(no subject)
musesfool has an interesting post on archiving and she asks a question:
The question is, is archiving all over the place - spreading your love around, as it were - is that attention-whoring or just smart marketing? How much work am I - is anyone - prepared to put into this, once the actual writing is done? Is it enough to put my stories here and on my site and hope that the people who'll like them can find them? Most days, I think it is. But then there are times when I think, wow, there's a whole universe of fandom that doesn't know my stories, and they should! They rilly should!
I get this feeling sometimes and it's mostly because I personally am moving away from wide-spread proliferation of my fic. There are days when I regret my decision to no longer be so involved with mailing lists or join newsgroups or archive my fic anywhere other than ff.net (if at all) and my website.
The feeling is more acute when I put up a new X-Men or JAG fic; obviously breaking into a new fandom, I should be doing more work than I am and so I feel guilty because I'm not marketing my fics the way I should, but at the same time, the idea of fic taxes had a strong influence.
However, I would call mass-archiving/self-publicizing smart moves, especially when breaking into fandom. A smart marketer would be all over the place, getting her 'brand name' out there; if one has the time to do it, it's probably the way to go in a new fandom. It also helps because you'll meet new people which is also a good thing; every new person whom I've run into and exchanged emails with over a long period of time has always made me think or do something differently. But the key word here is time.
Writing itself takes up a lot of my spare time and as it is, I'm slow about editing, updating the site, and when all is said done, there is little time to do more than post a notice here and upload to ff.net (if I remember the latter). I joined a few email groups, but I got so intimidated by the size of the memberships and volume of emails that I ended up un-subbing.
So yes, I definitely do regret the fact I no longer archive or join mailing lists or participate heavily on bbs, but at the same time, it leaves more time to write. :-)
The question is, is archiving all over the place - spreading your love around, as it were - is that attention-whoring or just smart marketing? How much work am I - is anyone - prepared to put into this, once the actual writing is done? Is it enough to put my stories here and on my site and hope that the people who'll like them can find them? Most days, I think it is. But then there are times when I think, wow, there's a whole universe of fandom that doesn't know my stories, and they should! They rilly should!
I get this feeling sometimes and it's mostly because I personally am moving away from wide-spread proliferation of my fic. There are days when I regret my decision to no longer be so involved with mailing lists or join newsgroups or archive my fic anywhere other than ff.net (if at all) and my website.
The feeling is more acute when I put up a new X-Men or JAG fic; obviously breaking into a new fandom, I should be doing more work than I am and so I feel guilty because I'm not marketing my fics the way I should, but at the same time, the idea of fic taxes had a strong influence.
However, I would call mass-archiving/self-publicizing smart moves, especially when breaking into fandom. A smart marketer would be all over the place, getting her 'brand name' out there; if one has the time to do it, it's probably the way to go in a new fandom. It also helps because you'll meet new people which is also a good thing; every new person whom I've run into and exchanged emails with over a long period of time has always made me think or do something differently. But the key word here is time.
Writing itself takes up a lot of my spare time and as it is, I'm slow about editing, updating the site, and when all is said done, there is little time to do more than post a notice here and upload to ff.net (if I remember the latter). I joined a few email groups, but I got so intimidated by the size of the memberships and volume of emails that I ended up un-subbing.
So yes, I definitely do regret the fact I no longer archive or join mailing lists or participate heavily on bbs, but at the same time, it leaves more time to write. :-)