Jean Goldstrom has started u-publish-on-parade. It’s funny, but I have been kicking around an idea like this for quite a while. Jean beat me to it.

The basic idea that I think Jean is pushing is a central place to provide links to and for a community of authors. There are precious few websites that let you put advertising links up. I am not sure that Jean will get too many takers, even at the reasonable rate of $5, unless she can show that she gets enough page views.

Jean is right, though, there is a real need of a site that has promotional tools for writers and publishers, especially those without the backing of big publishing houses.

Jean has started with a links page. If I read it right, she is going to run flash fiction contests in order to bring in traffic. This makes sense as a way to get the readers and writers of spec fic to show up at your site. I have often thought that SamsDot should have a flash contest every month. They have the built in readership and it would give their readers something to do in the doldrums between new editions. They have the drabble (exactly 100 words?) contests, but I am not a big fan of drabbles.

What other resources could be included in a promotional site?

1) Banner exchange for spec-fic authors, perhaps with ads more fitting as a blog sidebar. I wrote a banner exchange and have most of a text ad exchange written, so this might be a good thing.

2) A store, in the style of project pulp. I am not sure how project pulp (now defunct) worked. I would guess the best way would be to take orders and forward them to the publisher or writer, while keeping a small finders fee. If they actually kept inventory – well that’s just crazy.

3) Resources links – There are lots of lists of writers resources, so another one may not be that useful.

4) Reviews – I think there is a demand for reviews of ezines, websites, stories and other writing resources.

5) Tutorials – LuLu, and other POD sites give good instructions, but I think a well written tutorial on some of the more nuts and bolts aspects of self publishing would be useful. There should be a tutorial about submitting your first story to a magazine. It is amazing how many people can’t follow the simple directions in guidelines pages. Podcasts, RSS and other techy subjects would be good. Designing a readable author’s web page would be a cool thing.

6) Inviting editors to reject a story would be a good column. Write a generic story with obvious faults (easy for me) and submit it to editors with the request that they return, not just a rejection, but a detailed discussion of why a story would not be good for their publication. I think lots of people would like to see a story get more than the “thanks, but we can’t use your story.” sort of generic rejection and they would not mind much if the rejection happened to someone else.

7) Start blogs for “story of the day”, “ezine of the week”, “Spec-Fic poem of the day”, “week’s best Science Fiction art”. These would all get lots of interest and provide traffic to websites and authors. Sounds like lots of work, but I think that after it was started, they’d be knocking down the doors to be included.

I’ll never get around to any of these, probably. I might do some tutorials for CthreePO.com. Jean might read this and use it for inspiration.