January '09 New Roundup

Some Interesting News Bits happening in the Blog Fiction World. Some old, some recent, all of it was news to me in the last week. This is a little longer than usual since I've covering December as well.

Abandoned Sites:

• Diary of a Dhampyr in England hasn't had a new story post since November. Fortunately, a post last week by the author indicates that it may spring back to life.
• The Time Traveler Blog - Only 1 post since august 2008 and nothing since November. I think it's safe to declare this abandoned.
  

Site Redo
The Super Hero blogs each took a temporary hiatus. Fortunately, they used the time to migrate their separate blogger blogs into a single Wordpress blog. I love the new look. It makes reading them together a lot easier. Great job guys, the new site looks great! All the old posts have been copied to the new site.


Hiatuses
(Un)Dead Man Blogging has decided to take a hiatus. Not sure when he'll be back. "Maybe" late spring.

New Sites:
I've provided links to all the new blog fiction sites that have come by in the last couple months. You can read more about each one in the Blog Fiction Links forum.
Minimal English | Sketches of Absurdity
Asher Marr | Cyberpunk
Detling Adventures: Lake Wobegon meets X-Files
Treasured Vulva
Diary: Alone on Earth
Wren & Marnie's Guide to World Domination

New Sites, but then abadoned:

• My Super Hopeless Romance was a good find. Too bad a new post has been added since I found it in early December.
• http://fictionblogs2.blogspot.com/ used to be a site that listed blog fiction sites. It had been abandoned for years. Late last year it was redesigned and posted a couple articles. Since then it's been abandoned again. - Oh well.
  

Back from the Abyss

• The Captivity of Wrigley the Cat - This site was abandoned last summer. Good to see that it's come roaring back.
• Life in Bear Country - My word. What once was lost, now is found. After I complained about the whole thing disappearing, the author, Marsha Loftis, stopped by to let us know that, not only is she rewriting the story, but that she has also made the original available on her site. SWEET!
• Evangeline's Ride went on hiatus in early december. Then, after some brutal reviews at webfictionguide.com I was afraid that it may not come back, but, fortunately, just as promised, the story is going again and posting every friday and monday.
  

Did I miss anything? Have your own January '09 news? Let me know in the comments.

EntreCard is Awesome

EntreCard has been really great for attracting new readers. After the initial setup of the service, you only need about 20 minutes a day to attract dozens of brand new readers every day. The best part is that if you want more and have the time, you can attract even more.

So what is EntreCard and how does it work? Well, it boils down to this. You try to earn credits so you can then spend those credits by buying advertising on other sites. When you first sign up you create a logo for you site. When you purchase an advertisement with your credits, your logo will show up on that site for exactly 24 hours. So, how do you earn credits? Well there are several ways.

The easiest way is to just put the EntreCard widget on your site. When people who also have the widget see your widget they can click the "drop" button. This gives you one "credit". This is one reason why you want to have the widget at the top of your site.

Another way to earn credits is by allowing others to advertise on your blog. After logging into the entrecard website you will be taken to your "dashboard" which will have a list of sites that would like to advertise on your site. If you approve the ad, the ad will enter a waiting list until it's turn and will display that logo on your site. How much do you earn from selling advertising? Well, you will earn however much people are willing to pay to advertise on your site. Obviously, if you have a well trafficked blog, people will pay lots( sometimes over a thousand credits). If you have a small blog they may only be willing to pay 8 credits. The longer the waiting list to advertise on your blog, the more people will have to pay to advertise on your site. Note that no matter how many people are awaiting approval, your cost won't rise, only when you approve an ad will the cost to advertise on your site go up. This gives you an incentive to approve ads ASAP.

Dropping
The final way to earn credits is the most intensive, but is also the primary earning for a blog with little traffic. You can go to other sites that have EntreCard and "drop" on them. Not only will that site earn a credit, you will too. As a bonus, many sites will often do "dropbacks" meaning they will drop on your site if you drop on theirs. If you find people that do that each drop doubles in value. My suggestion for doing drops is to bookmark a few blogs everyday that have the following characteristic:
1. Have an EntreCard
2. Are of a related subject
3. Have the EntreCard widget towards the top of their site.
Then put all of those bookmarks in the same folder(I use the firefox "Delicious" add-on and give all the sites the same tag). Everyday, go to that folder and choose the "open all sites in this folder" option. Then, go to the bathroom or make breakfast. By the time they are done loading you can click-close-click-close each and every site. Once they are all loaded you should be able to do about 50 or more drops in 5 minutes. Also, monitor your "dropbacks" and see who returns your drops. Delete the sites that do not and replace them with sites that do.

