I wanted to write a book—so I built a social network
When I was 12 my reading teacher gave the class an assignment to read 200 pages in the coming semester. I read 15,000. That should have been the first sign.
In 2010 we could barely afford rent, much less a Kindle, but my wife got me one. Getting published and making money went from being an impossible barrier to ladder I could climb. Devouring news about how successful all (maybe 5 of them) of these self published authors were inspired me. I started writing. It was awesome. When it came to my writing, I was drinking the Kool-aid and was certain my new full time job as a novelist was within reach!
Then I began discovering a lot of articles that talked about how hard it was to market your own book. Some authors were spending 90% of their time promoting their work. I almost quit right then. I couldn’t believe it. 90% of my time marketing? Screw. That. The writing part was still awesome, but now this ugly monster was hanging over my head.
I am an introvert who masquerades as an extrovert. Talking to people is nice, just don’t ask me to sell them something. As for posting on multiple social media channels constantly to promote myself? That makes me feel ill.
I started researching what it took to get published, that way someone else would be doing the marketing for me. The unfortunate reality is that writers do a significant amount of their own marketing and more than 99% of manuscripts are rejected.
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Shakes fist at the gods of publishing!
I remember sitting there feeling completely discouraged. I knew self publishing worked, but only for people who put a lot of work into self promotion.
Being innately lazy I decided to have someone else do my dirty work
At the time I was a User Experience Designer and had recently finished a crowdsourcing application. It had allowed the organization I worked for get 7,000 hours of work done in the first week of operation—for free.
What? Yes, FOR FREE.
An epiphany came when I realized that if authors could write a book in a social settings that encouraged people to get involved (lightweight editing), provide feedback (actionable data) and share it with their friends (marketing) I could get everything I wanted—for free—while writing. I wouldn’t even have to wait until I was done writing a book to start getting help, it would come naturally. The idea was pure awesome for a lazy man like myself.
But no one had built it.
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The “assured success” of my future novel
I began to imagine writing a book and getting feedback after each chapter. My audience would help me identify pesky errors and tell me about plot holes right away, saving me valuable time by preventing me from having to rework the entire story. These invested fans would help me choose a title, cover artwork and name my characters. Then, when I was finished, my hundreds of followers would share my newly minted masterpiece with their hundreds of friends leading to a massive spike in sales would catapult me to the top of all the best seller lists! Perpetuating my eventual rise to become the best selling author of all time! A moment of glorious triumph!
While imaginary, the daydream was terribly exciting.
I was so infected by the idea that I gave up all of my other hobbies and started working on the project (10 years of WoW on and off, my wife was thrilled). There was still a nagging question that wouldn’t leave me alone. Who would build it?
Learn to code. Seriously. Do it now.
When it came to writing code I didn’t know what the words class, method, struct, data model, library, plugin or anything else meant. I barely knew what a function was, but how hard could it be — really?
I knew how to do some basic front-end development and had dabbled in PHP. So I figured why not, I could figure it out. That was quite easily the stupidest thing I’ve ever thought in my whole life. After a year of working on the site, writing it in PHP, I realized it was total crap and started over. I learned ASP.Net instead (and discovered what debugging was), since then things have been much smoother. My code is probably crap, but it works.
Somewhere around this time I realized that what I was building was a startup and I had somehow become an entrepreneur. I’m still not sure how that happened.
By this time, I had three kids, a full time job and very little time. It’s taken me three and a half years to finally feel like Literrater isn’t a total joke.
If you build it they won’t come, first you have to drag them over.
Marketing doesn’t ever go away. Three and a half years after I started I’m back where I began, but instead of writing a book I built a social network. Either one of them would have needed marketing, and I always knew that, at least subconsciously.
The unfortunate truth is that if you’re creating a product, whether it’s a book or a social network, they both need marketing. So it’s time to either suck it up and pound some virtual ground to tell you about it, or fold.
So do me a favor, CLICK THIS LINK and sign up for Literrater. Tell your friends, we’ll even pay you for it.
Also, I miscounted, I have four kids.
