Bradley Robb

Near the start of this year, I had come up with a couple of ideas, large, expansive, and incredibly labor-intensive ideas that I wanted to contribute to the greater writing community.

However, I kept bumping into the fact that while these ideas are really good, they didn’t quite fit on a personal domain where I wanted the freedom to riff on the latest episodes of television or vent about things I found on the internet. Putting those ideas here would muddle their inherent value, dragging emphasis away from the niche, and creating confusion for readers.

Compound that fact with the pure amount of industry watching I’ve been doing over the past few months, and searching, largely in vain, for a centralized website that caters to fiction writers the way that CopyBlogger caters to freelancers, and I saw a definite need.

After talking with a few friends and about the idea, I decided to make the leap. So, on February 18th, I grabbed another domain name and started outlining ideas. Within a few days, the general idea had started to take shape, and I was putting up the first of the content, as my Twitter friends have likely noticed.

For the name, I’m going with Fiction Matters. I couldn’t believe that the domain was free. I think it’s a great play on words – a statement about the importance of fiction, and a statement on the site’s content.

The method is to leverage the entirety of the knowledge that I’ve learned about blogging, from being a journalist, from my experience writing fiction, and from my experience writing many company blogs and working in SEO. To that end, it’s kind of a culmination of knowledge related to both writing and the web.

The goal? Well, that’s to create a solid resource for fiction writers, which I believe will only become more numerous as our current economic crisis pairs itself with the decrease in the barriers towards becoming a fiction writer.

What to expect from Fiction Matters

Tips – In addition to writing tips, I plan on addressing tips for being a writer, tackling the business and promotional aspects which are only going to be become more important to writers in the new age of publishing.

Tools – Technology is increasingly expanding the methods and options that writers have at our disposal. I’d like to address those.

News – It’s important to know what’s going on in the industry. And news comes from many, many sources. I plan to accumulate all of those into one easy to find location.

Resources – I’ve been slowly assembling a compendium of knowledge which addresses the myriad needs of the fiction writer. From a database of industry people and where to find them online to a dictionary that addresses the plethora of writers terms. The goal is to put it all online and make it all searchable.

Community – This one depends on others. Writing is a lonely art, and talking with other writers is a boon. It’s my hope that when the first four pieces come into place, the fifth will evolve organically.

Call to Action

Yes, it’s going to be a lot of hard work to get everything off the ground. The upshot is that once everything is up there and active, Fiction Matters will be a very valuable resource for those who love fiction. Please let me know if you’re interested in contributing in any way.

Tags: fiction matters, writing, writing website