lilyofthecosmos

[lilyofthecosmos]

Me reading: wow I love how good this author is at implying details instead of stating them! It really creates an atmospheric vibe and keeps the pacing snappy!

Me writing: If I don't explain the exact sound my character's shoes make when they squeak on the linoleum floor while they walk all my readers will hate me.

[lilyofthecosmos]

The average Tumblr user

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V.VI Maeterlinck has been consuming my every waking thought. So here, have a fanfiction about her!

[lilyofthecosmos]

filter on ao3 that only shows fic by women in their 40s who has a degree and works an office job and probably leaves authors notes that are like “sorry for the wait on the chapter guys! i had to give birth to my third kid😂”

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god grant me the strength to write my weird porn, the serenity to write my weird porn and the wisdom to write my weird porn

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Butch Rusty meeting 621 in a brief rendezvous after operation wallclimber 👀

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Every polycule needs the:

- Lobotomized mech pilot recently unfrozen from a decades long nap

- Plucky mech pilot double agent for the resistance

- Sentient cloud of psychic dust

- Computer

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Please tell me there's someone else out there as obsessed with V.VI Maeterlinck as I have become

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Living the fanfic writer dream (finally writing another chapter for that fic I last updated three months ago)

[lilyofthecosmos]

Hey Derin, can I ask you a question or two about publishing? (If no, close your eyes for the next bit and click near where you remember the delete button was.)

I'm writing something with the dream of publishing it one day and I'm considering all avenues at this stage. What led you to publishing serially online? What are the pros of your experience doing that?

Asking you because I was looking over your site earlier today and thinking about how comfortable a place the internet feels - less of a big step than traditional publishing, or even putting out a whole story at once for self-publishing.

I've never pursued trad publishing and have no plans to ever do so, it was immediately obvious that it wasn't for me, so I can't give you like, comparisons. I only even got into indie publishing because my readers were demanding ebooks and paperbacks so I just shrugged and got them made. Sometimes I get asked trad vs. indie publishing questions that I do not have the experience to answer.

This question, though, I can answer. I didn't sit down and go "how should I publish these? Online, or through a trad publisher, or what?" I approached web serial writing directly as a career without considering publishing my writing as books at all; that was never on the radar until the readers wanted them. And the reason I started writing a web serial was simple -- it was a hobby that suited my lifestyle.

I'd written serial fiction before; fanfiction, some r/hfy stuff, just whatever I felt like, and I had a serious problem experienced by many casual writers -- I tended not to finish stuff. The stuff that had never made it to the web was even worse; I had so many novels in progress on my hard drive that I'd gotten to the end of the first act of, before moving onto a new idea. I needed something to do with my time (I'd moved back to my hometown to spend time with my dying grandfather and was unemployed) and posting a web serial with a strict schedule and a patreon seemed like the best way to force myself to actually finish my stories. If a handful of people were giving me a couple of buck a month, I wouldn't be able to just drift off to something else; I'd have to finish the story.

And it worked. I got a new job and wrote Curse Words on my off weeks, then that job ended and my Patreon was paying my new mortgage and suddenly this was just kind of my job now. And then enough people were asking for ebooks and paperbacks that I had to figure out how to make those happen. And this is kind of my life now I guess.

In terms of pros I would say:

Low barrier to entry/small steps of progression: You can just start publishing on a website for free whenever you want. You can make your own website for free and publish on that (I did). It takes five minutes or less to learn how to do and you don't need to buy anything. Your time commitment is mostly Writing The Story, which is presumably what you want to be spending your time on anyway. If you do it for 2 months and decide you hate it? You can stop. No harm, no foul.

No boss: You're beholden to your patrons and nobody else. You can write whatever the fuck you want, wherever the fuck you want, however often you want. The only deadline is the schedule that you yourself set, and you can set it to suit your lifestyle.

