Saturday, November 01, 2008

Reviews, comments, and criticisms, and praise

This week's topic revolves around my short story "Brazen" published on "East End of the Web". Today, I focus on the many different comments and the diversity of them. It's almost funny and I think, teaches a lesson, one I've also learned working customer service at the day job. You can't please every one all the time. It's impossible. What one person loves and thinks is perfect, the next one absolutely hates, often for the same exact reasons. I wrote this story many many years ago. In fact, I don't even remember which year and I had forgotten all about it until I received a recent very favorable email about it that made my day. The comments range from "It sucked" to "unrealistic" to "Nice story. Enjoyed reading it" all the way to "I love it! I love it! I LOVE IT!!! I write stories like this. It hooked me from the very first sentence! Really great job!!!" Honestly, if memory serves, it was just a quick short story I wrote for my website when I was starting out, that I later posted on East End of the Web. I don't recall expecting it to be the next Great American Novel but just a cute, quick short story. It's good to see what readers think as I usually don't hear a lot of feedback from them. It makes me think I'll write more short stories to post there to see what kind of reaction I get. I've thought of that over the years, then opt out to actually sell the story to a royalty paying publisher. But it's also good to have free promo in many spots as my advertising budget right now frankly sucks. So after I finish my huge judging project and at least 2 sets of edits, I'll start writing a short story here and there for promo and post it again on East End of the Web or other popular writing sites. My younger daughter loves http://www.fanfiction.net/ and reads their stories all the time. That's probably another excellent place to post free short stories. If you're a reader, please tell me, if you ever found a writer by reading a free short story and if you followed them to their other books. If you're also a writer, please tell me if you ever post free short stories to give as samples of your stories and if you think you've gained readership?

4 comments:

DJ Kirkby said...

Hi
I post excerpts from novels in progress on a couple of blogs and I have found this to be very helpful in terms of raising interest in the book.

Sandra Cox said...

I've never posted a freebie, but it seems it worked out well for you!

Unknown said...

I believe in posting excerpts - not sure about the free reads thing. I will be interested to hear what you find out

Unknown said...

I'm glad you posted this information on short stories since I'm learning to write these as well. I will check out your sites.
Thanks!

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