More
Than An Ebook
by: Andy Walsh
The following in an excerpt from the E-Book of the
same name.
Utilising the Full Resources of the Internet to Promote
your Fiction
Fiction writers appear to be the despised members
of the internet writing community. Our product doesn't
promise the reader financial success or the prospect
of an early retirement. We don't claim to know the
one true secret of how to make a million or how to
drive thousands of people to your website each day.
Other people aren't likely to use our books in a marketing
campaign or pay to give them away as freebies.
Imagine the emails you could receive: 'Easy Assonance
in Eight Easy Steps', 'Build your own sonnet in less
than 14 Days' or 'Sign Up Now: This Short Story deal
terminates tonight!!!'
It would be great, wouldn't it?
Alas, this is not our lot in life - I sometimes wish
it was or I wouldn't be driving around in a small
Fiat Punto.
To write fiction is to suck the marrow from life,
to engage our minds in the pursuit of literary excellence,
to lay ourselves open before our readers.
Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.
-- Henry Miller
This sounds far from the hard-hitting world of internet
commerce. And it is. The marketing gurus have used
the internet to their advantage. It is time that we
fiction writers do the same.
I've written this article to encourage everyone who
writes fiction to fully utilise the resources that
we have available to us on the World Wide Web.
It's a companion piece to my earlier article based
on my book 'Writing Fiction for the Internet' (http://www.stbrodag.com/buy.html).
In that volume, I described the basics of building
a website and marketing your book across the web.
I want to help you to think creatively. I want you
to push yourselves to think of new and exciting ways
of promoting and displaying your work.
I'll show you how to use colour, sound and images
to enhance your book.
I'll help you to find the sites you need and pass
on tips that I've learned along the way.
At the end of it all, I hope that you will have a
book that will grab people's attention.
As an example, I'd like you to look at my own website.
http://www.stbrodag.com/stb3.html
This is the part of a collection of pages that I set
up to promote my own novel, 'St Brodag's Isle'. Let
the page load and see what happens.
I've included music to give the page a Celtic feel.
I actually wrote the music myself and I'll tell you
later how to download the programme to achieve this.
I tried to write a piece that would evoke in the mind
of the listener the 'Riverdance' music. I'll leave
it up to you to decide if I achieved that or failed!
I've also picked on a recurring motif within my novel,
the kittiwake, and highlighted it here. A kittiwake
is a small gull-like bird that nests on steep sea
cliffs. I found this little animation on the internet.
I'll give you the links to such sites later.
I'm combining words, pictures and sounds on this web
page.
Words
Pictures
Sounds
That's the sort of combination I'd like you to try
soon. As writers, we're adept at handling words. It's
time for us to broaden our horizons.
© Andy Walsh 2001
The full transcript of 'More than an E-Book' is available
at http://www.stbrodag.co/buy.html
About The Author
Andy Walsh is a househusband and writer living in
Cumbria in the UK. He writes novels, short stories,
articles and poems some of which you can read at http://www.stbrodag.com