Once you've earned a couple hundred credits(probably 2 to 3 days - possibly more when first starting) you're ready to do some major advertising. You can either buy lots of cheap advertising or build up your credits and only buy a few expensive ones. In my experience saving up to advertise on a well trafficked site is worth the wait.

The ads are the primary way to attract new readers. I can always see my traffic do a mini spike when I buy an ad on an expensive site (usually 256+ credits). There are residual ways to get new readers. When you buy advertising or do drops, sometimes those authors may check out your site and like what they find. Also, some sites to encourage droppers will permanently display their top droppers. That's free advertising for you!

So, to sum up my tips on getting the most from Entrecard.
1. Drop on sites with similar content
2. Advertise on sites with similar content
3. Save up and buy the more expensive ads.
4. Put your widget at top of your site to encourage droppers and advertisers.
5. Try to identify sites that do "drop backs"
6. Use bookmarks so that you can do dozens of drops in a day in only a few minutes.

Have fun and enjoy the new readers.

How to Use Hyperlinks in Blog Fiction

It seems that blog fiction writers just can't win when it comes to the editorial reviews at Web Fiction Guide. Check out these two reviews. First, this little excerpt from a Gavin Williams's review of Charlotte.

The Charlotte character mentions a website where she collects photos; a real blog would link to it and display them. Blog fiction should use the web just as well, if not better, than your average person’s real blog.

A good point that Gavin makes. Now let's take a look at an excerpt from another review. This time Morgan O'Friel's review of FlyOver City.

Another problem with this story is the liberal use of the ever-controversial hyperlinks through-out the blog. I found myself feeling as though I had to click on the hyperlinks to understand the references (or else why would the author put them in there), but once I did, I got so distracted by the other sites that it threw me right out of the story.

Well this creates quite the conundrum, doesn't it? Whether or not you use hyperlinks in your blog fiction, you lose. So what do you do? Well, I think that Blog Fiction is a little young to say that things should or should not be one way or the other. There is no "convention" to follow. I think ultimately you should do what you think is best for your particular story. Maybe someday, after a lot of experimentation, "conventions" and "best practices" will develop for Blog Fiction. That day is not today.

That being said, I'm not going to let it stop me from offering my opinion on the matter. As of right now, my opinion is closer to Gavin Williams's than to Morgan O'Freil's. I say, link away. It's one of the built-in advantages blog fiction has over dead-tree publishing. People read blogs all the time that have links in them. I think they'll figure out how to read fiction with links as well. I don't think they'll get distracted by too many of them.

I can think of 3 instances where you would want to use links in your story. They are:

1. Referring back to previous events and characters
2. Normal Blog linking and esoteric references
3. Leaving "Bread Crumbs" for your careful and savvy readers.
   

Referring back to previous events and characters
The first case where you might want to use links is when referring to a past event or character in the story. Imagine if you're reading a book and a character disappears on page 50, and then reappears page 150. By then you may have forgotten who he is. How convenient would it be to be able to go back to the first page he appears to remind yourself who that person is. The ability to refer people back becomes more important for Blog Fiction, because now imagine instead of reading something 100 pages later imagine it's 100 days later. Links solve this inherent drawbacks to serialized fiction - people forgetting what happened since the last entry. Also, it's a great way to get new readers caught up without having to reread the whole story. The User Pool uses this linking strategy a lot.

Normal Blog linking and esoteric references
Another way to use links on your blog fiction site is to use them exactly the way you would on a non-fiction blog. That is, you would link to stuff that your character might find interesting. Videos, news events, and other sites they find. Links like that could either give comic relief to your story or offer insight into what that character finds interesting . You might also use links to reference something your readers may not be familiar with. For instance, the Cranky Product Manager is all about creating software. Not everyone understands software development. So, when the writer mentions the "Agile" development method, she provided a link to a Wikipedia article about it. Those who know what it is (or don't care) can skip over it while others can click the link for more information. The story is not ruined for readers who aren't "in the know" because they can find out, and the story is not interrupted for readers who are "in the know".

