red bird

This past November marked the one year anniversary of launching the weekly serial “Tales of the Big Bad Wolf.”

What follows are some thoughts… on the writing and the business side of things.  First the writing…

Writing a webserial.  Hm.

First off – if you don’t know what I’m talking about – it may help to visit my “About” stuff on the website.  That should cover the “why, what, WHY,” question in the back of your mind about why I even did this in the first place.  Moving on…

When I started I had no update schedule in mind. One kind reader told me to go weekly and since she seemed quite firm about that, I decided to go for it, knowing full well that “weekly” was actually quite a slow schedule compared to the webcomics I had been reading thus far.

So far, I’m glad to say that I’ve posted fairly consistently, missing a few weeks here and there when emergencies came up or I was too pressed with convention duties. However largely I’ve kept my promise to my readers and think have been rewarded for that faithfulness.

In terms of the writing — I think one of the hardest parts of doing this on a weekly basis is keeping all the details of plotlines straight over a long period of time.  I’ve now forced myself to reread the story from the beginning at least a few times, to the point that I worry I am starting to move eyes over the e-ink screen before I really truly process certain details that I had thrown into the narrative for later retrieval.

The other thing that has constantly worried me is the issue of changing “voice” or writing style along the way.    At times I think my tendency has been to veer wildly between long paragraphs of description and thought processes to short dialogue absent much descriptive language.  This kind of “style” inconsistency is something that really only can smoothed down in a straightforward editing session conducted in one day — not while working through a few pages of text at a time.  This lack of internal consistency normally would drive me nuts except I keep telling myself that this year (when I expect to finish my serial ) I will take everything and shove it in front of a few reader-editors to look for loose threads, sections that don’t have the same “voice,”  and begin the process of converting the webserial into an e-book.

Book Two Dilemmas

My intent is to start serializing Book Two within a two-three month timeframe after completing number one.  (The interim period would be devoted to recharging, concepting more of Book Two and hopefully generating a few dozen pages to establish the characters and setting.   Ideally I’d like to be done with an editorial review of Book One so I can see if there are major holes to fix and any new sections /revisions to provide to the webserial readers so everyone starts “Book Two” on the same page. It may be that this proposed gap will have to be lengthened should Book One be deemed a massive pile of crap by a designated editor xD.

But I guess that’s what new models are all about. I’ll have to probably gamble a bit and beg for forgiveness later.

Advertising and Marketing

Regarding the business side — I know, unlike the established ‘crowd of webfiction folks,’ that I advertise more.  I’ve taken my fun money — primarily given over to MMORPG item malls or Starbucks  in the past — and put in ten-fifteen dollars here and redeem coupons there to play around with  online advertising.

One thing that I also may do differently is avidly examine my Google Analytics stats. I examine everything from hits to time spent on site .  Analytics is free to boot, so there is no excuse not to try to use it if you’re honestly going to spend any money on advertising.

Project Wonderful

I know that these methods have worked as people have sometimes directly commented that the PW ad was how they found the story. However, to be quite honest, this is a costly way of finding readers.

I did a lot of experimentation — trying campaigns with tag words and on sites I personally read.  I  determined the following:

• For those who are starting out with a very limited budget, pick a site that draws the kind of audience you want reading your story and likely to like it, based on topics/subjects/gender/background.  Advertising on PW works well if your audience likes similar subject matter.  I can honestly thank Phoenix Requiem and Red String for the bulk of my initial readers and I’m grateful I was able to place ads prior to the completion of Requiem. (Post-completion, comic sites do not have a lot of traffic from what I have observed.)
• PW is very good for certain tastes – for those who enjoy humor, IT, chicks with boobs, and some fantasy.   As my story largely reads “vaguely Victorian, Austen, fantasy with elves and mysterious antiheroes” has a large cast, and a literary bent — the crossover appeal to most of the PW base is very limited.   I tried the humor sites. Doesn’t work except to get traffic to your landing page, but once they see your work is prose and requires five minutes of minimum investment, most will move on.
• Webfiction, by its very nature, is very niche. You are playing in a sandbox that is largely dominated by visual media and informative blogs designed to provoke response.   Your landing page may be super and great, but unless it looks like the page you advertised at (and is visually comparable) a visual person is not likely to stay.

I do not think PW, therefore, is useful for most webfiction writers.  Also, sites that work one week may not work another.  My initial strategy had to change multiple times as comics concluded or webcomickers found new ad networks and changed their available options. Project Wonderful is a LOT of work and likely doesn’t do well for long term advertising .

Overall, my conclusions are that something else would be desirable for webfiction.  I’d love to find another way in to the reading/ebook/Kindle-Nook market.

Wattpad

 Enter Wattpad.  This web community/ electronic app reader is Fanfiction.net/FictionPress in the modern age. You can post serials or complete works. You can simply use it as an e-reader if you don’t want to deal with the clunky interface of other content access points.  You can read your stuff on the web or on your phone.  This is seriously an amazing concept.

That said, accessing the 1 million readers on this community is tough. There is a lot of stuff being posted and to probably get your story out there, you have to take advantage of the social networking aspect of the site.   But even without a huge community presence, there seems to be no better alternative for serial writers as you can tap into a passionate reading base and mobile capability for broadcasting your story. Of course, the teenage base is pretty strong and it’s pretty easy to get lost in here if your story doesn’t match the userbase.  But I lucked out.  Staff posted to their Facebook a link to the serial, so I got an immediate increase of 1000 reads on the first installment.  It was more than I would have received otherwise.  Retention has not been so strong — probably have about 50-60 readers patient enough to keep reading, but it’s good enough. That’s 50-60 more readers than I had without Wattpad.

On Ad Artwork

Given that PW is heavily dominated by the webcomic type site, eyecatching art content is really critical.  Bad or bland art can make a very bad ad.  If you are a writer, you must get help if all you can manage are stick figures. Commission an artist to help you develop something that can be cropped and used as banners.  I have tested several ads in their network and know that in general “text only” doesn’t work much.

Your ad also needs to stand out from the rest of the ads competing for visual real estate on a webpage. The more ads there are on a page, the worse your ad does unless your ad dominates the others. Don’t bother advertising where there are too many ads unless you’re confident that your ad will win over the others on the page

GoogleAds:

Had a coupon. Too expensive and not enough conversions even with the voucher.  I’ll only reconsider this when the ebook is done.

Social Networking Redirects

While these did not account for a high number of visits, the time that people spent once they clicked through was very good.  I think Facebook, Deviantart, and Twitter have sent consistent numbers of people over who spent at least 10 minutes or more on site reading through content and looking at other pages.

One bizarre observation about webfiction vs webcomics

In examining my Google stats, I”ve noted that I have a consistent (but small) number of folks who search for the story as “tales of the big bad wolf webcomic”.   This has puzzled me enormously because other than the illustrations I used early on in the story posts, this project is a webnovel.  I find it fascinating that there is a lack of a distinction between webfiction and webcomic in this regard and possibly something to pay attention to in the future.  I think– ultimately– that text is not a dead web format and that with the right multimedia you can “brand” these hybrid projects as either webfic/webcomic or better yet — visual novel /light novel which is how it’s done overseas.

I do think that there is a way to entice webcomic patrons to becoming webfiction readers… but not sure yet how. Only one or two projects I know of have regular illustrations accompanying the text that I know of and they are too new to evaluate their success. To that end, I’d love to hear from others marrying text with images to find out how people “brand” your work.

And … thinking this is it for now.  I’ll save thoughts/observations on site content usage for another lunch break xD.

Questions? Comments? As usual, feel free to ask away/contact me at any one of my various handles