Checking out 'Scribd' and you should, too

Jane Friedman,
photo by Rowe Studios

Fellow writers, I am inspired to write another post based on a content tweet by Jane Friedman, invaluable friend to writers who want to be published or more published. Just to reiterate, whenever Jane tweets, I pay rapt attention. I even scroll through her tweets on occasion to see if there's something I missed. In confess that I'm a tactical tweeter and don't hang out on Twitter very often.

This time, Jane's tweet linked to a blog post she had written for Writer's Digest about a young widow who posted content on Scribd and has been very successful in building an audience for an eventual book launch as a result.

What is Scribd, you ask? Here's their line on themselves: They are the world’s largest social reading and publishing company. They've made it easy to share and discover entertaining, informative and original written content across the web and mobile devices. Their vision is "to liberate the written word, to connect people with the information and ideas that matter most to them."

If you want to find out more about Scribd's potential, you should read the article. Instead of rehashing that woman's experience, I'll tell you what I did.

Granted, I am only taking baby steps on the site. Scribd has a lot more capability than what I am currently using. Just so you know, it's easy to log on to if you are already on Facebook.  If any of your Facebook friends are on Scribd, they show up as "Followers" or at least that's how it appears. Even though Scribd tells me I have been a member since October 2010, I only uploaded my first two pieces of content to Scribd this week.

1. The first three pages of my WIP, WHO KILLED TOM JONES? (uploaded 3/21); and
2. The first 30 pages of WHO KILLED TOM JONES? (uploaded 3/22)

Today is 3/23. In those two days, I received more than 50 "reads" on each of those pieces. Now, while those numbers pale in comparison to the young widow's memoirs, I am really delighted with that level of activity in two short days. The fact is that I don't even know how all those readers found my excerpts in the first place. I don't think I would have been able to find them myself because I'm still learning my way around the site.

One of the things that became readily apparent is how major publishers are used Scribd to promote their new or newer releases by publishing excerpts.  In fact, by perusing those excerpts, I realized I needed to reformat the larger excerpt to look more like the others. So I added some bells and whistles to make it look less like a manuscript and more like a book. I did end up uploading the thirty-page excerpt as a PDF though, since the file was too large to upload as a word docx. I like the appearance of a PDF better. The pages are clearly demarcated, and it looks more like the published book excerpts on the site.

I plan to upload more excerpts, to try to learn how to use Scribd and get a handle on its potential. I have other pieces I can upload as well.

So, if you liked the 500-word excerpt of WHO KILLED TOM JONES? previously published on this blog, you can read 28 more pages at Scribd.

What do you think? Do you see yourself used Scribd to obtain more visibility for your creative writing? Any keys or insights on how to use Scribd more successfully?

TWITs Writing Marathon Update . . . four hours completed . . . only eight hours to go!

For my participation in the TWITs (The Write Idea) writing marathon, I decided to work on my unfinished novel WHO KILLED TOM JONES? So far, I was able to use slivers of Effie's prompts including, "Squeeze my hand" and "breeze at dawn" to add more than 2,500 words and eleven new pages to the book.

I haven't looked back at the prompts in a while--those two took me on a nice bender lasting several hours. But since I'm stopped to post this update, I think I'll see what else Effie has rounded up for us.

So far, I've collected pledges of $300 dollars (not including my own gift to the local library).

Time to post this update and get back to writing. My goal was to write 6,000 words and 25 more pages. I'm nearly halfway there.