want. Perhaps we can reverse engineer this.

 

[Ruti]

Something i forgot to say is: your chapter publish rate might also affect the commenting rate too. Although I can’t say for EVERYONE, I personally feel a greater desire to comment if im on the most recent chapter, and feel like I can properly give my own input. This changes from community to community, and person to person, though, so take this with many grains of salt. Anyways, gonna leave this thread and look through the other ones

 

[aurifex]

I'm gonna go ahead and drop the awkward truth everyone likes to skirt around:

It's more than possible your story simply isn't good enough to have mass appeal. Breaking the 'fandom bubble' so to say requires an extremely well-written story. Just because you have a tiny subset of people calling your story great doesn't mean it actually is.

 

[BLIGHT_ZERO]

im prettttty sure blud is a troll lol.

 

[AnneOminous]

I'm gonna go ahead and drop the awkward truth everyone likes to skirt around:

It's more than possible your story simply isn't good enough to have mass appeal. Breaking the 'fandom bubble' so to say requires an extremely well-written story. Just because you have a tiny subset of people calling your story great doesn't mean it actually is.

Feel free to check for yourself.

 

[Keene]

Just want to reiterate something mentioned in this thread and that's to create a discord for your readers to congregate.

More generally, the marketing advice is to actively engage with your readers and try build a community. As someone who read serialized novels for years, I would only ever comment and favourite when I really liked a series. Knowing that, I've made sure to constantly thank and engage my readers for their favourites, comments, ratings and reviews.

I never ask for these things, but I am appreciative. I try to reply to all my comments, and always give a shoutout to reviewers. I believe letting readers know that their interactions with you have a positive and motivating effect only encourages it more. This has paid off, and I have a very high amount of comments/favourites per chapter compared to novels of similar size.

In support of another suggestion made in this thread: I don't think the growth of my series would be possible if I dumped multiple chapters a day. It feels counter-intuitive, as surely posting loads of chapters would be better as it's more content, right? Instead, letting chapters sit for at least 48 hours, letting readers theory craft and read what other users are thinking, is the secret sauce because it gives other readers the opportunity and time to get excited with other readers.

I've been crossposting to RR at a slightly faster tempo to catchup to SH, but still gave each chapter time to breath, and now the novel is top 0.5% rated on RR and will probably overtake SH readership eventually. That result would likely never have happened If I chapter-dumped. It probably would never get noticed.

Capitalizing on opportunities when they appear is important if you can see them in time. I got so many emotes in comments it was becoming a meme so I programmed a cookiebot for the discord server. It's running off a raspberry pi plugged into my router. Now, users in the discord earn cookies from posting messages and they can level up their stats, steal from each other and a bunch of other interactive features. The discord now stands at over a hundred members.

Another idea I had, which I intend to resume, is I did writing streams of the next chapter. Again, it's another form of interaction and content for readers to interact with each other and me.

I'm thinking of learning blender to be able to render scenes from my novel, both to eventually give more visuals but also to generate high quality wallpapers for patreon supporters.

I also link my series with my other hobbies - although I am yet to release a game, when I do start making another game in Unity or UE5, I always set it in the world of my novel, and plan to link any fans of that game into the same discord (community) that I'm building currently.

You mention you've been part of this fan fiction for this show for twenty-five years? Presumably you have a good understanding of existing communities dedicated to fan-fiction. Are you in any communities where you can advertise or trade shout-outs? Do you have any other hobbies you can link with your series?

I've rambled on a bit - but yeah, engage and encourage interactions between not just you and your readers, but your readers with other readers. Experiment and seek ways of engagement and interaction that isn't writing (twitch, art, game dev, blender, discord, youtube etc etc).

And the other most important bit, which people don't like to admit because they don't have control over it: sheer dumb luck. Sometimes you can do it all right and fail. Othertimes you can half-ass it and succeed. Not fair, is it?

 

[AnneOminous]

Something i forgot to say is: your chapter publish rate might also affect the commenting rate too. Although I can’t say for EVERYONE, I personally feel a greater desire to comment if im on the most recent chapter, and feel like I can properly give my own input. This changes from community to community, and person to person, though, so take this with many grains of salt. Anyways, gonna leave this thread and look through the other ones

I drop one chapter every day, usually.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

Can you please answer my question? I am still trying to help you, and not just say drop your work and dream. This is the question.

Can you please tell us concrete goal? How much readers and comments you want. Perhaps we can reverse engineer this.

 

[Deleted member 84247]

im prettttty sure blud is a troll lol.

I been thinking that for a while.

 

[aurifex]

Feel free to check for yourself.

I don't want to read a million word mostly-OC Ranma fic
This is the basic unsolvable problem people are trying to make you understand

 

[AnneOminous]

Just want to reiterate something mentioned in this thread and that's to create a discord for your readers to congregate.

