I especially like forums as you can meet fellow authors, who may have information which would be useful to you, its great for networking and also promoting your work.
However, the latter is slightly more delicate to do.
No one likes to see someone in a forum just promoting their work on every message and some people will complain and the following could happen:
- Your messages could get deleted from the administrator of the forum,
- Members of the forum could send you messages telling you to stop publicising your work (some messages can be quite embarrassing) and;
- Due to you over publicising your work, it makes you look desperate and this could affect your potential reader straight away.
How to use a forum
- Do use forums for genre's your book is in and participate in the conversations to make yourself known
- Do share your own experiences with people and refer them to your work if they ask
- Do ask questions and initiate topics (not only will this indirectly bring people to you but it can direct people to your work.
Ok, so now the things that you shouldn't do!
- Do not just go into forums and post links to your work! It's like Spam in your email...no one likes it!
- Do not send messages/answers without proof reading it first! If your an aspiring writer and your sending replies with spelling mistakes, people pick up on this and can become quite funny about this and may bring it up in their reply.
- Do not send nasty or negative messages even if the question asked seems quite stupid! Everyone was an amateur once and no one is perfect! Every question should be valid and treated that way!
Again, I hope I do not sound like I am preaching, as all these things are what I have experienced (minus the last in the 'do not' section) and hope you don't make the same mistakes I did!
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