Getting exposure

[Warren_Paul]

. Also, I suppose I'll be slightly reluctant to delay my novel completion date (I'm a slow writer already, as you know) to make time for the stories.

Way I see it, finish your book first and start submitting it. While your sending it off to publishers/agents and waiting for responses, work on the other stories in your world.

If you don't get bites for your novel first time around, maybe the publishing credits from the short stories you did after submitting the manuscript will help for your second attempt, once you have revised and improved upon the manuscript.

 

[Anne Lyle]

I agree with Warren. Finish the novel, then play with short stories to distract yourself from the self-imposed torture that is agent querying!

If short stories aren't a passion, you're unlikely to get them published anywhere, tbh. The market is very very small and standards extremely high.

However if you can get novels published and build up a fan base, you could then use your short stories set in the same world as promotional freebies or interim self-pub "fixes" to keep fans going in the wait between novels. It's a strategy I've seriously considered, although my present contract barely gives me time to write the novels, never mind extra stories!

 

[Daezarkian]

In my opinion (humble though it is), a blog, Twitter and Facebook are the way to go. It's fairly overwhelming at first, as you feel like you *always* have to be active and engaged, but after a while you get a feel for how much time to spend social networking, and where.

I won't claim to be the grandmaster at this, or anything: I've only sold 500+ books since last May, but that's more than I ever expected to sell. If you publish through Amazon or Barnes and Noble, there are also quite a few e-book promotion sites out there, many of which are free. (Many, unfortunately, are not.)

Being active and commenting on other people's blogs is also a good idea.

 

[Carro]

In my opinion (humble though it is), a blog, Twitter and Facebook are the way to go. It's fairly overwhelming at first, as you feel like you *always* have to be active and engaged, but after a while you get a feel for how much time to spend social networking, and where.
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I went looking for SF and Fantasy groups on Facebook the other week, the only ones I could find seemed to be full of spam. Would you mind saying what groups you went to?