Looking for advice to increase my readership
So I have been writing for a few years now. I have a couple of books on Amazon, a number of my stories on other forums, and I have been using Patreon for around a year with a low-cost ($2/month) subscription model (to protect my stories and fund my caffeine habit), and I think I am about ready to try and ramp things up a little.
I've just finished posting a 210,000-word story called 'The Nuclear Family', and I'm launching into a massive multi-generational mystery ', The Hidden Letters, ' along with weekly posts on other smaller stories, but I am not 100% sure where to go from here.
My wife wants to encourage me to find an agent and publisher, and while that does appeal to me, I would rather increase my readership enough to engage an editor to fix up the mistakes that Grammarly and I just don't see.
But how is it best to increase my readership? What channels and strategies have you used to find more people and engage readers past the story?
Have you built a strategy, engaged marketing firms (which I am loath to do btw), or have you just posted on X, here on Reddit, etc?