Thread: My new online serial: FOR YOUR DAMNED LOVE

People keep hearing me going on about online serials (weblit, webnovels, wovels, blog novels, blovels/blooks, etc) and how they are fun,a writing aid, and possible route to readership or even publication.
But, the more alert among you ask, where are web serials this guywrites, that we might be aware of whether he knoweth what he speaketh,and not be fulleth of shith?

Well, just launched, (in fact, I guess this sort of IS thelaunch...pitiful huh? Bono said he'd come play, but a guess a bunch ofstarving pickaninnies somewhere are more important to him than I am.

Anyway, sex, drugs, Mexico, murder....it's just a click away.

FOR YOUR DAMNED LOVE

That's the blurb for other sites.

For this workshop, note that I undertook to do this as minimally as possible, no flashies or gizmos, just chapters and TOC.

Let me note a couple of things for other weblitters here.
This is pretty drafty. I thought Moderan was nuts saying he's doing the Hendrix thing first draft, but it's ocurred to me that maybe it's not worth doing a high polish before going online, especially with this sort of thing. It's by no means first draft--this thing actually had an agent at one time. But... Any ideas on that, anybody?

Note the RSS FEED. I got this idea from those Mayan Calendar maniacs. It's a wordpress plug-in called Add Any. What I like is that it allows people to add your feed to dozens of sites, including their desktop or even email and iPhone notifications.

I whipped this out to put up here because all I've been posting are essentially failures as bad examples. So here's this. Maybe it sucks, too, for different reasons?

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Welcome to the madness. Looks pretty good actually.

I admire the simplicity. And am grateful for the suggestion on RSS subscribe. I had wondered about what to do about that, and decided to post my own serial without one, here as workshop, to see what might work with it.
I will attempt to install that Add Any. I very much like the multiple capability.
Is there a downside to that?

Sorry, the app is called AddToAny.
I don't see any downside except that it's a third party thing and you can can't put ads on it. I don't see anybody putting adds on RSS feeds anyway, although you could do it with FeedBurner. I guess they agree with me that you don't want to do anything to discourage or "anti-reward" people for subscribing.
I see you have adds on yours, by the way. Not bad for a new launch. None of my business, but I'm assuming they are place-holders, not paid ads. Have you looked into Project Wonderful, as seen on the top banner of this page and the home page of the site?

Intriguing. I'll be back to read more. Argh, I need more time in a day.

Thanks, Foxee.

The thing about RSS feeds is not just that it's nice for the writer to have a subscription base, but that the reader gets updates and can read them one at a time as they arrive. My feeds pop up on my Yahoo desktop, just like the sports scores and weather and such. I also get an email notice on one of them. So it's not like, here, read all this, it's like 2000 words come up once a week or whenever.

It's considered a good idea start with a "backlog" of chapters, but I wonder.... I'm essentially presenting a newcomer with a lot of backstory to read. Of course as the story progresses, anybody coming in will be confronted with longer and longer backstory. So as your story continues and builds readership, it also becomes more of a curve to people to get with it.
I hadn't thought of it before, but it's kind of a flaw in the process. Or something.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to provide periodic ebook downloads for people to get up to speed?

Some of these things have run for years, by the way. Tales of Mu, the "granmammy" of the modern genre, has been running more than five years, and that's with new episodes every couple of days.

Take a page from roleplaying, perhaps? In a roleplaying game sometimes you have people who lag behind for whatever reason and we need to catch them back up. We do this with summaries or updates, the more engaging the better. I suppose that would be like television, too, sometimes in a serial they have little lead-ins that explain what's been happening up to the point where the episode is going to start.

Whoa!

Is my face red. I am one of the last Americans to actually watch serials in movie theaters, and have compared this kind of publishing to them. And they always had the "What happened last week" thing. And of course what happens next week. (Which I always thought was lame because here you are on the edge of your chair over whethter Dick Tracy is going to die in that sinking tugboat, then here he is next week, smashing some yegg in the yob.

