Today's post is in reply to a question about where to publish stories online that was posted to the Writers and Authors Facebook page.
When it comes to publishing your stories online you have a few options:
- Find someone else to publish it for you e.g. an ezine editor. There are huge amounts of ezines and website that publish short stories and many pay professional rates too. A simple search on google will give you a selection of places that are open to submissions.
- Self publish. You publish your work and make it available online.
In this case, the answer that automatically comes to mind is to create a blog. You keep all the rights to all work published on your site and get to present it just the way you want to. You can personalise the look of your site so it's the perfect match for your stories or design it so it expresses your personality.
If you want to create a professional showcase for your writing you might want to consider getting a domain name and setting up a website with professional hosting.
Following on from this, if you're interested in publishing your stories with the goal of gaining feedback from readers etc... then you might want to check out these sites:
- Booksie.com This site offers the chance to post your stories online for free. You retain the full rights to your work and can get feedback from readers. You can find out more about how it works here.
- StoryWrite.com Again, completely free to use. You maintain ownership and copyright to your poetry, stories, or other original works of art you upload to their sites, including the right to publish it elsewhere. They also have contests and writing groups on site.
- StoryStar.com A family friendly site where you can post your stories to be read and rated. Each month they select a story from each category to give extra recognition to and the stories with the most votes/readers also get highlighted. As with the others this site is completely free to use.
If you want to make some money from your stories consider publishing them as ebooks. Again you have various options. A popular way to go about it is by using a site like lulu.com or Amazon's kindle program to self publish your work and make it available to the public for purchase.
Have you published you stories online for free? Which route did you take and why?
