I launched my book. I got beagley.blog in shape, and I set up murderbyalgorithm.com to point towards a nice page. I created an About the Author page that isn’t terrible, and I set up other website elements.
I also learned I hadn’t turned on SSL for all of my domains. They were unsafe and producing errors. I fixed that and a hundred tiny other things.
…so, what is a website for?
When promoting my book, I can link to the Murder by Algorithm page. That’s good.
This month I also discovered that a website is a way to structure what parts of my creative work will be available to “the external.” Whether anyone reads my website or not, its existence is a mental bridge, a portal between creative work and “the other.”
Other people might stop by. A website reshapes how I think and feel about audience and about my creative projects: I will learn and grow through what I am willing to share. This might be the most important purpose of a public site.
My books and other creations will probably not gather an audience through genre. I don’t “write to market.” A science-fiction murder mystery? That’s a narrow enough BISAC. But a queer science-fiction murder mystery that talks a lot about AI but then doesn’t have a specific social message about either queerness or AI? How is that going to work?
Another challenge to building an audience: My book’s protagonist is not very likable. They are an artist who thinks they are very self-aware but aren’t. They have a lot of work to do. Are they “the unlikeable narrator who you end up liking or at least respecting, or else find it rewarding to follow their journey?” Maybe. That’s up to the reader. Objectively, they are unlikeable. But I like them. I enjoy their company. I wrote their book. I enjoy their journey and thoughts. But they aren’t Luke Skywalker, Murderbot, Katniss or Bella. Without following certain conventions, I don’t have a natural, built-in audience. How do I find the tiny slice of readers for whom my book is written?
Earlier today, I made a “difficulty scale” in my head. I’ll try to make it clever here:
- Writing a book is easy. Just start typing.
- Writing a decent book is hard. Wow hard. Decades hard.
- Producing (publishing) a book is easy. You learn about KDP, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, etc. You choose how deep you want to go. Then you click some buttons, make a lot of mistakes, spend some money, and 6-12 months later: a book. Put another way: producing a book is harder than buying a house but much, much easier than surviving middle school, breaking a habit, or parenting. There’s a scale.
- Finding an audience for a book and connecting them with it? Now we’re back to hard. Not “effort” hard or “suffering” hard, like middle school. But “jumping and landing on a dime” hard.
Finding an audience isn’t just luck. You can improve your chances. You take opportunities; you make opportunities. You can even load your dice and count cards. Doing “all the things” doesn’t mean you’ll find an audience for your art, but there are things you can do.
As with making this website, I’ve done some of the things.
Yesterday, on Murder by Algorithm’s official release date, I cross-posted on Instagram and Facebook. I learned that Facebook is still the most crowded social media site, at least with the over-thirty set. I’m not a social creature, so getting 50+ likes within an hour or two, from people I know and love, was wonderful. This morning the count is at 84.
I try to do the right things in response. If there’s an opening, I aim to really see the person behind a comment. To let them know I see them.
Elsewhere on my feeds, I make sure that when I see real humans doing real human things, I pause to give attention and appreciate. The social internet has attention reciprocity. If you have a goal of sharing something with the world, slow down and appreciate what other people are sharing. If we did this well, the internet could almost be a community. (It isn’t.)
While I don’t think the social internet has been a net positive on humanity (far from it), there’s an element to all this “pay attention, share what you love, and connect” that is fundamentally good, if we could strain out the garbage.
Next week I’ll make a very short vertical-form video and post it. There’s a tumble-on effect of these algorithms. Facebook wants attention. My post got 84 attentions! Next time it will appear again as you scroll.
I don’t expect to snowball into finding a big audience for my art. But some people will purchase copies of my book.
But. This morning I re-realized: I’m not very interested in selling books.
The actual goal of websites and other audience-searching steps: I want to honor the art I made, the voices that assembled within me. I want readers. I want someone to stumble along my little marks on a page and laugh, or be intrigued, or assemble their own version of my universe, drawing in the shapes and colors that are not present in the text, using their own imagination. I want that co-created universe to exist, for a few hours, somewhere out there. I won’t even know when it happens! But the publishing and selling of copies are to make it possible to happen.
This morning I also realized what I want to do most of all: to keep writing and keep doing it better. That’s the deep wish.
By sharing and having an audience, my book sitting in a bookstore, there’s a part of me that rises up. I understand better how art, far from being a solitary venture, is actually a communication. It is a collaboration, a journey, a seeking, and an expression of a communal understanding of the universe.
I’ve written for decades, and I’ve sometimes shared my work with a few people. I enjoyed the exploration, the critique, and the evenings at a table in the Barnes & Noble cafe. But different parts of myself wake up to a larger audience. This happens on stage or in a room full of colleagues, too.
Now, because people might read my book, I have a humming, stuttering spirit making the rounds to my insides, fluttering and mixing. It’s not comfortable. It’s challenging. And it’s great.