Payment model: The patreon/ko-fi sponsorship model is vastly superior, in my opinion, to making money via book sales. There's too many factors involved to really say if you make more or less money on Patreon, but what it has is predictability. Patrons come and go, but slowly. I can predict my monthly income from my supporters to within a hundred dollars or so. This is a massive advantage when you have bills to pay. Book sales surge unpredictably, and while you can bank on things like advances if you go the trad publishing route, these are few and far between.

Time: There are minimal delays in web serial publishing. No waiting months or years at a time for your book to chew through the machinery of a publisher, no long delays as your agent works or contracts are negotiated. Indie publishing is faster but still has far more delays than web serial publishing; most notably, you have to write the entire book first, often with little idea of how well it's going to perform. I don't do well with waiting periods or having to coordinate timing with others, so web serial publishing works best for me.

Marketability: Web serials have a far smaller audience than books, but they're also easier to market to that audience. For one thing, they're usually free, and it's a lot easier to convince someone to try a free story instead of buying one. For another, their one-chapter-at-a-time nature feels like less of a commitment and less intimidating to some people, even though they are traditionally much longer than books tend to be. Also, their chapter-by-chapter nature allows speculation and jokes and fanart and stuff to be spread while the story is still going, which is great marketing, especially when readers end up talking about it far longer than they would talk about a book (because they're reading it chapter-by-chapter for far longer).

But the biggest advantage in marketability is what I call 'rolling weight enthusiasm'.

When you're pushing a cart or something, it takes a lot of effort to get started, but once you're cruising at a consistent speed, you can rely on momentum to do half the work for you. You can build more and more speed with the same effort, because a rolling weight is maintaining that momentum. Writing a web serial is a lot like that; the consistent release schedule means that if you can get people invested, it's much easier to keep them invested, because they're waiting a very short period of time (a few days to a week, depending on your release schedule) to get more of the story. If you're releasing books, there might be more than a year between releases; you can keep a dedicated audience interested for that long, but it's much harder to hold onto the casual readers. There are so, so many book series that I've only read half of because at some point a new book was released and I didn't notice. If you write and publish books, you have to do a big part of the marketing all over again to let people know that the next one is out. Web serials don't have this problem. When's the next chapter out? soon enough that the previous chapter is still fresh in your mind. soon enough that you probably don't have time to finish the fanart this one made you think of.

Immediate feedback: Another great thing about web serials is that you can watch the audience reaction in real time. Not only that but, unlike with a book that people read all at once, you get very detailed feedback specific to each chapter. I don't mean people telling you about the story; reader suggestions and 'constructive criticism' is almost universally useless and can generally be thrown out. If you trust somebody's writing and editing skills enough to take feedback from them, you should ask that person directly; random readers are unlikely to be experts and unlikely to have accurate advice.

Instead, watch them discuss it amongst themselves. What did they get right away, and what are they confused about? what did they react most strongly to; is the dominant emotional reaction to the various characters vaguely in line with what you intended? Check the theories; how well are they predicting future events? (If everyone is guessing the Big Twist, then you need to put more effort into selling it so that it's not a let down; the less surprising a twist is, the better the writing has to be to pull it off. But if nobody is guessing the Big Twist, then you have insufficiently foreshadowed it. You're looking for a very high population of readers being accurate about the information they're expected to have gleaned, and a small population being accurate about twists and stuff, and you want that small population to grow as they get closer to the twist.) Checking these reactions can give you a better idea of what you need to emphasise, clarify, or foreshadow in the text.

[lilyofthecosmos]

patches from the souls series is one of the funniest characters ever conceived bc he's like one of the only universal constants across every game but his role is that he's a little guy and its his birthday and u cant get mad at the birthday boy for playing a birthday trick on you

[lilyofthecosmos]

Every polycule needs the:

- Lobotomized mech pilot recently unfrozen from a decades long nap

- Plucky mech pilot double agent for the resistance

- Sentient cloud of psychic dust

- Computer

[lilyofthecosmos]

My top three rules for world building:

How are these bitches eating?

How do these bitches stay warm at night?

Who is paying for all of this bullshit?

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next up on the docket: the author's blatant (and yet thematically relevant!) fetish

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