In my opinion (and thanks to awesome readers, I have the sales
numbers and fan letters to back up my opinion), giving away free work is a
great way to build a
readership.
Aside from that, I know of no magic bullet, but after three and a half years of writing for a living, I can think of worse ways to spend my time, and I'm always extremely grateful to my
readership, because there are any
number of
great books out there, and I'm fortunate they're reading mine.
And then I remembered, I had an agent, a
great agent, I wrote
great books (so all the rejecting editors told me) and yes, you are right, self pub has given my stories a voice and an ear and the chance to be read, when they otherwise would have still been gathering dust on my hard drive, yet, on the other hand this is hard, REALLY HARD, it is SO hard to find your way to a
readership as a SP, with limited funds (dwindling)... and the glimmer of trad pub — with their power to splash your name around established circles of readers, and their ability to secure a
great number of reviews where, as a self pub, doors have been slammed in my face — becomes temptingly shiny again, (it's like childbirth, you forget all the painful stuff with time)... and it all gets very tempting... almost tempting enough to consider sacrificing one work JUST one artistic premise for the trade off of visibility... and then perhaps, just perhaps THEN, my SP efforts will finally sprout wings... but then I hear you and other say, it wasn't worth it, you'd never do it again, and I sigh... And then I wake up the next morning and think of packing it all in, and going to work for Walmart and steady shitty pay... lol And then along comes this blog post.
Here's one more reason for law bloggers to keep the faith: If you can crank out
great content for over half a decade and grow your
readership to a massive
number of subscribers, you might be acquired by a public company.