One of the top-growing services in the self-publishing industry is StoryOrigin: a massive community of authors working together to share and promote each other’s work. It’s more than that, of course. You can run a huge portion of your author business from your StoryOrigin profile and use it as a tool to books all aspects of your work, but mostly it comes down to the community.
StoryOrigin is a new platform and still growing rapidly. Several subscription tiers allow you to choose how involved you wish to be, including a free level that allows you to create an account and browse the many opportunities available.
What do these opportunities look like?
Reader Magnet Pages
You can set up and host your reader magnet right here on StoryOrigin, and the form integrates easily with your mailing list. It's a minimalistic layout, but it does its job well. Here’s a picture of a new one I set up under a pen name:
Mailing List Integration
Since list-building is a big part of the group promos StoryOrigin specializes in, it helps to integrate your mailing list with your account. This is easy and only takes a few clicks to set up.
Database of Upcoming Promotions And Newsletters
You’re free to host your own promotions for other authors to join—encouraged to, in fact. But if you don’t know where to start, or if you’re looking to join a group already in progress, StoryOrigin keeps running tabs on all upcoming promos and newsletters. All you need to do is find the ones that best fit your writing and request to join.
Easy Promo/Newsletter Sharing
Want to invite other authors to join you? Creating a new listing on StoryOrigin is easy and largely automatic. Other writers will see you listed in the database and request to join.
Easy Networking
You want to spend your time writing, not advertising. StoryOrigin aims to make that possible through its easy networking tools, allowing you to connect with similar authors with only a few clicks.
So... does it work?
As of my writing this, I’ve been active on StoryOrigin for one month under a pen name and have taken part in one promotion and one newsletter swap. My experience is not necessarily typical, but here’s what I’ve seen in my brief time with the platform.
It’s easy.
I didn’t need to learn any new tech skills, and I never got lost. I found everything on StoryOrigin to be intuitive and automatic. Some promotional tasks that would ordinarily take hours to set up and verify I could have done in minutes, making it a huge time saver.
My readers like it.
I got a slight bump in newsletter engagement, specifically with the group promo. I appreciated having exciting new content to share with my readers, and I loved seeing that I had shared something with them that they cared about and visited.
My Kindle Unlimited page reads spiked!
I didn’t actually sell many more books in the past month than usual, but my Kindle Unlimited page reads started breaking records on an almost daily basis—I was pleasantly shocked! This is because I had taken part in a Kindle Unlimited promotion through StoryOrigin and listed one of my books as one of the featured reads. Apparently it worked!
I recently added StoryOrigin to my resource page because I think it’s a huge help to anyone looking to grow a solid author network from the ground up. If you haven’t already, feel free to check it out for yourself and share your own reviews in the comment section below. You can also join my Facebook group for self-publishing authors here for further discussion.
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