Leaving "Bread Crumbs" for your careful and savvy readers.
The third way of using links is to reward careful and savvy readers by leaving "bread crumbs" (additional information in the story) on other websites. This is not something that I've seen done a lot, but if used, can be really fun for readers to find. Lord Likely is the only fictional blogger I've met that stays "in character" on other web sites.

The bread crumb idea is something I thought of while reading Fate's Acquittal. One of the entries makes reference to the website Don't Date Him Girl. The website is meant for women who get treated like crap by an ex-boyfriend. They can tell all the horrible things he did to her as a warning to other women that they shouldn't date the guy. In the story, one of the characters get listed there by another character. The blog quotes word for word what is written about the male character. I thought to myself, wouldn't it instead have been a lot more fun if the writer would've created an account under the name of the female character "writing" the bad stuff and then actually have an entry on the website that is bad mouthing the male character. Then, in the blog entry it could list the general "gist" of the post, but actually link to the full listing on the site. Wouldn't that have been a lot more fun? Careful and savvy readers would've checked the link and found the article(rewarded), while careless or hurried readers would've missed it.

Another example from fate's acquittal is the use of myspace and facebook. Sure the characters have a facebook and myspace account but they really aren't updated that often. In the story there are numerous references to myspace and facebook where the author could've created and linked to fictional characters' profiles.

Another good example that I can think of comes from the first entry of FlyOver City. In it he references (and even links!) to a yahoo page about "Taki's" restaurant. A really fun "bread crumb" could've been the fictional character leaving a review of the restaurant on the yahoo page. Again- this would've rewarded careful readers who clicked through and may have noticed it.

So there are my suggestions for when and how to use links in a blog fiction. When, if ever, I attempt to write my own blog fiction, I would use links for all 3 purposes I've laid out. However, if you're a writer and don't use all or any of my suggestions I wouldn't be upset. As long as whatever you're doing works for your story. Experiment and use what works for you.

Fate's Acquittal: A Review

Fate's Acquittal is a blog written by the fictional character Tom Evans. It has had daily postings for more than a year already and just ended this past weekend. Very recently I finally took the time to read the entire blog from start to finish. I was very entertained by the story and am very impressed by the talent of the author.

Plot Summary
On the surface, the plot of Fate's Acquittal is deceptively simple. Tom Evans, a mild mannered barrister(To my American readers, The best comparison to a barrister would be a trial lawyer) on the road to the perfect upper-middle class life, gets dumped by his long time girl friend, Annabell Steele. In his desperation and depression he ends up turning to his free-spirited friend, Ed Donavon, for solace. Together they form a "plan" to have adventures inspired by the lyrics of songs that they hear. Each adventure brings either humor or drama and sometimes both.

On the surface, that is what is going on, but like any good piece of literature there is a lot more going on once you scratch away the surface. There is the constant back and forth of the absurdly conforming Tom against the equally absurd non-confirming Ed. Love triangles abound between the characters. Although an infrequent character, the relationship between Tom and his mother is also full of conflict.

An underlying theme of the story is the concept of "free will". What is the role of free will in a society that demands conformity? Is there such a thing as fate, and if so can it coexist with free will? Tom, as the main character, is constantly dealing with these questions. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. Tom is on a constant character arc deciding between conformity and nonconformity.

Format
The story is presented as a standard blog fiction, that is, a single fictional character writing a blog. No multimedia, this is a text only blog. The story progresses in real time and the posting schedule is daily - including weekends! As far as interaction, at first the author interacts with commenters, however, as the story slowly progresses it is the character that responds to the blog's commenters.

There is some limited use of graphic language sexual content. So while the majority of the writing is PG-13 there is an occasional R-rated scene. So this is not for children or adolescents.

Pros
The story and prose are both well written and make it a joy to read. The overall story line is tried and true. Someone recovering from a devastating breakup. The hook provides enough of a twist to make the story interesting - they do adventures inspired by song lyrics. However, if that's all that was going on it wouldn't be the gripping read that it is. There is a lot more going on. The conflict between the characters, as with most great reads, is what makes it a great story.

All the character's have their flaws and insecurities that drives the tension to exciting conclusions. In spite of their friendship Ed and Tom have their tension. More than once, Ed's craziness drives Tom to the breaking point. While Tom's indecisiveness and natch for conformity irk Ed's desire for adventure. The girls that come in and out of their lives all have their flaws even while the men fall heads over heals for them. The flaws always drive to a climax so great you can hardly wait for your browser to finish loading the next day's entry.

