The Veil War

Over at Whatever, John Scalzi is doing his annual pimp thread week wherein authors are allowed – nay, encouraged! – to leave a comment touting the merits of their work in the hope that eager readers will swarm them with love and money. Today is pimp day for traditionally published authors, tomorrow is for non-traditional. Which would be me. Assuming I can fit the criteria he sets, I’ll certainly be posting a link to the Veil War. Since Scalzi gets about 50k readers a day – readers that we may reasonably assume are heavily self-selected in the science fiction direction – one might hope that the result is more readers. Especially since the Veil War is free.

Last week I submitted the Veil War to Boing Boing’s submitterator, and got two visitors. I will admit that that was not the most successful propaganda ploy in world history, but, hey! A warm welcome to both of you. Don’t be shy, introduce yourselves!

Which leads me to my question for you: Where can I go to get the word out to more potential readers? More to the point, where I can increase my visibility without looking like a preening jackass?

I’ve pondered a more aggressive twitter campaign. I note that George O’Har and Steve Umstead – both of whom I mentioned the other day – have twitter followings of 850 and 13,000. I presume from the numbers that Mr. O’Har grew his Twitter following the old fashioned way and Mr. Umstead used more aggressive tactics. I wonder how much traffic @steveumstead is driving to his website? Granted, our situations are not identical – while he posted an excerpt from his upcoming eBook, he’s not serially publishing a whole story. I want readers, he wants readers and buyers.

Those of you on Twitter – if you had never heard of @veilwar, and @veilwar followed you – what are the chances that you might have ended up here?

Thoughts?

So I took some time off from writing the story to lay the groundwork for some marketing. I have brought into being:

• A Facebook page
• A Twitter account
• A Google+ page

The more alert among you may notice that the name attached to these accounts is not my normal nom du net, nor is it in fact my actual name. While I haven’t, and don’t really intend to go to fanatical lengths to conceal my actual identity I have decided to go with a pseudonym for this project.

That name is Stephen Gustav. So there.

I would like to ask everyone who has taken a peek at my story so far (next installment tomorrow!) to do a couple small things.

1. If you are a user of Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ or any other relevant social media framework, please make the effort to like, +1 or tweet as appropriate this website. Mention it to your friends if you have a blog.  Share the love.
2. And, apropos of my last blog post, leave a comment, subscribe to the rss feed or email me and let me know who you are. I promise not to try to sell you viagra.

There will be rewards for early adopters. And hey, look what happened to that Reddit Marine unit back to the Roman Empire guy.

As time goes by, this cunning plan will hopefully become even more cunning. Any suggestions you have for spreading the word are of course welcome.

A couple updates on the social networking front:

I am in the process of setting up a Facebook page for the Veil War – named, cleverly, The Veil War.  I am having some difficulty getting posts to go from here to there automatically, but still the page is there, and shortly it will have stuff on it.

Also, there is now a twitter feed, @veilwar.  That will also shortly be populated with stuff.  Tell your friends!

Welcome.   Things are a bit bare-bones around here at the moment, but that will change as the future sneaks up behind us.  As you may have surmised from the title of the blog – or even known before you even got here – this blog is about the Veil War.  So, there you are.

Oh, wait, you ask.  What is this Veil War thing?  Well, let me tell you.  The Veil War is a series of stories about just what happens when a very large door between worlds opens up here on Earth, and nasty violent things come pouring out of it.

You can read the first part of the story by clicking the “Start Here” page link.  In time, clicking the About page will actually serve some purpose.