Hi,
I have five chapters posted of a book that I am writing. The problem is that I have noticed after chapter two people seem to stop reading. My original goal was just to finally finish something, however now I am not even sure it is worth the time. it is approximately 30 pages altogether, the link to the next chapter is on the bottom of each page. Basically I would like to know if it is salvageable, or if I should just scrap the whole project. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
http://lisawilliamsj.hubpages.com/hub/W … ide-Part-1
As Wry says, HubPages isn't a good place to post anything in a serial. People can't follow from one chapter to the next easily. If you look at your profile, you can see they're not all grouped together.
It's not a huge problem to publish your early chapters online - chances are, by the time you're ready to publish, they'll be totally rewritten anyway! However, I'd be posting them somewhere which is designed to receive critiques, e.g.
http://www.writing.com/
http://www.reviewfuse.com/
Obviously you won't make any money from posting there, but you're not likely to make much with your chapters here either - creative writing doesn't earn well generally.
Chapter One needs work to draw the reader in and get them involved. I've written a series of Hubs about novel writing - the ones most relevant to you are "Writing Beginnings: the first chapter of your novel" and "Novel Writing: Backstory". I'm not allowed to post links here but you can paste those titles into Search and you'll find them.
My advice is that you not show your early chapters. Write the novel. Finish it. Set yourself a daily word count goal and finish the first draft.
It's a first draft. Of course the early chapters are going to need lots of work. But until you have a whole story, you CAN'T possibly know what you should change in the early chapters. It's impossible. So you'll just be changing for the sake of change. Never getting anywhere.
Sharing early chapters with family and friends will make you feel nice. You'll get lots of "oh that's lovely" from them, and "you're so talented." It's all very nice and warm and fuzzy. If you post it online to a site like HP, you might find a few that will like it, and a few who don't. More than likely it will mainly be ignored. No one will see it. There are too many finished works out there to read. Amazon has literally tons of self-published books for absolutely free. People actually write novels and then just give them away. Given this, there is simply no demand for serialized, unfinished works from unknown writers. Posting in HP and having it mainly ignored will give you a complex and make you think there is something wrong with it, when there is not. How can there be something wrong with something that isn't done yet? Is a beaten egg the measure of a crappy omelette? Worse, you can put it on a writer's site and you'll get lots of advice. Tons. So much that you'll be lost trying to decide which advice is good and which is garbage. Most will be garbage. Possibly all of it. So then you will have to decide what to do with your story.
You are already in that position. Right now.
What you do with your story is up to you. Stop seeking feedback before it is done. Don't seek approval from without, seek discipline from within. I know it's scary, a lot of work, a lot of time. It might suck. It might. But it might also be great. You'll never know until you finish it. So finish it. Go write it all the way to the end. At least one draft.
Then, maybe, ask a trusted, literate friend or two for input.
Set a word count (1000 words a day is very easy to do). A very short novel is 60,000 words. That is 60 days of work. You have several chapters done already. You could have a finished manuscript by the end of September. Mark it on your calendar.
Sorry this got long, but writing matters deeply to me, and I love to see people finish their books. Good luck with your story.
Hubpages isn't one of the best places to publish an entire book, especially if you ever plan to get it properly published. An editor would likely tear it to pieces anyway, so it's not a good indication of the general reception it will receive.
Contact a person on this site under the username Website Examiner, he may be able to help with a critique.
Thank you so much, I really appreciate this information! I sent an email to Website Examiner. Thanks again for taking the time to reply!
In my opinion the story opened very slowly and I could not tell where it was set. I only read the first part. You should also look at formatting. For example dialogue from a new speaker should occur after a paragraph break.
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