The pacing is also perfect. The author is extremely good at slowly building up tension and then having everything explode in Tom's face. Then right after a climax the author skillfully let's the tension draw down, but still keeping some it unresolved. This is done by having shorter posts where not much happens. This is in contrast to the longer posts that are used when building towards a climax.

After the initial novelty of zany song inspired adventures wares on, you might think that the story would begins to drag. Not so. New twists abound as the story goes on. The story never "drags on". Just when you think it might, suddenly Tom has to deal with a blackmailer, a fraudster, and eventually, his own sanity.

As great as a story it is, it wouldn't matter if it was near impossible to read the text of the site. Fortunately, that is not the case for this blog. The formatting of the site makes the text pretty easy to read: Black text on mostly white background. The paragraphs are broken up just like you would expect in a fiction book. New Dialogue is always it's own paragraph. Also for your reading pleasure the paragraphs are double spaced.

The writer also takes some limited advantage of his publishing format. Not only is there the primary blog for you to follow, but many of the characters also have a facebook and\or mySpace page.

Cons
There are a few minor squabbles I have that I'd like to have seen differently. The background used is not solid and the colors will strain your eyes when the text is on top of a picture instead of the plain white background.

The writer doesn't do a lot with his available medium. Sure, the characters have their own facebook and myspace pages, but they are never updated. Also, it is a text only story. Never a picture or video to liven things up.

Catching up can be daunting. References to other characters and previous plot points are almost never backlinked. Instead, there is a 'CatchUp' label for posts that have important information. While the CatchUp label is a good idea, after a years worth of daily posting nearly 30% of the posts are needed to "Catch Up". That's a lot of reading to do just to "catch up".

Also having to do with the blog format is that the date of with each post is shown but not the time. Unless mentioned in the text you can never be sure when Tom is "posting". Granted it's a very minor point, but I like the idea of knowing what time a character "wrote" something.

All of the previous points have to do with format. My only criticism of the story is that a couple of the characters seem a little "over the top". For instance, the villainy of Tom's Mother and Annabelle seem too straight forward. You would think women of their social standing would show more finesse - even in private matters. Characters that say exactly what they mean with absolutely no subtext just aren't very believable to me.

Conclusion
To anyone who questions the quality of online writing, Fate's Acquittal is the best rebuttal I could ever hope for. The writing is professional. The story is entertaining. Despite some minor squabbles, this is a story I would recommend to any avid reader. Overall I give it a rating of

8 out of 10

Picking a Fight With Jason Davis

For those who don't know, Jason Davis appears to be one of the more successful online fiction writers today. That is, he's making money on his online writings and has a solid readership. He currently runs the online fiction, The Curly Situation, of which a sequel is being published daily, also for the Courier Mail newspaper. Jason also runs the really awesome looking, but now seemingly abandoned site, blookworm.net.

So why would I pick a fight with such a distinguished online writer? Well, first of all, I just like writing juicy headlines so I'm not really picking a fight with him. Rather, I'm taking issue with some of the statements he makes in an article he published last month for the Courier Mail, an Australian newspaper daily. I don't have a problem with him, in fact I wish his online writings nothing but the best. That being said, his article makes a lot of statements that I either disagree with, are objectively incorrect, or failed to mention facts I think would be important. While the premise of the overall article was great, I have to point out some of the errors.

First of all, in the article he uses the terms "blooks", "blovels", and "blog fiction" interchangeably as if there are no differences. The article is mostly about people publishing novels online using a blog. That would be a "blovel". A "blook" is a novel that is a dead tree published book that was originally a blovel(as defined by the blooker prize people). Then of course is blog fiction which is something I've spend a great deal of time defining:

Blog Fiction: (noun) Serialized literature published to a blog that is written in a diary format. Often, but not necessarily, the fictional writer of the blog will interact with its readers.

To be fair, Jason is hardly the only person to make this mistake. Why people, especially someone as professional as Jason Davis fail to make a distinction is probably from a lack of exposure to the varied formats. If your only (or nearly only) exposure to online fiction are novels published using a blog, then the terms "blook", "blovel", "blog fiction" and other various terms would all seem to fit as a proper description of that format. It would not be until you actually have to describe a published blovel, or a diary fiction blog that it would strike you as important to use the terms more carefully.

