Story Snapshots on Social Media

[Svrtnsse]

Ahoy,

I'm currently editing the first draft of my WIP to make it ready for beta readers. Over the last few weeks I've picked out a few paragraphs from the sections I've been editing, and I've shared them on my facebook page for friends and family to see.

I've picked paragraphs that don't include any spoilers, but that still showcase a bit of the attitude of the story. Even taken out of context, they're amusing on their own and can tickle a potential reader's imagination.
I don't have any tangible evidence for how well this is working, but I have a vague feeling it may make others interested in giving the story a chance and I'm hoping it will make it a little easier for me to find beta readers.

Have you tried something similar, and what was your experience with it? Was it good or was it bad?


For reference, here are two recent snapshots:

Otter stuck out his tongue at him and then laughed his silent laugh again.

Enar spluttered. The words didn't want to come out right - not that he had any idea what to say. He'd never had a holy man throwing bread at him before. His thoughts ran in all directions at once and not a one of them stayed still. In the end he just crossed his arms and pouted.

Sure, it was embarrassing, but it was also kind of funny. Somewhere on the inside, a small part of him laughed its ass off at the rest of him.

“Well, yeah, except I didn't get away quite that easily...” Another big sigh. “I had to get one of the monks to shave my hair into a mohawk and enchant it to glow green.”

“Wow, really? That sounds a bit extreme.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Have you ever tried to sleep while your hair glows bright enough to read by?”

I had a few others as well, but I'm not finding them at the moment.

Basically, the idea is to show off some cool situations of the story, pretty much like stills from a movie or sceenshots from a game.

 

[spectre]

I think that writing scenes is a good way to grab readers' attention and to inspire the creativity in your writing. Enough said. It's sort of like a blurb, but more relevant to the story. There might be certain personalities drawn more to a blurb than scenes from your story, but from the marketing perspective it's more productive because it provides more content for readers than ten seconds in the fantasy aisle. I have yet to really put up a medium for sharing my writing but only because I have so few words to put on the page as of yet. I hope it goes well for you.

 

[Devor]

“Well, yeah, except I didn't get away quite that easily...” Another big sigh. “I had to get one of the monks to shave my hair into a mohawk and enchant it to glow green.”

I know it's a deliberate choice, but you should fix the bolded line if it's going into a marketing blurb. "Creative" grammar can be a turn off for some people, and even if that's normally very minor, you still don't want it in your promotional excerpts.

Otherwise, while this kind of stuff can be great for giving you more to talk about with your book, your opening pages - when they're ready - should really be what you're using to serve this purpose. That's your hook. They're written to be the strongest and most instantly engaging pages.

Right below these excerpts, you should have: Read more at . . . .

With a link to your opening pages and a place to sign up for an email announcement.

 

[Svrtnsse]

Thanks for the advice Devor. I'll try and keep that in mind when/if trying this out "in the wild" and not just among friends.

I wasn't really considering these to be blurbs, at least not in the way I've thought about blurbs before.
To me, a blurb is meant to give the reader a hint about the story, or what the story is about, but that isn't really what I'm going for. Instead, I'm trying to pick something that doesn't reveal anything relevant to the story, but which might be interesting in and of itself.

I've got some positive comments about these posts, but they do come from personal friends of mine, so I will have to take that into account.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I took this a little further. When I put my novel up on wattpad I discovered they had a feature called Quote Art (or something to that effect). It let's you highlight a piece of text from your book and put it as a quote on a background. It worked pretty well, but had some room for improvements, so I decided to create my own instead.
I used the cover for my novel and just added in the quotes. You can see some of the results here:

-+-+-

I'm kind of happy with it. It's fun to share the images and it reminds people that I've written a book they might have thought of reading.