Sep 23, 2015

With one week to go, I think it’s fairly safe to say that I won’t be winning the Inkshares/Nerdist writing contest. Not even close. So, in the closing days of the contest, I’d like to offer some thoughts on my experience.

POST-MORTEM, DAY ONE

It should be obvious that, unless you have a very close, very broad extended family and/or circle of personal friends, you cannot win a contest like this. Your first stop will likely be the fans of your writing, but not many of us have enough (I obviously don’t) to be able to leverage them to succeed. It becomes necessary, then, to reach out to individuals and groups in the hope that they will start a cascade effect (aka: going viral) that will report your need to the far reaches of the Internet and generate a lot of preorders from people you don’t know.

Some of my friends amplified the message that I was in the contest and needed help (and thank you, you know who you are); unfortunately, this did not appear to significantly increase my preorders. In addition, I did reach out to people I knew, however slightly, and organizations that I thought might be helpful in my cause. Unfortunately, although I made some connections that might help me in the future, they did not help me in the present situation.

Sigh.

Why? I can think of a couple of reasons.

Most of the books in the contest are fairly mainstream, and certainly easily categorizable. Because of this, they have natural constituencies they can call upon for support. This point was driven home to me by a woman who told her followers that she was hoping for help from a steampunk organization. Those who wrote zombie novels could expect help from people who enjoy zombie novels; those who wrote post-apocalyptic novels could find support in that community, and so on.

I believe that mine was one of only three or four humourous novels in the competition. I briefly thought that people who liked humourous science fiction would be my natural constituency, but when I started looking for them, I found that they were incredibly difficult to find, and the few I did approach did not respond to my call for help. Otherwise, a novel about everybody in the world changing sex doesn’t fit neatly into one of science fiction’s sub-genres, making rallying support for it difficult.

In the end, my inability to muster support beyond my circle of friends and family made it impossible for me to do well.