Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

Which platform should a new novelist post on?Utsudo’s advice: as far as you can manage, post your work on every platform — like casting a wide net. Each platform has a different readership and recommendation system; after running them for a while, decide which to keep based on the response. Most important of all: keep updating and finish your work.

So many platforms — how do you choose?

　　Search online today and a flood of platforms for posting your work comes rushing out. As a newcomer, you really wouldn’t know how to choose.

　　

　　So my personal advice is — post your work on as many platforms as possible.

　　Yes, you read that right. It’s the idea of casting a wide net.

　　How to put it — each platform reaches different people, its operators recommend works differently, and different genres are popular, so the same work can perform quite differently on each one. Unless it’s truly terrible, in which case it won’t do well anywhere (X

　　And taste in fiction is subjective.One platform’s operators may pass on your work while another’s picks it up — and the same goes for publishers, so I think the best approach is to publish your work as widely as you can, within what you can realistically manage.

Most important: keep updating and finish your work

　　But there’s one thing to watch out for, and it’s especially important:“Keep updating, and finish your work”.

　　However well a platform responds, if you only post a few chapters and then let it fizzle out, it won’t help you at all — and you’ll lose readers’ trust.

　　Personally, I think a writer should finish their stories as much as possible and keep honing their skills. Whether a publisher or platform notices you is something you have to be zen about. Butif you absolutely must debut, you can of course work harder at building popularity and getting seen to improve your chances. Popularity alone doesn’t guarantee publication, but it does lower the bar a bit.

Watch the response, then decide

　　In short: get your work ready, publish it as widely as you can, and after running things for a while, you’ll see how each platform responds to your work. At that point, you can decide which ones to keep and invest in.

　　Of course, if you’re good at managing things, running them all at once is great. But for a goldfish brain like me, when I get busy I forget which platforms I’ve posted to and forget to reply to comments — it just doesn’t work, so I pick and choose.

　　I hope every writer finds the platform that suits them XD

FAQ

Further reading (in Chinese)

• Previous: #69 — An invitation to a creators’ meetup
• Next: #71 — Do authors have character settings too?
• Start from the beginning: #01 — Utsudo’s debut
• Column introduction
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.