Navigating the authoring community
It's been about a week now since I put my book up on Amazon for Kindle. The sales have started to tail off a bit now it seems, though I'm sure its first review will make it more visible to general Amazon hunters, hopefully leading to an increase in interest. At the moment the grand total is 12 copies, though two have been in the States and one in Spain, so I at least know those weren't family or friends.
So now I've started trying to learn about some of the other methods of getting your work seen (and more importantly, given feedback). The main one of these seems to be to join one of the writing communities out there. I've found a couple of great ones so far, both of which offer a lot of advice, and stories of success and failure. These are www.Litopia.com, and www.authonomy.com. Authonomy seems to be the best so far for taking what you've worked on and getting something back from it. Litopia is definitely more of a hints and tips for the process of writing your book in the first place, as in order to be able to upload it to get other writer's opinions, you have to have posted several hundred times and risen up the ranks of membership. I get the feeling many of the members are very experienced in the traditional publishing route and indeed seem to encourage wariness towards e-publishing or self-publishing, to a degree.
Authonomy on the other hand is where you stand a chance of cutting out the middle man - the literary agent (who is incredible difficult to get in the first place) - because it's run by a major publishing house. The idea there is to submit your work (or a piece of it at least) and just leave it out there for other members to read, review, and comment. The more members "bookshelves" your work makes it to, and the better rating members give it, the better your ranking.
And here's the genius part: The top 5 in the rankings each month get sent to an actual editorial board at Harper Collins for serious consideration for approaching the author for something more! And what's great about the "sampling" method of reading the members do, is that they can leave comments on what they thought of it, hints for changes, things they liked.
However, because of course we're all there to get our stuff read, ranked, and win the grand prize, it's very much a "read my book" environment. I have no problem with this, and of course will mention my work wherever I can. But as a new member you do tend to get inundated with private messages asking you to read theirs if they read yours. This is fine, and I will indeed have a nose around and pick out some samples that intrigue me by their description and (possibly) cover. But there is an implied etiquette towards this personal introduction message, in that I feel obligated to read a work that may not actually be exactly my genre (just because my book has a sci-fi element doesn't mean I want to read about aliens, for instance). I don't want to hurt my fellow writers by not reading their work, or by not giving it a fair shake if I find the first chapter not quite my cup of tea. But likewise I fear the repercussions of not doing so may result in a less than favourable review of my own.
So how to best navigate these choppy waters of the writing community? Do you accept every friend request, and read request? Do you "up" someone's work by supporting it without fully enjoying it simply because they liked yours? Did they even like mine, or are the positive comments that are quickly followed by "and please read mine" more a means to increase rankings than actually help your fellow author? I'm all for quid pro quo, and I do want to read lots of examples of work by people out there in the same boat as me (unintentionally continuing the analogy there), but I also don't want to hurt people by not being bowled over by their work - which is daft really as although I would hate to discover my book shook no one's literary world, I also don't want to put the idea in someone's head that their work gripped me when in fact it did not.
Small successes and small failures could well be seen as the means to true improvement, without the risk of ego.
So now I've started trying to learn about some of the other methods of getting your work seen (and more importantly, given feedback). The main one of these seems to be to join one of the writing communities out there. I've found a couple of great ones so far, both of which offer a lot of advice, and stories of success and failure. These are www.Litopia.com, and www.authonomy.com. Authonomy seems to be the best so far for taking what you've worked on and getting something back from it. Litopia is definitely more of a hints and tips for the process of writing your book in the first place, as in order to be able to upload it to get other writer's opinions, you have to have posted several hundred times and risen up the ranks of membership. I get the feeling many of the members are very experienced in the traditional publishing route and indeed seem to encourage wariness towards e-publishing or self-publishing, to a degree.
Authonomy on the other hand is where you stand a chance of cutting out the middle man - the literary agent (who is incredible difficult to get in the first place) - because it's run by a major publishing house. The idea there is to submit your work (or a piece of it at least) and just leave it out there for other members to read, review, and comment. The more members "bookshelves" your work makes it to, and the better rating members give it, the better your ranking.
And here's the genius part: The top 5 in the rankings each month get sent to an actual editorial board at Harper Collins for serious consideration for approaching the author for something more! And what's great about the "sampling" method of reading the members do, is that they can leave comments on what they thought of it, hints for changes, things they liked.
However, because of course we're all there to get our stuff read, ranked, and win the grand prize, it's very much a "read my book" environment. I have no problem with this, and of course will mention my work wherever I can. But as a new member you do tend to get inundated with private messages asking you to read theirs if they read yours. This is fine, and I will indeed have a nose around and pick out some samples that intrigue me by their description and (possibly) cover. But there is an implied etiquette towards this personal introduction message, in that I feel obligated to read a work that may not actually be exactly my genre (just because my book has a sci-fi element doesn't mean I want to read about aliens, for instance). I don't want to hurt my fellow writers by not reading their work, or by not giving it a fair shake if I find the first chapter not quite my cup of tea. But likewise I fear the repercussions of not doing so may result in a less than favourable review of my own.
So how to best navigate these choppy waters of the writing community? Do you accept every friend request, and read request? Do you "up" someone's work by supporting it without fully enjoying it simply because they liked yours? Did they even like mine, or are the positive comments that are quickly followed by "and please read mine" more a means to increase rankings than actually help your fellow author? I'm all for quid pro quo, and I do want to read lots of examples of work by people out there in the same boat as me (unintentionally continuing the analogy there), but I also don't want to hurt people by not being bowled over by their work - which is daft really as although I would hate to discover my book shook no one's literary world, I also don't want to put the idea in someone's head that their work gripped me when in fact it did not.
Small successes and small failures could well be seen as the means to true improvement, without the risk of ego.
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