But I would say the first step is not to feel embarrassed or ashamed about talking about your work. Cast aside the fear that it's annoying! If you have a social media presence related to your writing, people are following you because they're interested in your writing!

Also: it may feel like you are constantly talking about your work being out. But unless you are someone whose work has gone wildly viral while in development, and/or you've had vast sales success, not enough people will know about it. Even the latter is no guarantee that people have heard about it.

That said! It is also worth engaging with other people's work - not for mercenary marketing reasons but because reading other work in this sphere will help you develop your writing skills, and perhaps that will help you connect with your peers as well.

I do think that if you are new to sharing this kind of writing, or if you have a current unfinished project and are starting a new one, it is wise to share some of your work upfront rather than getting excited and announcing a project that does not get off the ground.

This is for your own peace of mind if nothing else: I do not say it to cast aspersions. I have seen plenty of people talk about the difficulty of having an unstarted project get a lot of attention and then realising they need more time than they hoped or that they do not actually want to make the project at all. That's a very hard situation to be in but it is an avoidable one.

The happy side of that is that if you have something to show, it is much easier to show off! Let your light shine and don't hide it.

On a practical level, I recommend writing your materials in advance and queueing them to be posted, and perhaps making a spreadsheet or list of when your next post needs to go up. Being prepared makes it much easier, especially if you have regular types of posts that go up each week or fortnight for example. Otherwise it is very easy to lose track and get burned out on the whole thing.

One last thing: there is a temptation to share a lot about one's own life when marketing and while that suits some people well, please do not put yourself under pressure to do so. And do not feel that you have to do huge amounts of customer service or extra writing in order to make a good piece of interactive fiction.

Make a piece of work that you feel proud of, talk about it, and show it off: those are the things that I think are best focused on.

That said, "your writing" is not limited to the project itself and certainly includes the ways in which you share information about your game.

It is eminently sensible to have a pinned post including easy-to-read information about your game and the places where you can learn more about it and play it.

It is also a good exercise to get used to summarising your game in 2-3 snappy sentences that say something about what makes your game interesting. When you are sharing things about your game, call back to this. You do not have to use those exact sentences all the time but keeping them in your mind will make it feel more natural to tell people about what's exciting about your game in a way that's easier for them to understand.

You will find that posting on a regular schedule is likely to result in more interest in and questions about your progress; this does not have to be constant activity of course, and do not burn yourself out, but it is more beneficial to have a post twice a week for three months than the same amount of posts crammed into a couple of weeks and then nothing. That's where creating a queue of posts will be useful to you.

Please do not chase trends that you don't love in the hope that you will hit a lucky jackpot. It is wonderful to be inspired by others but there is no guarantee that a similar concept to a popular game will go viral. Games take a great deal of time to make: ensure you are writing something you feel fully on board with and passionate about, and you will be able to showcase and share that passion with others.

I am not an expert in marketing in any way but I have been in hobbyist and commercial interactive fiction circles for many years and believe the most important showcase of your skills is your project, the story within it, and the way you refine and develop it over time. Of course we all see beautiful graphic design and thrilling character posts sometimes getting big flurries of engagement but it is creating and sharing the game itself that will bring you the most satisfaction and will keep an interested audience coming back.

It can be a major time and energy drain looking at popular people's work and trying to determine some manner of secret recipe from them. Their marketing methods may have contributed towards their popularity, or it could be something entirely different: you cannot know whether correlation equals causation and you'd be better placed concentrating on what you are writing.

Finally, this is a very small world - a niche subsection of interactive fiction as a whole - and while it is not exactly a singular "community", my opinion is that those within it do not have to be in competition with one another. There was a tone in the message I received that made me wonder if the sender thought otherwise. But I believe that a rising tide can lift all boats and if you consider yourself to be competing with other writers for attention or even money, it will make you miserable. If you find some interactive fiction that makes you happy, and you tell others that you like it, it can help everyone involved. If saying this makes me a somewhat naive seal, I am at ease with that.

Best wishes to you, Marketing Friend, and I hope your writing goes well!