Comments and Feedback

A major benefit of the blog format for storytelling is that readers can provide instant feedback to a story in progress. Even better, readers can talk directly to the characters and maybe even have them reply! This was one of the features that originally excited us so much about blog-novels and their potential to go beyond what traditional paper novels can do.

Our advice to blog-novelists is, simply, to turn on the commenting feature for their posts, police the comments to weed out the inappropriate ones, and post replies to encourage the rest. You may want to close comments on an occasional episode that creates a controversy, but turning off comments on all posts would defeat the two-way interaction that is the main purpose in having a blog in the first place.

You may not get many comments in the first month of your blog-novel, until you start building a readership, but don't let that discourage you. Most readers will not ever leave comments, no matter how much they're enjoying your work. When you do start to get comments, respond to them with comments of your own--in character or, if you're more comfortable that way, as the author. A small trickle of comments will encourage more and more.

In addition to providing a means for reader feedback, comments will help you understand what your readers like and dislike, or where they are confused and need further explanations and details.

In Week #2 of "Giant Girl Rampages," we dealt with Melly's feelings of loss for her family--showing her anger by having her lash out at Jay Appleton. Some readers felt that Melly's behavior was uncalled for and that she should immediately apologize to Jay. Others identified with Melly and, viewing Jay through her perspective, decided he was a jerk and not worth associating with. As authors, we were able to take both of these reactions into account in fine-tuning and steering the Melly-Jay relationship over the ensuing weeks. We were also able to have Melly herself provide interaction through comments that helped readers understand her moods and motives. By doing this, the comments became an important part of the story.

We also received some abusive comments from a reader who seemed oddly obsessed with Melly's feet. Fortunately, other readers rallied around Melly and let the foot guy know that his comments were inappropriate and unwanted. We were able to delete the comments in question and, deprived of a voice, the foot guy went away.

If you're very lucky, your readership will become a community in itself and comments will riff off each other as much as off of your original posts. This hasn't happened to us, and probably never will, but we've seen it on other more popular sites. And even on our site, the commentary enhances the story.