If I were to start Teratogenesis again, what would I do differently?
I would use a WordPress account rather than LiveJournal. There is no way around this- LiveJournal is showing its age. I had thought to take into account the ready built community but, frankly, the social networking element is a lot more rudimentary than I expected. The other element is the inability to place tracking code on the blog. Ten months in, I still have no idea of how successful it has been. I can see how many people read this blog, but not Teratogenesis.
I would shill a lot more. So far, all of my traffic to Teratogenesis is, presumably, either direct, from here or from the Xaeromancer Project. And that is mostly from the fact that if I have an account somewhere that will let me post a link here, then I’ve posted a link here. I should also have gone onto online writing forums and talked up the project that way. Reaching the most people is the trick, as not everyone will be a fan; I accept that, but I need to reach the people who would be interested if they knew about this project.
I would have structured it a lot more. Sometimes there is a perfect storm of synchronicity, but other times it’s a real challenge to move the story along. I think managing the story arcs week-by-week rather than month-by-month would have kept a better pace. It’s all a matter of flexibility versus slack and rigidity versus robustness.
I wouldn’t have bothered with the Amazon links. Maybe with higher traffic, this would have been worth it, but so far…
Still, Teratogenesis has cost me nothing but time so far, so I can afford to experiment. A real time window into the life an increasingly strange protagonist? It’s not a safe bet at the best of times. But then, I’d sooner fail for over-reaching myself than be successful for playing to the lowest common denominator.
