A Steemit Future for Fiction

NOTE: This post mentions two projects that no longer exist (at least not in a form I can support). It also relies on it being impossible to edit after 7 days.

Everything that has come to light in the past week with the flagging incidents and the discussion of the potential for fiction on Steemit has me thinking and rethinking what I post as an author and blogger and worrying about what other authors post as fiction.

I happen to be a curator for two projects. It is already known publicly that I'm one of the fiction curators for @muxxybot. Less well-known--because we don't run around advertising it--is that I'm also a curator for @sft. The goals of the two projects are different and I find my roles complement each other nicely.

With Muxxybot we try to encourage authors who have potential--to let them know that their work is being seen, help them connect with potential readers, and hopefully encourage them to spend some more time honing their craft. It is focused on lower reputation authors with decent stories but low payouts.

SFT looks only at quality--the quality that you'd be happy reading in a mainstream or genre publication at a high level. An SFT curator doesn't care what your reputation is, what writing experience you have or don't have, or what the potential payout is on your post. We only care about the quality of the individual story. Yes, even the small flaws can keep you from being curated by the SFT. We aren't looking for something that might be good enough for an Indie publisher. We're looking for the kind of quality that would be approved by an agent, a publishing house, or a mainstream magazine.

With these two roles, I spend a lot of time reading things tagged fiction on Steemit. At this point, I am finding going through the New pages increasingly terrifying. It isn't just all the missing NSFW tags, the copious erotica, and the blatant tag abuse that scares me though. What I find more terrifying is the number of people who think it's okay to publish rough drafts.

PUBLISH.

Steemit is publishing. What you release is going to be on the blockchain forever. Any other publication--magazine, book, ebook--will be a re-release. Legally it is already published. The rights to the work are yours, but you can never give a publisher exclusive rights.

Do you dream of taking your novel to an agent? Don't publish it on Steemit. Getting an agent to have a serious conversation with you is hard enough to begin with. You don't need one googling your work and finding the rough drafts of the book you're trying to sell scattered all over the block chain.

You need beta readers? Go join a writing workshop. There are plenty of them out there. Keep looking until you find one that works for you.

One of the current trends that really worries me is the prevalence of freewrites. Don't misunderstand me here. I think freewriting can be a great exercise. But it's an exercise.

I don't have an issue with people posting prompts and suggesting freewrite exercises. But the result of a freewrite is a very rough draft. You wouldn't send it to a magazine. You wouldn't push it out to Amazon and expect people to download it. You probably wouldn't even be happy seeing them in a college literary magazine.

I also wouldn't mind people publishing freewrites if the post also included a nicely polished and well-edited story that resulted out of the initial freewrite. That would be a great demonstration of the value of the exercise. You take the prompt, freewrite for a while, then spend some time working on it and turning it into a real story. Or at least a vignette.

The thing to remember is that when you publish a post on Steemit you are asking people to pay you. The pay might not be great, but it is still pay. So do the work. Put your best foot forward. Give your reader some value to warrant those two cents, or two dollars, or two hundred dollars that you want your post to payout.

The past tendency of some curation groups and high-vote curators to curate sloppily written and insufficiently edited posts hasn't helped anything. There are a lot of people out there with my reputation or higher who are used to getting big payouts on junk. On stuff that is so bad the blurb on Amazon would keep me from downloading it if it were free. On stuff that if I somehow downloaded it by accident, I'd be giving it a 1 star review on an unfinished book. And I'm not the type to put books down lightly, especially if I intend to trash them. I usually feel like I have to finish it just in case the author pulls off a miracle.

Am I saying I expect every fiction post to be perfect? Of course not. My own aren't perfect. But I spend time editing every draft. I workshop them. Being a writer means a lot of hard work. Hard work that the fewest writers will ever make minimum wage for doing.

If you're on Steemit and you're posting fiction because you think it will make you a lot of money in a hurry, you're wasting your time.

If you're on Steemit because you need to write and you want to share your work with an audience and keep on working to be a better writer, welcome.