Online Story Writing
When it comes to writing stories online, the good news is that there’s no shortage of places where you can publish your stories, poetry or random thoughts but if you’re looking at making money from online story writing then you are going to find that it is a real uphill struggle. The short story (pun unintended) is that people go to the Internet to get information or entertainment for free. That’s not to say that they won’t whip out their credit card for products or services but these items need to be really well marketed (either online or off) and online fiction is not something that really fits into this category. There have been a few authors – Stephen King being the most notable example – who have published and sold their fiction online but they were already well established brand identities offline, so there was no great challenge in pulling their readership online to purchase their writing efforts through a different medium. If you’re an unknown writer and you’re looking to make money by writing online then your efforts will be best rewarded by doing writing that is in the service of other money making activities – like writing articles for webmasters who need fresh content for their monetized websites or blogs; or indeed setting up your own affiliate marketing website and writing and publishing articles with the intention of driving traffic to that website. If however, you’re only interested in writing fiction online for the sake of writing itself, then the Internet is your oyster. There are a number of sites such as Writing.com and Storywrite.com that have set themselves up specifically as a place where enthusiastic writers can publish their stories or poetry. The beauty of these sites of course is that you can expose yourself to a wider reading audience than just your friends and family. These sites are free to join and will offer their members a number of resources as well as the opportunity to have your work critiqued by other writers. Something else that should not be overlooked when doing your own online story writing is setting up your own blog – particularly if your stories all fall under a certain theme. Blogs are a very easy way of establishing your own web presence and are straightforward to set up – all you need to do is go to Blogger.com and follow the set-up instructions. If your stories are tightly themed (say you have a leaning towards science fiction) then the advantage of blogging is that you can very easily link and be linked to by other sites pursing similar theme. This will ensure that your blog and hence your stories receive a steady stream of visitors who have an interest in those themes that you are writing about.
| 