It’s amazing what providing freebie can do for you. Take Simon Haynes, for example.
Simon created the novel writing program yWriter to help him write his novels because he couldn’t find anything that did what he wanted to do at the time.
Afterwards, he let people use it for free.
Today, yWriter has something of a cult following, and Simon’s name is known around the world.
His novels have had far more exposure than he could have ever hoped to gain without yWriter.
Similarly, a few years ago I created a novel structure diagram as a last-ditch effort to try and save a novel I just couldn’t get to work no matter what I did with it.
From what I could tell I was doing everything right, but it still wasn’t working.
Years of casual research went into that diagram, but it paid off because the information highlighted a whole bunch of structural elements my novel was either doing poorly or missing altogether.
The diagram was my means of making sense of it all my research; a visual clue I could see in a moment to trigger a greater understanding of what needed to happen around certain points in a story.
When complete, I posted it on my blog in the hope it would help others, and from the feedback I’ve received, it did.
So what’s the point of all this?
My blog gets more hits from that one page than any other post I’ve ever put up.
What’s more, visitors often continue on to my other posts about writing, and sometimes that trail even leads them to my fiction.
Just the other day someone posted a link in a writers’ forum asking the people there what they thought about the diagram.
Lots of writers clicked on that link and swung past my blog to check it out. Plenty of them read on.
So what’s the value in a freebie?
Would I be blogging about Simon Haynes if it wasn’t for yWriter? Would someone have posted a link to my blog without my diagram?
It means people come for something, and hopefully find something else.
Maybe you’re sitting on something that might help people too. In helping them, you just might be helping yourself.
Find out more about yWriter and/or download it from Simon’s website.
Take a look at my novel structure diagram – it may just be the answer you’re looking for.