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I always look for excuses to get away from my screen and phone after I post a story online. If I stay connected, I refresh the page to see if the upvote count has changed. Then again. And again. My screen is in night mode because I’m civilized so Reddit’s orange upvotes and messages are easily noticeable when they show up. Even more so when they don’t.

One of the most common questions I see pop up on discussion boards and social media related to writing is: would it be possible to make a living with writing? The obvious answer being, yeah, of course, tons of people profit from their fiction. Some people even get rich. I’m pretty sure R.L. Stein has a fleet of yachts and Stephen King probably hangs out at the same Illuminati club as Elon Musk.

We’ve gone over the mechanics of writing that first scary story already. And we’ve talked about r/NoSleep, one of the most popular places on the internet to share horror fiction. If you are at all interested in spreading some friendly nightmares around the world, NoSleep is worth checking out. However, it’s a hyper-competitive environment where 90% of stories posted each day get buried, or removed, or buried then removed in the creative writing equivalent of digging up old bodies just to toss them over a cliff.

My last blog was about writing a horror story. But what do you do with the piece once you’ve polished it until the words are shiny as old bones? The traditional route would be to seek publication, often as part of an anthology. That’s a perennial option but if your main focus is simply finding readers, Reddit’s thriving creative writing platforms are worth checking out. And r/NoSleep is the current king of stories that go bump in the night.