What are the best ways to get your work out there and build an audience?
Hello fellow writers.
I started writing as a creative hobby as a means to escape the drudgery of my mostly-driving-AI job and since then I managed to finish "book one" of a story at about 50k words and am about 12k words into book two.
I've been posting my work on DeviantArt and while the numbers are large, it seems to be mostly AI crawlers and bots trying to sell turning your story into a comic via an AI tool. I've also posted over on RoyalRoad but getting more than ten people who read a single chapter is hard and I feel like my work doesn't really fit with the stuff that does well over there.
My concern is that I don't want to be the kind of person who spams advertising everywhere to try and garner attention.
I'd like to know how everyone else shares their work and how they have built an audience.