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woohoo! Two days off in a row! So far. Keep yer fingers crossed!

What a coincidence, I hate wearing clothes too….. Promotion is basically marketing; where you’re trying to gain readership. So, if contributing a story to a round robin gains me a reader or two, that’s GREAT! Even still, I do have fun writing them, so there is that.

I’m quite aware of the threads one can make in these forums for just such a purpose. But that really only reaches this audience here, and that really relies on having a catchy title to get someone to click to open said thread. I’m more curious how others go about promoting their work online. I know everytime I post a chapter I post it on Tumblr and Twitter, and plug out a notification on the various Discord channels I belong to. But how do you folks go about doing it? And any tips or tricks for others to try and promote their stuff where promotions might catch some attention and draw in them Dragon Prints?

Last year was my first year participating, even though I’ve been on this site since… forever. (I feel like I should technically be like an ancient AFF forest spirit by now) I was just finishing up Cold Snap when Halloween rolled around so I was feeling the loss so it came right at the perfect time for me to jump into a oneshot. I have no idea what the promotion factor is on these stories. Like in theory it makes sense that it’s a good way to reach readers you wouldn’t normally reach. But mostly, for me, the Halloween anthology was a bonding experience with the other writers of AFF. Getting little glimpses into everyone’s writing styles and review styles, learning how much DP’s characters hate clothes. Just like a big, AFF-style group hug.

Take a read of the existing ones, (& review ): http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108028 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108385 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108780 Just a Halloween element and original is the tradition for the Halloween ones. Though, I choose to make mine related to my existing stories in some fashion, so in mine, I’ve done: The Phone: A “haunted” phone Sweater: Bullying’s effects (around Halloween) Bones: Teens in a haunted Indian burial ground on Halloween. For the other round robin, it’s holiday related, so: The Phone, Part II: Sequel to the phone, (holiday followup) Mistletoe Hanging: A teen boy goes to his school’s winter dance Jump: Helping a veteran on Christmas Eve Baby Shark: Two boys around Christmas And the two boys one, I started having a lot of ideas, too many; so I took the single holiday idea, wrote it, while the rest of the plot bunnies became the longer chaptered sequel, Dale’s Game. If you do as I do, place it into an existing original universe, don’t expect the readers to have read any of your existing works. (As its kinda why I decided to submit in the first place, to hopefully lure some readers in to my other stories.)

Well, sometimes I revisit a theme I used in an earlier submission. And sometimes I get bitten by an entirely new idea. But in general, the primary theme is the occasion, such as Hallowe’en, or whatever anyone celebrates in December, that sort of thing.

It’s sort of “Hallowe’en! Go ghoulies!” Or mostly.

Isn’t there themes and such though? How you starting without that? Or is it just: “Halloween! Go ghoulies!”

I sometimes post in the “Promote a Story” section, but honestly, I mostly do that for stories that I think aren’t likely to attract a lot of viewers – not because they aren’t good, but because they may not be as relentlessly smutty as the rest of what I write. As for Halloween: I solemnly swear that I am up to no good and have already started my story.

Fair enough. It sounds like a good fun time. And Halloween usually… usually… isnt too busy for me.

I not only missed last year, I also still owe reads and reviews… Last year was horribly busy, and crazy. But this year might prove better!

So far, it’s been a different volunteer stepping forward, as I did for the 2016 one. It’s definitely fun to have a smorgasbord of different stories, read authors you don’t normally read. For the holiday 2015, I submitted two stories, one of which was a sequel to my Halloween story.

The previous ones (halloween & holiday): http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/60996-affs-tales-from-the-shoutbox-2015/ http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/61534-aff-deck-the-shoutbox-2015/ http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/64096-2016s-tales-from-the-aff-chat/ http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/64342-chatbox-holiday-cheer-2016/ http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/65894-2017-halloween-party/ (warning, the topic post text is white, so use a dark background) http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/66153-walkin-in-a-writers-wonderland-2017/ I’ve contributed a story (or two) to each one of them.

Toss in another idea ... Do those halloween/holiday round robins that we like to do, submit a oneshot and maybe pick up some readers that way.

I don’t promote mine either. I’m not proud of this, I just am not comfortable with self-promotion. I wish I did more of it. Wattpad requires promoting which is why I stopped posting there, but it offers methods with which to do it. Reading groups and whatnot. I guess that would be an option. I’ve created a twitter account with the intention of giving writing updates, but somehow it ended up being a political account instead, lol, since I didn’t tell any readers I might have that it exists. I feel like there should be one good place to reach everyone out there who’s interested, but if there is, I haven’t found it.

I don’t really promote mine! Good luck with it tho’

It’s a chicken-and-the-egg sort of thing, unfortunately, you really need dedicated fans to really help promote, but you need to promote to get enough dedicated fans, otherwise, it’s just advertising yet-another-smut-story. And with the type of stories posted here, I’m not going to post on FB, under my real name about it. I do the promote-a-story for my originals, use them as examples on occasion, and tried to have a bigger presence here on the forums; that’s kinda it. For my potter stories, I did have a yahoo group for it, where I’d post status, etc, but that required people to join up – fortunately, that other archive does have automated alerts to new chapter posts.

True. However, with this device (in canon), IIRC, there are no bodies… convenient And technically, as the canon device was introduced after I started writing, so I’m already AU, I can alter it to fit my needs. However, given the name of said device, it can be presumed that nobody, previously, has survived the encounter, the other characters can be forgiven for assuming that it was successful on the smaller party. As I had started this story at the start of my writing hobby, there are some deus ex-ish spots already inthe plot, before I really understood the concept; my sense for detecting it came while working on this. I didn’t have a name for many years afterwards, more of the “random-last-second-rescue” seemed a bit unrealistic, for it to always work. Eventually, I stopped using it as much, though I reserved the last one for this particular juncture in the story; because I had already established a sense that a particular character was watching and would intervene in the case of one of the main characters, and this most certainly qualified (ie, that particular character is the reason my MC isn’t immediately dead from said device).

Never count heroes out unless you have seen the bodies, Have access to said bodies and have their souls corked in a wine basement somewhere in a hidden location on another continent in a different dimension.