I’ve been pondering how to make it easier for people not interested in this blog per se to follow my serial fiction projects, without all the other blog stuff and without my commentary.
I’ve also been curious about a new social media thing called tsū, which shares ad revenue with its users. Get a lot of clicks, get a wee bit of cash. So if I were to publish things there that lots of people liked and shared, it would be cool.
As far as I can tell, tsū is really not suited for serial fiction, or even posts of more than a paragraph or two. It may be completely impossible for people who stumble across Episode 3 to find Episode 1. But maybe, just maybe, it’s a growing platform that would embrace words as well as pictures and memes and whatever the kids are posting up these days.
More likely, I’ll have to find a different platform. But it’s worth a shot.
I’ll keep posting TFNIWLNW here, so don’t fret, kids, you need do nothing to continue to enjoy the upcoming twists and turns, and maybe even a plot. Maybe. But if you’d like to check out what this tsū thing is all about, click this link and you can join up as my personal guest. Or just sign sign up and when they ask you who invited you, use the code ‘vikingjs’.
A big hitch is this plan is that I have exactly one connection on tsū. If that person doesn’t share the post, it’s pretty much dead.
I was first to market with this concept: http://frendshop.com/
I dropped development when I couldn’t drum up much interest, but kept the few clients that had signed up. It’s generated $10Ks in sales and $100s in ad revenue, which is not bad for something I knocked together in a day or two. You are welcome to find a way to monetize fiction + frendshop.com … at least there’s no signup involved, which is a huge barrier to adoption on the www. If you drive enough traffic there, I may even take it out of mothballs.
What’s now missing on my platform is the small-ticket items which would allow people to “get stuff for free.” Maybe you can sell “the next chapter” of your book, repeatedly. Is anyone serializing books on the web? e.g. first chapter is free, and micropay to continue reading? Why not? That seems like a model where customers get to try for no risk, and a long compelling novel could “sell” for several times its retail price, with no one feeling ripped off in the process. I’m sure it would turn fiction into a neverending series of single-chapter cliffhangers … but I’d argue that a lot of popular fiction is nothing more than that already.
Interesting. I remember you describing friendshop, but at the time I was completely clueless about social media (now I am only mostly clueless), and it sounded to me more like a service for buyers and vendors. If I’d understood your concept better back then as a place I could get paid just for getting people to look at my stuff, I probably would have given it a try.
I haven’t seen writers using the model of selling chapters, but it is very common for book series to offer the first for free and then charge for follow-ups. tsū offers micropayment services, so that part of the equation is covered, but I haven’t seen a way to put content behind a paywall on their site.
tsū does have tagging, so that answers the “how do people go back to old episodes?” question. So far the tags I chose for Episode 1 have attracted exactly zero people. I’m up to a massive TWO followers on tsū now, (double the count when I posted this episode!), but only one of them has seen TFNIWLMW. Apparently one lonely view is not enough to generate significant revenue.