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 2,000 GPs were sent to Writing.Com Support  with this post.I am an amateur writer with 30 unedited short stories totaling 80k words. I am holding off on putting any one of them in my portfolio as that would count as published by professionals if it could be found by a google search. I also have an 8k word description of my created world: The Five Realms and in particular the Known Lands. One of my intentions was to publish the 30 stories as two short collections on Amazon after I have them edited and not really market them, as I am not too good at the business side of writing. I might set up a website with a link to the two books. What I am looking for here is your opinion or advice about displaying my world description or any of my stories and still count them as unpublished for contests, or first publishing rights if I do try to go the traditional publishing path. Any thoughts about WDC options would also be appreciated. Randy Ames |
| If you are self-publishing, then where they were published before does not matter (provided you hold the rights, which WdC does not hold). You can put them up here, get reviews, suggestions, etc., and then collate and self-publish. Traditional publishing is where it gets tricky. I have had 5 short stories that first appeared on WdC traditionally published (1 magazine, 4 anthologies). The way it is not considered "published" is to restrict who can read the works. I either do a private entry and give it a password override, which I give out to those reviewing or who ask for it, or set it to registered authors and higher only. I have even gone preferred authors and higher only for some works. These works are not findable by search engines as they are not in the general public sphere. Of course, some publishers do have different definitions and don't even like it being here at all, but I've only encountered3 or 4 who have had that issue. Hope that helps. |
| Hi, Basically just going to repeat what S 🤦  said.If you self-publish your stories, then any trad publisher would consider them previously published. It seems to vary more what editors considers previously published in regards to stories being available on a site like WdC. In general, though, if the story is available to every user on WdC and searchable by Google, then yes, most editors will probably considers it previously published. Again, as has already been said, access restrictions are your friend. If you want to be completely sure you don't violate any editors' guidelines, then password protection or setting access to a particular group only is probably the best options. Though, I've had stories published that were on WdC with acces set to registered users or authors only. Some editors would probably consider this okay, others not. Either way, there's not really an easy way for them to find the story and check. Another thing to consider is probably what you want to achieve by self-pub'ing your stories in collections without doing any subsequent marketing. If you do it because just because you would like to have the collections out there and have your stories available to anyone who might stumble upon them, then that's a perfectly valid way to go. But if you do it expecting any money and readers to come naturally, I think it's probably the wrong thing to do. Short story collection are notoriously hard sells even for relatively established authors. For an unknown author, even with some marketing, I don't think you can expect more than a handful of readers to buy the collections. I'm saying this to destroy your spirit. It's just a good idea to have your goals straight before moving forward. |
| Thank you for the heads up. Some research needed. |
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