More generally, the marketing advice is to actively engage with your readers and try build a community. As someone who read serialized novels for years, I would only ever comment and favourite when I really liked a series. Knowing that, I've made sure to constantly thank and engage my readers for their favourites, comments, ratings and reviews.

I never ask for these things, but I am appreciative. I try to reply to all my comments, and always give a shoutout to reviewers. I believe letting readers know that their interactions with you have a positive and motivating effect only encourages it more. This has paid off, and I have a very high amount of comments/favourites per chapter compared to novels of similar size.

In support of another suggestion made in this thread: I don't think the growth of my series would be possible if I dumped multiple chapters a day. It feels counter-intuitive, as surely posting loads of chapters would be better as it's more content, right? Instead, letting chapters sit for at least 48 hours, letting readers theory craft and read what other users are thinking, is the secret sauce because it gives other readers the opportunity and time to get excited with other readers.

I've been crossposting to RR at a slightly faster tempo to catchup to SH, but still gave each chapter time to breath, and now the novel is top 0.5% rated on RR and will probably overtake SH readership eventually. That result would likely never have happened If I chapter-dumped. It probably would never get noticed.

Capitalizing on opportunities when they appear is important if you can see them in time. I got so many emotes in comments it was becoming a meme so I programmed a cookiebot for the discord server. It's running off a raspberry pi plugged into my router. Now, users in the discord earn cookies from posting messages and they can level up their stats, steal from each other and a bunch of other interactive features. The discord now stands at over a hundred members.

Another idea I had, which I intend to resume, is I did writing streams of the next chapter. Again, it's another form of interaction and content for readers to interact with each other and me.

I'm thinking of learning blender to be able to render scenes from my novel, both to eventually give more visuals but also to generate high quality wallpapers for patreon supporters.

I also link my series with my other hobbies - although I am yet to release a game, when I do start making another game in Unity or UE5, I always set it in the world of my novel, and plan to link any fans of that game into the same discord (community) that I'm building currently.

You mention you've been part of this fan fiction for this show for twenty-five years? Presumably you have a good understanding of existing communities dedicated to fan-fiction. Are you in any communities where you can advertise or trade shout-outs? Do you have any other hobbies you can link with your series?

I've rambled on a bit - but yeah, engage and encourage interactions between not just you and your readers, but your readers with other readers. Experiment and seek ways of engagement and interaction that isn't writing (twitch, art, game dev, blender, discord, youtube etc etc).

And the other most important bit, which people don't like to admit because they don't have control over it: sheer dumb luck. Sometimes you can do it all right and fail. Othertimes you can half-ass it and succeed. Not fair, is it?

I do pretty much all of this. People are looking at the first story and judging my posting schedule, when I was trying to get caught up with AO3 and FFN where I had been posting much longer. I post one chapter a day pretty consistently - I recently reached the end of the book and need a few days to do planning on the next cycle. I do have a discord. Every fandom space for my fandom that I can find is sick of hearing about it I talk about it so much. One of my readers does a weekly twitch stream with my content. I am working with a composer to have the original songs I wrote for the story put on Youtube.

Other hobbies? I work two full time jobs and write 35k words a week. I don't have time to *shower* most days.

I don't want to read a million word mostly-OC Ranma fic
This is the basic unsolvable problem people are trying to make you understand

Fabulous. There's a whole bunch more people who haven't gotten the chance to make that choice yet.
I know it's an uphill battle, but I'm looking for options of shit to try to improve my chances. I know even if I do everything perfect I'm fighting for more of a very small pie. But "it's hopeless, fuck off" isn't helpful for anyone.

 

[ArtBusterBeeze]

One thing you need to understand is that Art is a thing of patience and beauty. You may not see it now, but in time, you will. So far, you have a good-looking story but good and good-looking can be different things. Time will tell you the way things will play out for it. You may have reached the limit of your patience, in which you ran into a realization: You don't have as much people eyeing your story. Here is what I say: You want to get to the goal? You will have to follow a few steps to reach that goal.

As others may have told you , you won't be able to market your work effectively unless you pursue your own creativity. I do not care how attached you are to it but unless you take that step towards doing that, you may not not get where you want to be, though the question then becomes if this is how you want to write your story. I don't believe you need to change it for anyone. You seemed to object to the idea of retooling your story for a bigger audience, which in my opinion is totally your choice but In the end, you will have to make a choice that will ultimately effect what you decide to do in the future if you intend to write future stories. After all, if you intend to be passionate about your writing, you will eventually need to reach that height of writing where you can brandish yourself(How you go about this is up to you. I'll just give marketing advice).

