What are your opinions on building up a reputation on some of the community-driven sites, like wattpad.com or reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ ? Is it practical to catch the attention of an editor or agent there, or is it strictly amatuer play?
I'm glad you brought this up, as H and I were talking about it last night! There have been authors who got lucrative publishing deals after publishing their work outside of the traditional means, the three I tend to think of being EL James (50 Shades on a fanfiction site), Andy Weir (The Martian on WattPad), and Hugh Howey (self-published the Wool trilogy).
It is possible for this to happen: To put your work out there, yourself, for free (or low cost), and for it to get big enough that a publisher notices your work and picks you up to boost you further. I didn't cover that scenario in the article because it's a 1 in 100 million chance of happening. If a content creator has something that good, compelling, and special, and if they put it in a place where it can get seen by a lot of people and start generating buzz, then that can happen—but it's not going to happen for 999 million out of 100 million people who try it.
I wouldn't advise this as a strategy for becoming a traditionally published author, anymore than if someone told me "I want to become a successful singer with a record deal" would I advise them to go out and sing karaoke and hope a record exec notices them. Can you get a record deal that way? Sure, anything's possible. Is it a smart strategy to invest your time and effort in if your goal is to get a record deal? Absolutely not.
My intent is to sneak some science fiction into a scholarly paper posted to arXiv.org . Need to write a valid scientific article concerning that there are no hidden messages in the stars sent to us by the gods; the patterns are all random stochastic to a confidence level of 99.5% -- and spend the rest of the paper cross-examining potential sources of biases and interpretation errors in that last 0.5%.
There are several barriers to entry, practicality is not one of them :/
What are your opinions on building up a reputation on some of the community-driven sites, like wattpad.com or reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ ? Is it practical to catch the attention of an editor or agent there, or is it strictly amatuer play?
I'm glad you brought this up, as H and I were talking about it last night! There have been authors who got lucrative publishing deals after publishing their work outside of the traditional means, the three I tend to think of being EL James (50 Shades on a fanfiction site), Andy Weir (The Martian on WattPad), and Hugh Howey (self-published the Wool trilogy).
It is possible for this to happen: To put your work out there, yourself, for free (or low cost), and for it to get big enough that a publisher notices your work and picks you up to boost you further. I didn't cover that scenario in the article because it's a 1 in 100 million chance of happening. If a content creator has something that good, compelling, and special, and if they put it in a place where it can get seen by a lot of people and start generating buzz, then that can happen—but it's not going to happen for 999 million out of 100 million people who try it.
I wouldn't advise this as a strategy for becoming a traditionally published author, anymore than if someone told me "I want to become a successful singer with a record deal" would I advise them to go out and sing karaoke and hope a record exec notices them. Can you get a record deal that way? Sure, anything's possible. Is it a smart strategy to invest your time and effort in if your goal is to get a record deal? Absolutely not.
My intent is to sneak some science fiction into a scholarly paper posted to arXiv.org . Need to write a valid scientific article concerning that there are no hidden messages in the stars sent to us by the gods; the patterns are all random stochastic to a confidence level of 99.5% -- and spend the rest of the paper cross-examining potential sources of biases and interpretation errors in that last 0.5%.
There are several barriers to entry, practicality is not one of them :/
I will edit this paper pro bono.