Hi all

I'm thinking about publishing some short stories online; I'm a web developer by profession so can quite easily put a site together. I was just wondering - has anyone had any success with this? Did you get much interest / traffic? How do you cover yourself legally so that no one can republish / copy your work? I'm not bothered about making any money from it but I thought since I have the know-how and I know search engine optmisation techniques it makes a good option for me to get published.

If you are putting complete stories on the web, then publishers will consider them to be published and will be less willing to publish them in book form. The proviso to that being, if you get a large following and so create a ready market of people willing to buy the book you are more likely to get a publisher interested in publishing - but instances of that happening are very rare, and people are mostly attracted to erotic stories. Publishers rarely go searching for stories on the web - they have enough posted by snail mail to keep them busy - but if you generate a lot of media interest in your work they will sit up and take notice.

As for How do you cover yourself legally so that no one can republish / copy your work?
You hold the copyright, but if you put the work online you are pretty much giving it away, since anyone around the world will be able to download it and may even try to pass it off as their own work - although that happening is pretty rare. Publishing houses have legal departments to deal with this if it happens to their own authors, whereas you will only have yourself. If you find yourself being plagerised it will be up to you to complain and initiate court proceedings, which is usually prohibitavely expensive.

So, go ahead by all means, but just do it for the fun of it.


- NaomiM

What's wrong with submitting the stories to already existing ezines? Then you have something to put on a CV... many ezines are as hard to get into as some good print magazines.

Some sites, East of the Web for example, are trawled by agents on a regular basis. But you have to be very very good to get accepted.

Vanessa

If you do decide to go down your original route, you can protect the text from being copied with a simple HTML protect program which disables copy/paste and printing. I have a few of my stories on my website, but they're all previously published work. I wouldn't put anything up which hadn't been previously published because it effectively rules it out for future publication.

Zoe

I intended to publish the work exclusively for the web so the publishing thing is not a problem. As per the HTML protection that won't work is you're web savvy. Us Internet geeks can still get at it.

Ah yeah, but... most of the people who read and want to rip-off aren't, so that's all right then. (Well there's me making an assumption, but I bet I'm right.)

Zoe

Yes, I'm sure you're right.

Besides, it's like protecting your house from burglars - you can't, completely. You can only make it difficult enough that they go elsewhere.

I have to say that this issue is something that in my experience the more experienced writers get, the less they worry about.

Emma