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I'm working on a story that is like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but different. Instead of being "you" and deciding what to do next, the reader must choose which characters participate at what time. By choosing the characters, you then get to follow a story path involving people most suited to your interests.

The roadblocks I'm encountering are few, but worrisome. The site I'm currently hosting on doesn't have very many members, and a bug is making it hard for people to find and read it. So I'm looking for other places I can set it up, where it is more likely to get fresh faces who are interested in trying something new. To be clear, I'm not looking to make a buck, this is just a side project I'm doing for free.

Does anyone know free sites with a lot of traffic where I can post my story?

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3 Answers 3

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If I were writing a Choose Your Own Adventure story, I'd create a free site on WordPress and publish the story there in instalments.

There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of writers on that platform and a searchable index of all their posts. The trick with WordPress is that when you reach out to someone, they will reach back to you. Read a story, pop a Like on it, make a Comment or even Follow someone and you will find that that they will do the same for you. It's possible to build up a devoted following within a very short space of time.

It may not be what you imagine you want, but WordPress might be just what you need.

Good luck with your writing.

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  • I've known a few writers to do well on WordPress hosting, but they usually advertise themselves through Facebook, and if they don't have a lot of interested friends views drop off pretty quick. Do you have any suggestions on how to get visibility if you host this way? Jun 26, 2018 at 20:29
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    @called2voyage I went from 0 to 2000 followers in a few months on one WP Blog simply by writing articles daily, liking articles on other WP blogs with similar themes and articles to my own and leaving comments on posts I enjoyed reading. What you give is what you get.
    – robertcday
    Jun 26, 2018 at 21:06
  • How do you make a choose your own adventure story on WordPress without buying a premium plan? Jul 2, 2018 at 20:03
  • @S.Mitchell - link from page to page in much the same way that a wiki does. Create the alternative storylines like this.
    – robertcday
    Jul 2, 2018 at 21:23
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    @user102021 - I always use relevant tags. They're useful because they enable people who share your interests to find your posts. If you write a post about (or containing) 'interactive fiction' then use that as a tag. Then, when someone searches WordPress for that phrase, your post will pop up. More useful than this is for you to actively search out other posts containing the tags you use. People who use those tags are telling you that they are interested in that subject, so use that to your advantage by visiting their site & Liking their content. They will then visit you and do the same.
    – robertcday
    Jul 5, 2018 at 8:09
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Look for 'interactive fiction' instead of 'choose your own adventure'. There are many sites, some of which even pay for your story or allow you to earn money from it. Look for example at 'Choice of Games'.

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Firstly, please clarify your project's scope.

This first bit may or may not be a relevant recommendation, because I can't tell if you're planning to write out only the decisions that some hypothetical group of players/readers make, as you go, or if you wish to create an entire tree of decisions and (then?) host it somewhere - but if you are in the former case, I'd try Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, or (if you're generally focusing your writing upon prurient matters) Questionable Questing (which is the only one that fronts "quests" as their raison d'etre, but it's still a popular keyword I'd use to search for any further examples, and all three sites have dedicated tooling for it). I've seen websites more focused upon the latter case 'in the wild' before, but I have no particular experience with them as a writer or reader.

I believe it may be possible to adapt the forum-style hosting of the above-recommended sites to "writing the entire decision tree" cases, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it - at least, not if you're planning to release all at once. I can actually see a "vote on which branch to explore" setup getting some decent traction, though it would still be - odd.

Secondly, this might be better modeled as a game, than a book, and you should consider pursuing it accordingly.

If I were doing this myself, and in the "make the whole thing in one go" case, I'd think about busting out a proper game engine, or at least a fancy webpage, something more than a bare blog as others have recommended; I don't know if I'd recommend that to someone with no prior experience in programming, but it seems to me that you're approaching the level of complexity in possible results where you'd need to start making decisions like "Okay, all these characters give equivalent outcomes in this challenge, modulo some specific bit of character flavor" to actually get your project done in a reasonable amount of time/effort.

I've heard of an engine called Twine that is reputed to be good for that, and produces web-hostable output, as far as I understand it. (That is to say, not very far, but hopefully far enough; I've never used it myself, though I know quite a few people who have.)

I will also second that Choice of Games is a decent reading experience, though I can't speak to writing for it - and, funnily enough, they release their projects as standalone apps.

TL;DR:

If you're only going to explore one path of the many available routes, look for sites that host "Quests". They've got the tooling for it.

If you want to do the entire tree, this is something that should be developed more like a videogame than a blog. Choice of Games, if you want to work with a publisher-of-sorts (n.b. I have not looked into them from the authorship side, I have no idea how they work), or the Twine engine, if not, come to me decently well-recommended. You can complement this with a devlog hosted on e.g. Wordpress (or one of the questing sites, for that matter).

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