Another thing I found objectionable was the sites he suggested for hosting a "blovel".

Writers can have a blog up and running in minutes on hosted blog platforms such as LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com), Yahoo 360 (360.yahoo.com) and the easy to use Blogger (www.blogger.com) for nix.

First of all, Yahoo 360 is practically defunct so few people use it. The second thing is that livejournal and yahoo 360 are meant more as mySpace like social networking than as blogging platforms. While they could be used to create blogs, it's not something I would recommend if that is your sole purpose. Blogger is mentioned as being easy to use, but there are several other just as easy to use sites. Check out this listing here.

One thing from the article that really stood out as factual wrong was this statement:

For those who feel the need for their own domain you'll need to pay for website hosting

That is not true at all. I have my own domain and yet my site is hosted by blogger. Wordpress has a similar program to have a custom domain, but still host your site on the main wordpress servers. I'm sure many other blogging hosts have a similar service.

The article does go on to offer several helpful suggestions. However, one thing it leaves out is the most obvious way to monetize your blog: Ads! The article mentions leaving having a pay pal "tip jar", but fails to mention using ads or other affiliate programs.

Finally, the biggest beef I have with the article isn't a factual error, it's more of an "attitude error". He defines success in the realm of online fiction as getting dead-tree published.

Does it work? Yes, but the competition is growing fast. Probably the leading online fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, (a co-editor of pop culture site Boing Boing) has conventionally published four novels and two short-story collections after first offering them free on his site (craphound.com)

This is very pervasive and very annoying attitude about online fiction. It makes writers think that the only use of online fiction is as a vehicle to get noticed by a dead tree publisher. Worse still it makes readers think that unless a writer is dead-tree published then they aren't worth reading. This is an attitude that has got to change in a large number of people before online fiction is taken seriously by itself and by others.

So in the end, I am happy that blog fiction and online fiction got a little exposure from Jason's article, but I would be even happier if it had been a little more accurate and presented in a slightly different light.

It feels so good to be back.

I am so glad to be bringing back the Blog Fiction blog. A lot of stuff has been going on. New sites to report on, new thoughts to share, and changing events to report on. The most significant for me is that my "vacation" let me remember why I started this site in the first place. Without the pressure of trying to write "something", I was able to again start reading blog fiction just for the pure enjoyment.

Lots of good news. There have been a lot of new sites added to the Grand List of Blog Fiction Sites. Some sites that were once lost or abandoned have come back from the brink. More on those in a later post. Two sites should be coming back soon: The last post of Evangeline's Ride said it should be back this month. Also, I exchanged a couple emails with the author of The End of Things and she said she'd be back by the end of this month . Unfortunately, there has been some bad news as well. Looks like a few sites were freshly abandoned. (see Time Traveler Blog) Maybe they should've read my article, 8 Strategies to Avoid Abandoning Your Blog Fiction.

Now that I am back I don't have any major projects to announce. I like to think of just picking up where I left off: Sharing my thoughts on the medium, reviewing and comparing past and current blog fiction projects, and doing what I can to help connect readers and writers. I would though like to make a renewed effort at promoting the Blog Fiction Widget. If you put it on your site you get free advertising on sites that also have it listed. Just copy the code and drop it onto your site. It's easy.

One final editorial note is that I will be reducing my posting time from three times a week(Monday, Wednesday, Friday) to only twice a week(Monday and Thursday). My reasoning for doing this is two fold. The first is to prevent burn out from happening again.

The second reason is to give me enough time to ensure that all of my posts have content worth reading and less fluff. So many advice columns for bloggers suggest you have a post everyday or at least every weekday. It doesn't matter what you say as long as you just post "something", they say. Supposedly, they say, only 1 or 2 of the posts need to be "substantive"- i.e. worth linking to. That seems like a good way for google's search engine to like you, but not a good way to get real actual readers to like you.

My goal is to make all of my posts something worth reading and linking. Therefore, I'm cutting my posting time to help eliminate the pressure to just publish "something". If I find that I have more to say I may go back to 3 times a week.

Anyways, as I said, it's good to be back. Hope you all enjoyed your holidays as much as I did - and here's to 2009 -The year Blog Fiction becomes more popular than sliced bread.