Hello!! I have a question. When working on unfinished stories, how would you get your audience to care? What could I be doing to convince people to listen to my rambles and my excitement about my stories? Because to be honest, at this point I feel like no one other than me cares to hear about my writing unless it's fanfiction.
Without more info, I’m going to assume you’re talking about marketing. It’s an elusive thing for a lot of independent authors, so if it’s your first time through this process, it’s okay. It’ll come to you. And there are a lot of free resources out there too.
Each author, each story, and each genre is different when it comes to marketing too. As far as how to get people to care, the one thing I would say is find where your specific audience is. For example, we concentrate heavily in YA, but each story is different. Sometimes it’s a romantic comedy, like Fanon to Canon, and sometimes it’s time travel, like Infinity Child. Because both of those are still YA, we’ll concentrate on finding our readers, or people that might like our story, on Instagram, Tumblr, etc. I don’t really worry about FB or mailing lists because that’s now where my readers are congregating. Go where they are, find your appropriate hashtags, and see how others are doing it. Don’t try to emulate the traditionally published authors, unless you want to be one as well. They have a large marketing machine behind them and a lot of their posts are boosted, which means more interaction. If you’re not getting any, it’s okay. You will get there. It’s one of those things that takes time. Just remember, when your readers do find you, they will be super appreciative of all the content you produced while you were waiting for them.
My last piece of advice would be to find your author tribe. Writeblr is huge and supportive and lovely, but sometimes you just want to gush about what you finished that day. That’s where you need at least one author friend. Someone who gets it. Someone who doesn’t need the backstory on what it took for you to write that scene or that line or whatever. My DMs, for example, are literally always open. I will read all the things! I love to read!! But I met a lot of people just browsing. Take your time, be patient, and you’ll be just fine. Sometimes writing feels very solitary, but it doesn’t have to be :)
