Fiction Posting Experiment Update

End of week 1 update.

It’s been just over a week now and I am starting to get an even better picture of how things are turning out on the four different platforms.

I know it hasn’t been that long but I definitely think I am getting a better picture of each site and, in my mind, I have more or less ruled one out at this early stage.

Inkspired

So, if you read my last post you might have guessed that Inkspired is the site that I have decided is probably not for me. Last time I posted I mentioned two of my main worries: the target audience and the activity (or lack of) on the site.

Both of those worries have only deepened after a week of using the site. I received a weekly update email from them in Spanish and then later received the translation in English and I notice that there seems to be more Spanish fiction on there than English.

The activity on the site is also still a concern for me. The groups are not very active and I have zero followers, zero likes and zero comments on my stories. It could be that they are not very good, of course, but they are receiving likes and comments on other sites.

The stats tell me that on Inkspired my stories have been viewed way more than on other sites, around 300 times for two of them and 150 for the other, but I suspect that this does not equate to actual reads. I think it is more likely that they have just appeared on feeds 300 or 150 times each.

Perhaps I need to really get involved and do a lot of work on the forums to get connections going but it seems a bit like a lot of effort at the moment and I’m not sure how big the audience will ever be.

Current stats: 3 stories posted, 0 followers, 0 likes, 0 comments, approx 750 ‘views’.

Tablo

I want to like Tablo because I think the interface is really nice and I keep receiving emails about updates that they have been working on recently. The only problem is that, right now at least, the updates all seem to be geared towards readers who are looking for traditionally published fiction.

It all seems to be about previewing books from publishers, Q&As with famous writers or reading classics from well-known authors so it doesn’t really encourage me that it is the right place to get your work noticed if you are an unknown or new writer. It certainly has a lot going for it if you are a reader, however.

As far as my ‘books’ are concerned, I have received a few reads (one piece has 5, another 3 and another 13) but I have no likes, no comments and once again no followers. I’m not really sure if this is the right place for me to be posting my fiction but I think it is probably worth pursuing for a little bit longer to see how it goes. I’m also interested to see what further updates and changes they are going to make.

Right now there doesn’t seem to be a huge number of people using the site, but of course it could be early days and we could see numbers rise as it takes off. The jury is still out on this one.

Current stats: 3 ‘books’, 21 reads, 0 comments, 0 likes, 0 followers

Wattpad

Now I know that to be successful on Wattpad you have to get involved in the community and I haven’t really done that just yet. Despite this, I still have more interaction with my stories than on the two previous sites I have mentioned above.

The results aren’t great so far, I must say, but I have posted four stories on there and three have one view each and the fourth has seven views, two likes and four comments (all from the same person — apparently that’s a Wattpad thing). This gives me some hope, at least, that if I persevere with Wattpad, there could be readers there.

One of the problems with Wattpad however, is that I have troubles finding stuff that I want to like and comment on. There are some very popular works on Wattpad that I think would definitely not get published. Many of the books I started to read have been written in a style that sounds just like the speech of a teenager and I just can’t get further than one page. (That is when I get to the actual reading part after the long introductions about the cast of the novel, complete with ridiculously good-looking photos of actors or models.)

It makes me feel like an intruder in a young person’s world; I don’t really feel like I belong there. I want to encourage other writers but I can’t find anything that really inspires me. It just makes me feel like a teacher again. That is not a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not dissing Wattpad, I’m just questioning if it is the right place for me and my short stories. It seems to suit YA novels best, and if you can write them as you go along and post chapters regularly, this seems even better. I am considering doing just that with a YA novel that I have in first draft form from 2013 but I’m still not sure if it is the best thing to do.

I’ve also had to resort to using Canva to make some half decent covers for my flash fiction pieces because apparently this is an essential thing to do on Wattpad. It doesn’t take too long, thankfully, so it isn’t too much hassle to do. My covers aren’t that great though but I have used them across the four platforms regardless.

The jury is still out on this one but I haven’t given up just yet.

Current stats: 4 stories, 3 with 1 or 2 reads, 1 with 8 reads, 2 likes and 4 comments, 2 followers.

Prose

Once again, I’ve left the best until last. So far on this website I have had a lot more interaction than on any of the other three and things are steadily getting better, at a rate I would have expected from any successful fiction posting website.

I’ve posted 5 stories, and they’ve received a decent number of reads (31, 18, 29, 23, 18) and likes (5, 5, 6, 2, 4). I also have a few comments and have gained some followers.

It definitely seems like a more active community than Inkspired and Tablo and there are definitely users on there with followers in the thousands.

I’m not as keen on the interface, however, as I don’t think it is quite as easy to manage your stories. The news feed is also a little generic and there are no icons or colour codes to differentiate between a like, a comment, a follow or a repost like there are on Twitter, for example.

Another thing I dislike is that your posts appear in a scrolled list, rather than as icons, so to find one particular post from your history that you want to access might become a pain in the neck if you have made a lot of posts.

Prose definitely seems to have a lot of potential at this point and I am interested to see if it overtakes Medium with regard to reads or comments on my fiction posts. I think I can probably make a fair comparison when I get to the same number of followers so it may take a while just yet.

Current stats: 5 posts (total 119 reads and 22 likes), 8 followers.

Medium’s recent email about fiction on the site

The final thing I want to mention in this post is that I received an interesting email from Medium this week asking me to sign up to premium to be able to access ‘original fiction’.

I wasn’t sure exactly what that would mean for fiction writers themselves but I definitely got the impression from the email that it would be an opportunity to access fiction from publishers or from large publications.

Like with Tablo, I thought it seemed aimed at the reader, rather than the writer. Have any of you got any more insight into this? If so, please leave a comment as I’d love to know if there could be opportunities for fiction writers developing here on Medium.

Thanks for taking the time to read! You can also find me on my blog at lisawilton.com.