Is it time to write a book?

There are probably a lot of online writers who were members of Helium, the revenue sharing site that has recently announced its demise.  Helium was a fairly good place to write and earn passive income from ad revenue for many years, but Google's Panda brought the revenue stream down to a trickle for most Helium writers.  The revamping of the site last year did nothing to help, in fact, it caused revenues to go down even further.  At some point, Helium decided to call it a day.

The bright side of Helium's failure is that I can now remove all of my articles from the site and  re-purpose them.  Some may work well as blog posts, or be eligible to be posted on other writing sites - once they have been de-indexed by Google.  I did take the opportunity to download all my articles and have them sitting in a neat file on Dropbox.

Today I decided to see how difficult it would be to strip the html from the article files.  I found a neat little tool online that was free and plugged in the text from a Flash Fiction story.  It worked very well, leaving me only a few formatting chores - paragraphs, quotations marks, etc.

But I hadn't even remembered writing this story and so it was really fun reading it all over again.  Then, as I thought about it more, I realized that even though this story was stripped down and compact (flash fiction had to be 400 words or less on Helium) that it implied a lot more going on behind the scenes, and a much bigger story was potentially waiting to be written.

In fact, it seemed like a good foundation for a novel.  And I wondered if I would be making a mistake to republish this short fiction, when it could be turned into something much more substantial.

So, the question for me this morning is:  is it time to write a book?

I am going to try to flesh out the setting, the characters and the plot and see if I can muster the discipline to give it a go.

You may also have something that you've written that has the potential to be more.  Think about your stories, your ideas and see if there is one that has the potential to be more than you've written thus far.  Ask yourself if it is time to write a book.  Can you do it?  Why not?

Helium Update

I have been writing at Helium for about a month now and I see both its potential and its limitations. I have seen both positive and negative reviews of the site as a writing site and I think that each argument has some merit.

For instance, as far as publishing my writing on the web, I am perfectly capable of doing that myself. I should probably do it more often as several of my blogs are slightly behind on the updating schedule. They do offer payment in the form of a percentage of the advertising revenue. However, I have my own advertising revenue of which I get the entire payment. What they may offer in this area is wider exposure and possible higher ranking in the search engines.

What they do offer that is a boon for those who are considering freelance writing is an opportunity to submit articles for review to publishers who will pay for the article if it is the one chosen. It's a bit like a cattle call, in that many other members will be writing for the same opportunity, but that makes the selection of your article by the publisher even more satisfying. You have to beat out a lot of other articles to get noticed. Additionally, it's a place to get started in the area of freelance and build a portfolio of work.

That being said, I am not straying from Helium anytime soon and have begun to concentrate on the publisher opportunities rather than any other venues and channels. I have had some success here, and have sold several articles.

What anyone gets out of a site like Helium is what they put into it, but they must know what it is they want before they start. For a blogger, the prospect of writing just to see it on the net is not enough to warrant putting a lot of effort into what is essentially, someone else's site. But if a blogger wants to enhance their resume and broaden their experiences by learning to write on someone else's demand, it's a decent training ground.

If anyone is interested, my Helium pages can be found here. A list of my articles can be found here.

Branching Out

I've done something a little different, or at least different for me. I joined Helium, which is a writing community which enjoys a fairly wide readership. There may be pros and cons for me, one con of course is that since articles are rated on Helium as to style, content and popularity, it has the great potential of becoming a personal inadequacy crisis. But I suppose that if you can't stand the blue pencil, stay out of the editor's office.

I have just recently discovered that it is allowable to cross-post articles, that is, I can post them on my blogs and on Helium which made me give out a small sigh of relief. It can be hard to decide which place to post an article, whichever I choose, I would lose some hard work that could be put to use.

I haven't been a member long enough to decide if Helium is something I will stay with for a long time (I have only posted four articles so far) but I am going to give it some time to see how I like it. I may even have one or two articles that I will post here as well, and I may designate them as such (although I doubt that I have to do so).