Postmortem 101 · 2:40pm Sep 1st, 2014
It should be common knowledge that posting a blog advertizing your new story several minutes after you actually publish is highly silly. Who is notified of your blogs? Your followers and no one else. Who sees every new story you make? Also your followers. The result is every one of your watchers being spammed with virtually the same message twice. It is similar to repeat ads on YouTube: you are either convinced at first and ignore the second, or you ignore two messages. If you have a good story description, there is no reason from a follower's point of view to pay attention to the blog. It adds no value.
However, that is not to say a blog cannot be used to promote your story. You just have to find a way for it to add value for your followers and post the blog at a time when your followers would be interested. A teaser blog a week in advance, for instance, can help you build hype. However, there is a more powerful promotional tool that very few authors take advantage of: the postmortem blog. If done correctly, not only will you be effectively self-promoting, but you will provide your followers some advertizing they will want to read all the way through.
So what is a postmortem? In effect, it is a cross between a making-of and a self-review. They are generally written shortly after publishing with the intent to share what you learned from the writing experience with other authors. A good postmortem helps you reflect and grow as much as it gets the word out about your story. A good postmortem should be written a few days to a week after publishing and cover the following topics:
Your goals/motivation for writing the story
Every story starts somewhere, be it a crazy late-night epiphany or a desire to write something you have not tried before. Regardless, the best way to start things off is to share what your motivation for writing the story was. What were you envisioning when you started writing? Did you have any goals in mind? Establish what should have happened, so you have context to discuss what actually happened.
What went into writing it?
Here is where you get to share all the toil and hardship you went through to put words to page. What challenges did you face in the course of writing the story? How did you overcome them? If you did research, you can gush about all the cool stuff you found out but could not fit neatly into your story. If you did promotion, you might share what you did, why you did it, and what the response was to your efforts.
What worked?/What flopped?
Given your goals, how did everything turn out? Did your idea come out the way you thought it would? Did your readers enjoy the results? In this section, you give your own thoughts on the resulting story given what you set out to do. It is a mini self-review. Follow this with a discussion of how your readers reacted: favorite parts, top feedback, and so on. Of course, comments are sometimes hard to come by. You could share any thoughts from pre-readers, or in the worst case, you have your story stats to fall back on.
What was your favorite/least favorite part?
In order to grow as a writer, it helps to get a firm grasp on the specifics of your story. We can discuss high-level concepts such as Mary Sues or show vs tell all day, but until we dig into our own writing and identify a too-purple paragraph or a cleverly worded phrase, we lack the low-level pragmatic understanding of how those concepts look on the page. As such, it is a great help to force yourself to pick your single favorite and least favorite passage and explain why.
Two benefits here: if you felt this was your best story ever, it helps to step back and remember that you can always find things that need improvement. If you cannot find a "worst" part, challenge yourself to raise your standards until you can. On the flipside, an author who feels like they cannot write anything decent deserves to remember that even if they are no TheDescendant, they still can have their own personal high points. If they pick out the little bits they like in their own writing, it will help them get a feel for what is good and remind them that they wrote it once. They can do it again if they try.
It is important to pick only one for each category here because in order to grow as an author, you must learn to refine your tastes. Yes, there were a lot of highlights, but if you had to choose only one, which one is most deserving of attention? Why? It forces you to get specific, split hairs, and in the process decide what you really value above all else, even if the real difference is miniscule.
What did you learn?
The best way to wrap up is to discuss what you took away from the experience. This will probably be story-related, but you could also mention what you might do differently on the promotional front, whether you might tag it differently, and so on. In any case, it helps to be as specific as possible because, again, the whole point of the exercise is to get a pragmatic grasp of what your writing process looks like and communicate it to other authors/readers as best you can. Glossing over what you learned means you miss the opportunity to be conscious of how you grew over the course of your writing.