Then the next step becomes getting your following. All you got to do is remain consistent in what you do, but there's more to it than just simply posting the story. Your writing and style, and other things among that category matter towards your marketing efforts. You need to be aware of what you are posting, how you believe the audience to react to it, and then once you sort out those details, you use the services available to you. You market via advertisements (some sites allow you to do it), or through taking action yourself and communicating with other's who like the genre. If you are already doing these stuff and you are absolutely sure you have done everything you can for your story then the only thing you need to do is have patience.

The readership differs by fandom, and by the website you're posting on. You should know that trying to get so popular as another is not something you can plan for, or affect yourself even if you market your book. In the end, it is up to the people to like your story and the sooner you realize that, the more you will begin to understand about marketing. It is not an easy thing to do but if you want to achieve this, then you have to go out there and work hard on it. There's no way around that, so do it.

 

[Tyranomaster]

Fabulous. There's a whole bunch more people who haven't gotten the chance to make that choice yet.
I know it's an uphill battle, but I'm looking for options of shit to try to improve my chances. I know even if I do everything perfect I'm fighting for more of a very small pie. But "it's hopeless, fuck off" isn't helpful for anyone.

You misunderstand. The people who haven't gotten that chance yet aren't people who already read. 98% of people who read online stories are already aware of MASSIVE fanfiction stories. I read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I've had the option, almost everyone has. Most people don't want to, and they especially don't want to for a small fandom like Ranma.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

I know it's an uphill battle, but I'm looking for options of shit to try to improve my chances.

I gave you an option you said it's too hard.

 

[aurifex]

But "it's hopeless, fuck off" isn't helpful for anyone.

It's not meant to be helpful
Because there is no being helpful
Your goal is to explode in popularity. But it simply won't happen with your current story. You've already shilled it out everywhere you could imagine, and it didn't catch fire--so it will never catch fire.
No one is saying this to be rude. We're just saying it because it's true

 

[AnneOminous]

Can you please answer my question? I am still trying to help you, and not just say drop your work and dream. This is the question.

Honestly? I've been thinking about this a lot today:
* To be one of the most-frequently *recommended* stories in Ranma spaces, so that new people coming into fanfic (especially new folks coming from the anime reboot) continue to discover the story. So that it becomes "a classic" that routinely generates a comment or two a day across all platforms after it finishes serializing, to keep the flame alive.

* To be a supportive love letter to the trans community, and let it provide the sort of emotional hug that the trans folks who read the story (90% of my audience) routinely tell me it provides. Ideally, to hear from the people it gave good feels to.

* To be recognized as "a work that transcends what fanfiction is supposed to be," which I know is fuzzy, but like... "one of the better fanfic writers out there."

And in order for all three of those things to happen, I need critical mass. I need more people to be aware of it.

One thing you need to understand is that Art is a thing of patience and beauty. You may not see it now, but in time, you will. So far, you have a good-looking story but good and good-looking can be different things. Time will tell you the way things will play out for it. You may have reached the limit of your patience, in which you ran into a realization: You don't have as much people eyeing your story. Here is what I say: You want to get to the goal? You will have to follow a few steps to reach that goal.

As others may have told you , you won't be able to market your work effectively unless you pursue your own creativity. I do not care how attached you are to it but unless you take that step towards doing that, you may not not get where you want to be, though the question then becomes if this is how you want to write your story. I don't believe you need to change it for anyone. You seemed to object to the idea of retooling your story for a bigger audience, which in my opinion is totally your choice but In the end, you will have to make a choice that will ultimately effect what you decide to do in the future if you intend to write future stories. After all, if you intend to be passionate about your writing, you will eventually need to reach that height of writing where you can brandish yourself(How you go about this is up to you. I'll just give marketing advice).

Then the next step becomes getting your following. All you got to do is remain consistent in what you do, but there's more to it than just simply posting the story. Your writing and style, and other things among that category matter towards your marketing efforts. You need to be aware of what you are posting, how you believe the audience to react to it, and then once you sort out those details, you use the services available to you. You market via advertisements (some sites allow you to do it), or through taking action yourself and communicating with other's who like the genre. If you are already doing these stuff and you are absolutely sure you have done everything you can for your story then the only thing you need to do is have patience.

The readership differs by fandom, and by the website you're posting on. You should know that trying to get so popular as another is not something you can plan for, or affect yourself even if you market your book. In the end, it is up to the people to like your story and the sooner you realize that, the more you will begin to understand about marketing. It is not an easy thing to do but if you want to achieve this, then you have to go out there and work hard on it. There's no way around that, so do it.

I appreciate what you're trying to do - but literally you have just spelled out the goal, not the steps. I will put the level of "work hard on it" I have put into Phoenix against the effort level of any three authors you can name combined. I'm just spinning my wheels. I'm trying to figure out how to do more effective things, because "more of the same" ain't working.