More Than An EBook

By Andy Walsh

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.

(c) Andy Walsh 2001

The full transcript of 'More than an E-Book' is available at http://www.stbrodag.co/buy.html