I feel so lost.

BookCountry.com

bookcountry.com

Let me start at the beginning. About four/five days ago, ShelfAwareness sent out another one of their awesome newsletters. This one featured an article on the launch of BookCountry.com. It's a website run by a subsidiary of Penguin Group, as in the publisher. It's main goal is to be a writer's community, where people post their writing so it can be read and commented on. The goal is to have a bunch of writers interacting with each other, reading and critiquing each other's work. It's a great idea, so of course I signed up. 

One of the catches to making your own work viewable to the public is that you must review three other user's work first. Of course I totally get the impetus behind this requirement. If everyone just dumped their stuff off so other's could read it, where would the motivation be for anyone to review anything? Since the site is new, however, I did have a problem finding content that I actually wanted to read. I think I'll keep checking back, but for now, I've put my Book Country account on hold. 

Inkpop.com

In the meantime I found a similar site for writers, called Inkpop.com. This site is run by HarperCollins, more specifically tied into its HarperTeen division, since Inkpop is decidedly for teens and teen writing. From what I've been able to tell, the majority of its users are teenagers (there's no actual age limit, so that's why a dinosaur like yours truly is trolling around) and they post everything from fiction and its myriad of subcategories, to poetry and nonfiction. Inkpop allows users to pick five books as their Top Picks. From what I understand, rankings based on a ratio of Top Picks vs. Top Pickers or Trendsetters, dictates the ranking of a book. The kicker is--and this is how Inkpop greatly differs from Book Country--the homepage keeps track of the top five ranked books and at the end of the month, editors from HarperCollins read these top five, entire MS or the first 10,000 words, whichever comes first. 

inkpop.com

What HarperCollins is doing, of course, is using the Inkpop community to separate the wheat from the chaff for them. This is a smart move. Everyday publishers receive piles of manuscripts for review, and these are mostly from agented writers. They'd be drowning in paper if they all accepted unsolicited manuscripts. With a community at Inkpop at their disposal, the teen branch of the publishing house has a whole fleet of volunteer assistants (who happen to be their cheif consumers to boot) reading manuscripts and either giving them their seal of approval or not. All with the aim of getting reviewed by an editor at the end of the month, with possible publishing contracts to follow. 

It's a great idea. One Penguin decided not to do. They expressly say they cannot guarantee anyone of any significance will ever read anything on the site. Of course, that might change, but who knows? The one thing I absolutely loved about Inkpop was the wealth of choices available. The site has been around for a year or so and it is heavily active, so there are tons of projects to choose from for your reading pleasure. I've already poked around at few things and I can't wait to dive in a bit deeper.

This is when things started to go south...

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Four days ago, I posted the first four chapters of GHOSTS OF FALLEN LEAVES on Inkpop. Literally within minutes I received a short, positive review. A day later, another, more detailed review showed up. For not having done anything to promote it, I was pretty proud of myself. My ranking hovered somewhere around 1040, and one of the sites Top Trendsetters actually picked my book, so it even lingered on the homepage for a day or so. 

Fame is, of course, fleeting, or in this case, non-existent, so I didn't really expect much to come out of this without promotion. In the past four days, the book's ranking has risen to 914, which is awesome. It's currently on seven watch lists and ten waiting lists. No new reviews, but oh well. I feel pretty good about it, since I didn't actively try to promote it or anything. My goal wasn't to make it to the top five and have my MS read by an editor. If that happened, YAY! but that wasn't my goal. I still felt good about preparing this book for publishing later next month.

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The issue began, however, when I decided to submit another bit of writing. A few years ago, after working on the first draft of GHOSTS, I started a story called LOCH RAVEN. The setting was loosely based on a reservoir lake near my home with the same name. After writing something dark like GHOSTS, I decided to embark on something light, though still paranormal. LOCH RAVEN turned out to be a summery story with lovely characters I loved writing about. It was so unlike GHOSTS, which is why I think I like working on it so much. It got some fond reviews from my friends, but I never finished it because, firstly, I had to pick a project and it lost, and secondly, I had written myself into a hole. By the time I got around to working on a rough draft, I realized it would require some decent amount of re-writing and so I dropped the project. 

I'd always envisioned LOCH RAVEN as the next project I'd go back to, once I'd gotten GHOSTS firmly off the ground. And so I submitted it to Inkpop, since I figured someone might read it and enjoy it. The problem is...

People are enjoying it.

In less than 24 hours, LOCH RAVEN has done better and gotten more attention than GHOSTS has done in four days. 26 pick lists, 5 individual comments, 4 related messages and an overall ranking of 628. IN LESS THAN A DAY. 

*insert barrage of expletives here*

EPIC FAIL.

My problem, and ultimately my question for you...

Am I concentrating on the wrong project for my debut?