Quote:
Originally Posted by davidwfleming
My faith in the "wait to be discovered method" diminishes each day.
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"And all the stars that never were
are parking cars and pumping gas."
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Do You Know The Way to San Jose?
This. In a world of 7 billion and climbing, "waiting to be discovered" is a fool's game. Sure, it'll happen to about .0000001% of the population... how are those odds for you?
So far, I think only one useful thing has come out of this thread: The fact that "waiting to be discovered" is not the same as "getting noticed." And "getting noticed" is about doing the things that no one else is doing... yet. Being the leader... not another rider on the bandwagon.
Social media is great, but it's pretty much all bandwagon. By the time it gets popular, it's already used up by the first-responders. Everyone else is by definition an also-ran. It can be used to connect to you... but people have to know you first to want to connect to you. You won't get that through social media (it's probably significant that social media, when abbreviated, becomes SM).
Authors who go through traditional publishers are essentially paying the publishers to get you noticed in traditional areas... best-seller lists... media promotion... spots on Leno and CNN... etc (as long as they still work). Getting noticed in non-traditional areas... social media, etc... requires more than just Being There. You have to find a way to Stand Out, to be significant, to be an icon.
Unfortunately, writing being a traditional field tends to discourage non-traditional thinking... and many of us like to think: "I'm selling ebooks... isn't that non-traditional enough?" It was in 2005, but now, not anymore. What else you got?
That's our task as independent writers:
Figure out What Else We Have that is significant, that is icon-worthy, that will get us a shot at Leno and CNN. Or get yourself a publisher, and let them do the job for you.