I don't think I've ever seen anybody do this with weblit. It would take a little more work to have a "click here to find out what the hell this is all about" thing...requiring updates, involving synopses (arhhhhhhh!!!!) but certainly a great idea.

I'll get somebody else right on it.

I'm glad you went with the feed for this one. I've been doing a lot of digging lately regarding how to get and keep viewers pulled in to my story/site.

I was using the default Joomla RSS feed but I finally realized that it was junk. Sure, people could subscribe, but I had no stats, numbers or ability to track anything. I was completely in the dark.

So I turned to Feedburner. Except the standard Joomla feed url's were garbage. Aaargh. This is what I get for not going with Wordpress.

Anyway, if any Joomla wranglers read this, I wrote up and article on my main site regarding setting up Joomla with Feedburner:

http://hypertransitory.com/joomla/se...th-feedburner/

Now I can see exactly how many people I have subscribed. Actually the number was so low I really didn't want to know lol.

I think giving people all those choices to subscribe is a great idea. I was contacted recently by someone who has given readers the option of receiving the next chapter early via email. He said he got a lot of action out of doing it.

Now back to For Your Damned Love, I see you're using "FeedBlitz". Does that provide you with stats and tracking ability?

I'm really liking what I read so far! The color scheme really lends itself to the feel of the story, I think.

Thanks, John. This certainly isn't the terminal situation for feeds. I have scratched my head over Feedburner, also and tried to make Google Pipes work. Thanks for your input on it, I'll absorb all that and see if I can do something that works better.
Although actually, this works OK, I think. I have stats on the pages themselves, so I can see how many people read. But I'm all for power use if can get my head around it.

Itls nice having a place to shake this stuff down before slapping it up on WFG and "going public" on media networks. Which is the whole idea behind this subforum.

I had some mail from Corvus, who also snitched the AddToAny idea...and made a little custom button for it. Which I guess I noticed on the options, but didn't think about it. Gee I can further minimalize my look!

wow! you guys are having a lot of action in your sites right now. Is addtoany available on blogger? or is it exclusive to wordpress? of not, are there alternatives?


*okay- updates- I have something similar, but it doesn't have a subscribe email sumthing...

Thank you again for that tip, Lin.
I discovered and solved a minor problem with that widget, by the way. I had placed it above my table of contents, as you did, but found that every time I moved my cursor near it to select chapters the menu pulled down, obscuring the contents and requiring attention. A nuisance. I first selected an option requiring the button be clicked in order to expand into the menu, but that seemed to defeat part of the advantage of the button, so I moved it into the other sidebar, above my ads. This area would not be as widely hovered, so I can use the mouse-over pulldown without creating a problem.

I seem to be attaining a command of what I regard as technical jargon. Two weeks ago a sentence about a mouse-over hover for a pulldown in a sidebar would have seemed like Olde English to me. I suppose this is inevitable. Perhaps it will give me a cachet with my younger clients.

LOL
Yeah, I have learned a lot of tekgeek goodies fooling with this stuff. Unfortunately has little application to anything else. But I guess you'd say the same about writing fiction. (Unless you want to apply the creation of fictional stories to a poltical career).

I'm poking around feedburner again, after John's prompt. I went through it before and ended up jumping at AddToAny because it seems so "user-side friendly".

Yes all this stuff, while beneficial, always comes along with a handful of frustration.

Linton, for some reason, using the 'Add to Any' on your site still does not allow me to add the feed to my Google Reader. I don't use any of the others so I'm not sure how those work.

What I ended up doing was as such:

In Safari (Mac version), when you get to a page that is RSS capable, you see the RSS icon in the address bar.

I clicked on that and Safari then displays the feed for that site/page.

I copied that link and manually added it to my Google Reader. Once I did that, the feed popped in there as I expected.

The trials and tribulations continue..!

And of the two... you never hear of a getting off at a tribulation because of a hung jury.