Supernatural Fiction Readers discussion

If you're a writer of supernatural fiction, and you have an event or a new book or story to announce --or you just want to publicize your work in general-- this ("Group Members Who Write") is the folder for you! I'm going to post this thread as "important" so it (hopefully) will make the folder always show on the group's main page, and not be buried in "discussions."

Since I posted the original invitation at the beginning of May 2009, a lot of writers have responded to it; we now have no less than 257 threads in this folder! That's great; it gives readers in our group some great opportunities to discover new writers, and hopefully gives those of us who write some much-needed publicity for our work. With such a big group as ours, though, and so many threads competing for the reader's attention, it seems that some guidelines might help make the folder easier to navigate, so your potential readers can find your posts easily.

So, I'm going to request that if you're promoting a particular book or story, you put the title of your work and your name in the thread title, so people know who and what it's about. (Vague things like "New book!" just aren't very descriptive in that way!) Also, if you've posted about a time-limited giveaway, etc. that you're running, and you created a thread just for that, please delete the thread when the offer has expired! (That's a courtesy much like taking down a bulletin board notice when it's obsolete, to make room for new ones.) And I would strongly suggest that if you have a number of short stories, or a number of blog entries, that you want to let us know about, you create a single thread for your work in that format, and post about each one there. The same goes for novels that are part of a single series, or different threads all pertaining to the same novel. One thread with ten posts creates a lot less clutter on the discussion board than ten widely-scattered threads with one post each, and it also brings your material together where it's easy for your fans to access it with one click (smarter marketing!) The group moderators reserve the right to condense threads where it seems that this would help people find the material better.

Jim and I can do some of this re-labeling and deletion, etc. ourselves (and I've been doing a bit of folder clean-up in recent weeks); but it's much easier on us, and saves us time for more constructive things, if you each take responsibility to manage your own threads (as many of you already do!). We're also still interested in the idea, which I floated earlier, of creating an archive for long-inactive threads in this folder, but this is a project that will take time, and I haven't yet looked into how to do it. Any feedback you all have on this idea is very welcome!

Thanks for your cooperation, and thanks for all you've done to make this a successful and fast-growing group that we can be proud of!

Chris Robertson

I became inspired to write classically-styled short horror after purchasing a book at a yard sale which featured the works of Francis Marion Crawford, William Hope Hodgson, Seabury Quinn, Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Chambers, and many other of the early masters. Since that time I have been published in Doorways Magazine and Monomyth Magazine, and have written my own collection of short horror tales published under the title "Lisey's DEATH DREAMS". I also wrote and directed the feature length film "Disposal of a Corpse". ~ Regards, Chris Robertson

Welcome to the group, Chris! I'd encourage you to start a thread in this folder for your work, since this particular thread isn't really the place for writers to introduce themselves. In fact, after my first post above, I'd closed this one to discussion, and only re-opened it in case anyone had any comments about the second post. To avoid confusion, I'm going to close it again as soon as I get done posting!

The Goodreads management recently announced that, as of Sept. 1, they're discontinuing a number of features on this site. Most of these are relatively minor, such as our personal Favorite Authors list. But one feature being discontinued is unique to the Goodreads Author profiles, and one which a number of authors use: the Writings page, where we could post samples of our writing (stories, excerpts, etc.) for other Goodreaders to read for free. After Sept. 1, no new writings can be posted, and my understanding is that the existing Writings pages will all be deleted.

There are good reasons why authors, in an online community centered around reading such as this one, might wish to share free content, and why others might enjoy reading it. To provide an alternative venue for this sort of sharing, your moderators invite any of you, who want to, to create a thread in this folder for your own writing. You're welcome to copy-and-paste content from your Writings page (while it still exists!), or to add new work. Please just create one thread per person for this purpose! (You may have to split longer writings into more than one comment, because of "character" limits for each comment box.) Also, for those of you who have blogs, you can post creative writing there and link to it in this folder.