A postmortem blog the week following your story release will do more to promote your story and help you grow as an author than any other type of blog. It forces you to take a critical look at your writing process, vet your actual story, and then communicate your observations to other people. It helps you become conscious of what you write and forces you to explain yourself completely to an outsider. Your readers and other authors will receive an advertizement for your story filled with things they want to read: tips and tricks for better writing alongside an account of someone else's personal experience of the writing process. In the end, everyone wins.
There are days when I wonder why you have so few followers, and today is one of them. This was an incredibly useful and informative blog, thank you!
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I think it's mostly the lack of stories and self promotion bit. The only people alerted about a blog are the people who are already followers, so getting more followers via blog is a raw deal. I might have to find a venue to make some of the good stuff more public, but there aren't too many groups that are both trafficked and receptive to advice blogs.
In any case, thanks for reading and commenting.
The funny thing is that for some reason, some of my followers DON'T get notifications about a new chapter, or it doesn't catch their eye. I know they should get notifications, but they sometimes don't, or it gets buried somehow. How do I know this? They say so in the comments. "How did I miss this? Why didn't I know you published a new chapter?" So that's why the blog post.
I often mean to do post-mortems, but I include things like influences. etc., in the Author's Note at the end of the chapter so it's accessible to everyone. I'm also very conscious that I might be spoiling stuff, and I think I do a better and more interesting job explaining things like Party Pony Magic in my stories. I worry about inadvertently killing the magic in my stories.
I see the value in the idea. Maybe I'll do it at the END of my multi-chapter fic, but I think I'd like to keep things a bit mysterious for now.
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I was speaking more from a one-shot perspective, actually. The opening remarks were motivated more from seeing "Hey guys, I made a brand new story" blogs directly above the new story description notifications. If people missed one, how could they not miss the other if they're right on top of each other in the feed?
Blogs announcing new chapters are far more justified, as I do not think the current system notifies anyone about new chapters. You see your unread favorites go up by one tick if you starred it, but that is it. Not sure how postmortems play out chapter by chapter, either. Especially with shorter chapters and spoilers, there might not be much for discussion. Definitely something to do after story completion, but you are right that they fit awkwardly with chapter by chapter releases.
I agree about no blogs right after a story is published, but personally, a blog post about what made you write is perfectly fine in my opinion.
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So long as the post adds value, it cannot hurt. If it is a new story, I would still wait a day before blogging, though. Same reasoning about gradually adding it to new groups instead of all at once: exposure is more effective over time.
2419766 Good point.
FINALLY!!! Someone calls out people on the obvious! THAK YOU!!! The feed is difficult enough to load on a phone if you forget a day or two... Thanks to Knighty doing that stupid flank "load more" crap, vs next page.
Seriously, I wanna KICK web designers that do that shit...
But yeah... It's so annoying to see EVERY second story update doubled because some people refuse to trust the notification system... I do see it like spam, and it really ors get annoying. I do hope people will take this to heart... Sadly, they're all probably too busy tagging a blah with the story they just posted.
**Edit** Typed on my phone at UNGODLY hours in the morning.
I LOLed at some of the spelling derps... so meh, I'll leave 'em!
This is something I'm planning on doing in the future. Starting with older fics to get them some more time in the limelight and also so that plots not ruined for those who haven't read them. (still with that spoiler - read more - button).
Good layout ideas, too.
Edit: I have been advertising upcoming fics like, for one weeks in advance and another the day before... I'm thinking the weeks in advance one is probably going to be the best idea. Though... hopefully the hype train doesn't derail the fic.
I love when authors do "postmortem" blogs. They're always pretty interesting, and they generally offer neat insight into how the author writes. If only more authors wrote them...
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Yep. That's the problem with writing as a hobby: everyone wants to churn out stories. Commentary is not stories, so there are not as many people interested in it. And, of course, doing it well takes time, which is already in short supply.
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I'm not sure if fanfiction is big enough to even have a hype train. You might overexpose yourself if you, for instance, do a blog every day of the week leading up to release or something, but I cannot recall hearing of any stories with any amount of hype. The hype train seems consigned to summer blockbusters or AAA games with an actual advertizing budget.
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Thank you for your comments