#writing platform

Nice aestetics, colors, love it

Gonna write sth rn

I’ll be honest: I’m tired of the self-publishing gig. I’ve seen it done really well, but I don’t have the marketing savvy to make it work for me, and I’m tired of being on my own when it comes to my books. I want a team behind and with me. However, traditional publishing has even more stringent gate-keeping currently than it used to, and it seems like you need just as much marketing savvy to get accepted into traditional publishing as you do to make it in self-publishing. Yes, I’m speaking of the dreaded “platform.”

I just deactivated all my social media account except this one. My author newsletter has about 25 subscribers. My readership for Whitney & Davies isn’t much bigger. In terms of platform, no agent or publisher is going to give me a second look—and as much as I’d like to think, “oh, my books will speak for themselves,” I’m not so naive as to actually believe that.

Which leads me to … Substack. Perhaps once a month posts along the lines of, “the intersection of faith, fantasy, and redemptive storytelling,” with brief essays akin to my “Tragedy of Susan” post that’s recently gained new traction here, or the difference between Faramir and Boromir (in the books) and the significance thereof, or the establishment of right kingship in Narnia, or other such musings, including some of the ways these themes have influenced my own writing. Not an author newsletter, which is more specifically focused on my books and writing updates, but not trying to fight the algorithms of social media either. Something to introduce people to the ideas and themes that are behind everything I write instead of trying to focus on the individual stories that I have or am currently writing.

So then, hypothetically speaking, if you, my friends, were to see a Substack like that, would it interest you enough to subscribe? And possibly even recommend to others that they subscribe? Not because, "hey, this is e-louise-bates from Tumblr," but for the actual content of it?

For Writing:

Reedsy — this is where I have all of my projects. You can create new books or import files and it will automatically turn them into books. It has a lot of cool features like tracking your word count, how many words you wrote, how many you deleted, and the current word count. There’s a word count goal you can set. You can create different sections (I can’t remember what they’re called). This is where I like to keep my notes and character sheets. It auto saves your writing and you can go back into your past saves to recover them. It also allows you to export your story in proper publishing format for ebooks and manuscripts. There’s a lot more too. The site holds weekly contests for $250. They have 5 prompts you can submit 1-3k word stories to. Highly recommend. The downside is that they very recently put everything behind a paywall. So you have to subscribe to two different plans in order to get all the features they offer. Which I’m pissed about because up until recently I had it all for free. And I got locked out of my notes and stuff that were already there.

Miriam Webster’s dictionary — I always have this open while I’m writing. I usually use the thesaurus to find the words I’m looking for.

Capitalize My Title — very straightforward I have a hard time remembering proper formatting for titles so I just write it into this and copy paste it.

For Character Sheets:

CharacterHub — this site offers highly customizable character sheets and world/story sheets. You can create a unique style for every character from color to information and pictures. The only downside is that the site is incredibly slow and often glitchy. You have to be really patient with it. There are also social channels where you can talk to other users.

Unvale — less customizable when it comes to formatting but it is still great in its own right. You can post pictures, writing for both characters and stories. You can make pages for your stories and link them to your characters. There’s a very active community on here as well.

For Publishing:

Archive of Our Own (Ao3) — I post my fanfics and my original works here. It’s a non-profit that prides itself on its zero-censorship policy. Yes the tagging system to weed out all the things you don’t want to read or to find what you want to read. It’s hard to get reads on original works but if you cross-post to tumblr you can build an audience.

Reedsy — they have a market place where you can find authors, editors, freelancers, and other experts and resources. You can also get a job here yourself. And there’s a place where you can publish your stories for people to find.

Patreon — it’s hard to be a writer on Patreon. But I post my work in progress stuff for my original story as well as posting the finalized episode as soon as it’s done so people can get early access to episodes that normally get published once a month.

Tumblr — this platform is honestly one of the best places for posting your writing and getting feedback from communities. Reddit is also a great place to get feedback too but there’s rarely a place you can self promote your writing. Here you can.

Hi everyone 👋 I’m Pamela, Writer Development and Community Lead at Novlr!

October is coming to an end, and so is the time to prepare for NaNoWriMo (a time we affectionately call Preptober).

I hit my head, what is NaNoWriMo?

This is a fucking Godssent for every writer who is struggling to outline and plan on their own.