Hi Kaylee… tips for getting readers for your novel. :)

Hi Kaylee! I have a soft spot for writers — mind if I give you a few tips first?

PART 1: Editing…

First thing you want to do is edit your stories and reformat them a little. Because when they do show up in someone’s feed, they’re only going to see the first sentence or two and it needs to catch their eye. Like this…

If I was scrolling my feed and saw “this is the second chapter of my book…” I probably wouldn’t click it. But if I saw “I jolted awake and was confused to find myself…” — I might click that!

Also, if you make a unique chapter title for each story, that’s going to help more than having them all called the same title. So — start with an interesting title, then the image… then go straight into the story.

At the bottom, it’s nice to add a separator, and then link to the other chapters. Just make the title a link, so it looks like this…

To make a link, highlight the title, and click the little link icon. Like so…

P.S. On each chapter, you have a summary up at the top. Don’t move that to the bottom. Just eliminate it. If people start reading and like it, they’ll keep reading. You don’t need to summarize each chapter for them.

PART 2: FINDING READERS

Once you have the chapters edited, the real fun starts. Now you want to find readers. The best and fastest way to do that is to find one of the publications that publishes fiction and submit your work to them.

Because you’re new, you don’t have readers and it’s really hard to get an audience when your writing is only in a small number of feeds. But if a publication with several thousand people publishes your story, suddenly you’re in ALL those feeds and you’ll get readers!

The 2 fastest ways to find a publication to submit your story to…

1) The short way: Use Super Meditor — it’s a list of publications looking for writers. Just go through the list looking for fiction publications. Then click “submit” to send the link to one of your chapters. (I’d submit Chapter 1)
http://www.supermeditor.com/pubs

2) The long way: Use the search tool to search by topic. Then view related publications and check to see if they have submission instructions.

Click the publications tab and then visit each publication. Scroll to the bottom and look for the “about” link. Click it to see if they have submission instructions posted.

PART 3: FYI

You’re not going to have to do that “finding publications” for every chapter. You only have to do it once. Once a publication accepts you as a writer, you’ll be able to publish the other chapters to that publication.

PART 4: CELEBRATING!

Once you get accepted into a publication, come back to this post and let us know, okay? Then we can all cheer you on as you grow an audience.

:)