Getting Noticed as a Writer May Be Easier Than You Think

Thinking Outside the Word Processor

So you fancy yourself an amateur flash fiction or short story writer. When "the Muse" is active, the words flow like butter. Or something. You're not doing it full time nor could you, but you do it to create and write what interests you.

But you've been amassing a folder filled with finished or near finished stories. You haven't counted them yet but there could easily be 100 or more in your finished stack. 

What do you do with them all? You want others to read them, but your friends and family members only make guinea pigs for so long. They like what you write, but are they merely saying that because they know you and don't want to hurt your feelings or because you're actually a decent writer? How can you know?

I personally know about those short stories piling up, as well as the friends and family who've read them. I keep meaning to get them published but don't have a solid plan to do it. 

I also write limericks. I've published several hundred on substack, (ok, just a bit of self-promotion) but have at least 3000 more in the hopper just waiting to be published. I was hoping to break some sort of Guinness Book of World Records with 10,000 of them published. I took the extra step and wrote the good folks at Guinness to see if I could make the volume of limericks I had in mind into a record.

Pro Tip: If you want to have a question like this answered from Guinness, it'll cost you $5 and take 12 weeks for a reply. Drop the Five Bucks and wait. It's worth it.

As they promised, they came back and said, "No can do" to the limericks. Pity.

Now I've got a bunch of unfinished limericks to go with my unpublished short stories. Discouraged, I stopped writing and editing them altogether. But it doesn't have to be this way with any form of the written word. 

So, what do I do now? 

I could go the "be generous" route of a Seth Godin and publish it for all the world to see. Put it out there. Then what? Would I be able to write another 100 stories? Probably, but what's the point without proper promotion? I mean, if a short story falls in a forest and no one reads it, whose fault is it?

For me, it's always been about marketing and distributing the stories once they've been written. That's been my downfall and the downfall of many other writers. I guess you could say that about any of the creative arts: music, art, written word. You can have a mediocre product but with great marketing, you could have great selling items. On the other hand, you can have great products but with poor marketing, you could go out of business. Think Word vs. WordPerfect to get an idea of what I mean. 

What if, however, I could have the best of both worlds? 

What if I could gather a team of short story writers, publish some great stories on a platform such as SubStack (ideal for distributing to non-paying and paying audiences) or something else, and then have our entire team promoting and distributing those stories? I may only be on 1-3 social media sites, but six or seven other writers visit different platforms. With each sharing all of our content, think we'd get noticed? Think it could be a hit? Think we could get thousands of subscribers? It's certainly worth a shot. 

So, calling all flash fiction (250-1000 words) and short story writers, if you can write at least one story per month and are willing to promote others', send me a note. Let's connect, compare notes, genres, interests, and get this ball rolling.

I believe 7-8 writers on a schedule writing and promoting as they would promote their own work would do wonders for distributing the stories to a wider circulation than one could possibly do on his/her own. 

What say you?