So where are the readers?

I’ve been looking for places to post my work. I’ve written a million words of sci-fi/fantasy and I’ve been looking for a place to post some work that will likely not be published traditionally.

I’ve been posting on fiction press, a site for internet novels. I had hoped to get readers. Instead, I got spam. I think I have about five messages from real people looking to say something nice about the novel I put out there. The other hundred or so messages were bots set up by artists to spam for commissions. When I did come across a message from a person, I did my best to respond to it. Those messages sometimes turned into spam artist commissions, but once or twice I managed to talk to a real person trying to be genuine.

The other places I’ve looked have been tough markets. Royal Road is looking for LitRPG and only LitRPG. Anything posted there must have a flashy cover. If it Doesn’t get readers in the first day, then it never will. It gets buried in the sea of new titles. O have posted things there and been entirely ignored.

Reddit has plenty of forums for talking about reading or writing, but none of them allow for self-promotion. I’ve tried to be sly about it, but the moderators are pretty good. I think I am going to put up some of that stuff on this site, starting with a novel I’ve posted elsewhere, maybe a few chapters of my epic poem, and other things. I do have short stories up on this site, and there may be more of them soon.

If I can’t find readers without spam, then I’m just going to have to bring them here where I can post all day.

Thanks for reading,

Michael