I knew this day would come. No, I haven't gotten a traditional publishing contract, if that happened this blog would have the world's biggest Homer Simpson going WOOHOO on it. I've decided to formally end things with Fictionpress.
If you didn't know, I have been a member of Fictionpress for some time, with varying numbers of stories on there. From this point on, that number is going to be a big fat goose egg. There are a bunch of reasons I've decided to leave that site. I'll list them in order of increasing importance.
1) Fictionpress gears mainly to younger writers. While I certainly have no problem with teenagers learning how to hone their craft of writing, I am not a teenager. I'm 25. I've mostly outgrown the site. I hardly ever leave reviews for anyone else's stories, not because I don't like them, but rather for the same reason I neglect this blog. I just don't have much to say. I have a lot to talk about with my own writing, but little to say about anyone else's, aside from book reviews. (And another of those is coming up, once I finish the Renewal series.) Overall, I just didn't have a lot of use for the site, and the only reason I joined up with them was to get feedback. That brings us to reason number two.
2) I wanted to get more feedback on my writing. But after two months of not getting a single review and only a few dozen hits on my stories per day (sometimes I got less than 10 hits a day), I felt frustrated. I know the irony of this is that everyone else had the same problem I mentioned above, that they simply have nothing to say about my stories. I understand that. But I was getting discouraged. I hate getting discouraged, and at this point, I feel any feedback I get should be from reviewers on Amazon. Granted, I don't have any reviews there, either.
3) The other reason I joined Fictionpress was more practical. I wanted to have an online back-up of my writing so I could refer to it. If one of my characters is said to have brown hair in Chapter 3, I want to make sure they still do in Chapter 35. Back in the old days, I often made mistakes and wrote inconsistencies like that. But I have a much more private online back-up now. I use Google Docs. It's visible to me only, but if something happens to my computer, I can easily retrieve the documents.
4) Fictionpress, while I like most of the users there I've interacted with, is nonetheless a flawed site. The development and administration leaves a lot to be desired. The stats counter has broken more times than I can count, the file upload preview system doesn't work right, and recently they broke all links in all users' profiles to stop spam that I never even noticed was there. The site is completely unmoderated, and I have never seen a story, spam or otherwise, be deleted there by anyone other than the author. The author can delete stories, which is what I have done.
That's my reasoning. I haven't deleted the Fictionpress links from the blog yet, but that's what I intend to do once this entry is over. I'm frustrated with Fictionpress, but relieved in a way that I've finally made my decision and left that site behind. I hold nothing against its users, and I wish them all the best of luck in their writing journeys. I just wish the site itself would get its act together.
You can still find all of my released books on Kindle and Smashwords. As for And I Feel Fine, it'll be released in (most likely) September of 2012.
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