Promoting and sharing

For a while now, I’ve been mulling this post by David Louis Edelman about promoting your favourite authors. You can extrapolate that to advancing blogs you find interesting and raising interest and awareness of content on the web that are, in fact, worth reading and paying attention to.

The simplest way in which we all help to do this, is simply linking to posts of interest. Google Reader is a magnificent tool, bringing all my favourite blogs in one place for me to browse. It even gives me the option to share posts I like - I click on the share this button. Unfortunately, it only posts the headlines and also creates a seperate blog for it. I did try adding the Google Reader widget to my website, but it died one fine day.

But it’s so much easier to click one button than to systematically collect links and then post them. Whichever way I do it, I don’t know if anyone else truly finds it of interest. I do know, that the one method is infinitely friendlier and easier on me than the other. And so, sometime in the next month, I’ll probably activate my Google Share Blog, link to it from the website and those people who do find some of the stuff I link to interesting, just pop in every few days and see if something catches your fancy. Most of the time, I link to stuff that interests me or that I like, but I don’t necessarily have anything to say. If I do, I’ll likely link to it on my blog because I want to talk about it. Or at least waffle in semi-coherent manner for a while.

Back to the whole business of promoting and sharing:

Clarkesworld is the only magazine with a “share this” option. Unbelievable. Now, I liked Pratt’s story “The River Boy“, and emailed it to a couple of people who I thought might like it. I sent the email from the Clarkesworld page, that handy little share this button made it unnecessary for me to log into gmail, copy and paste the link and add a message. So simple, why don’t more online magazines add this nifty little button? In addition, because the Share This plugin allows  you to configure which services you - the owner of blog/ site -want made available, I could also send a link to my Facebook profile with a quick little summary of my own. Will anybody actually follow the link from my profile and read the story? Fuck knows, but I don’t lose anything by doing it.

I’m under no delusion - and too cynical to be convinced otherwise - that short story writers far, far outnumber the amount of people who genuinely read short fiction. Hell no, the purpose of the writer is to write! So that he can be read. Not waste time with the pursuits of lesser mortals, like reading.

And we stand around in commisserating confusion wondering why nobody reads short fiction anymore. A bit hard, I think, if no one makes the effort to let the world know short fiction exists and specific stories and writers that might - might - be worth your time.

It’s not any different for novels, or won’t be much longer, except that short fiction is online and presumable want people to know they exist.

Notice to short fiction magazines online - add a Share This button. It takes a little time to do it, and it might bring you nothing in return. But, damn, I don’t lose any sleep and very little time in sharing Pratt’s story. And I don’t think it does any harm, not really. I would have loved to do the same for Wise’s Matthew, or Turnipseed, or Alfar’s Glass. But I can’t - the option isn’t there. So I can share it manually — like I just did - with all ten my blog’s readers. Well, maybe more than ten, I don’t know. And you know, sometimes it’s just too much of a damn schlep to Ctrl-C+Ctrl-V, and do a write up along the lines of, “ooh! go read this luverly thingy!”

I like people who make life easy for me, and so I don’t mind taking a couple minutes and bombing the net with a Clarkesworld story I like. The net gets bombed by badly animated Singaporean fucky-fucky all the time, so I’m hardly damaging the content quality.

It’s the same with blogs, and since most of the blogs I read are writer folk, it follows that I can spare a couple minutes to netbomb blogs and people I enjoy reading.

David Louis Edelman and John Scalzi both have these little Share This icons on their posts. I just played with it, taking Edelman’s fascinating post “Will the novel die?” and sharing it. Stumbling, deliciousing, tankrailing - I couldn’t digg it, because I don’t have an account yet, and he hasn’t included the option to Facebook or myspace it. Pity, it takes me  a couple of minutes only to clicky-clicky and toss out a notification on both a post I find interesting and by a writer I like and wouldn’t mind if I somehow participated in him getting just a little bit more attention. I don’t even know what he writes like - I just like him and enjoy reading his blog.

Sure, I had to set up accounts at some of these places, but I opened stumbleupon, delicious, tailrank (and even a technorati profile) all in under 5 minutes. Already have Facebook and Myspace, so if the options are given to me by the blogger, I’d be happy to bomb my profiles.

Of course, it goes without saying that I’m willing to do this for bloggers who provide me with the very easy option of doing it, aka the Share This option. The rest? well…maybe. If I’m in a good mood, then I’ll dump you somewhere on my Google Reader Share this blog.

Invisibility is the true enemy of the writer - oh, writerdom has certainly embraced this mantra. I blame it on the writer’s love for apocalyptic scenarios.

Nothing summons the hero quite like the idea of being the member of a noble, dying breed standing fast in the face of impending doom. Much more glamorous than being just another member of the antz hill. (Woody-ant, you’ve just made a breakthrough! I have? Yes, you are insignificant!)

Yes, you are insignificant; yes, you are invisible. What to do about it? Well, be cold and calculating and say, maybe it starts here, maybe it starts with me getting the word out on other people worth reading, worth paying attention to, who said something interesting, who wrote a damn fine story. What goes around comes around and all that snot about building karmas.

Share It.

Or, do it because it’s the right thing to do. Share It.

Hell, share it because you feel like it and can spare a couple of minutes in your day.

So long as you remember you are insignificant, irrelevant, invisible. The Horns of Doom are sounding…no, not really. I have implicit faith in our species ability to survive as much as I despair about the manners in which we live and the ideals we hold and make Issues of.

Think of this post as a plea to all the bloggers out there reading this (all ten of you) to add a stupid little Share This button and make David’s life easier and happier. Because I have writing to do and no time to waste. The clock is ticking. Old Gabriel is standing over to the side with a smirk on his face as he wets his lips and raises that bloody horn. Will it make a difference to you to provide the option and i take the time to webpromo you? Probably not. Maybe. I don’t know.

Now go read those 4 stories I linked to. Or don’t, and write me something I can link to someday in future. If your publisher or you makes it easy on me to do so. Clicky-clicky. So easy.