Writers and Authors

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Where to publish stories online for free

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.

Let's take a closer look at the second option.

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?

If there’s one thing I want to say to all fiction writers whose blogs I read, or whose posts I see on other sites, it’s that they have the advantage of storytelling. Look around at Internet news sites, or even off-the-radar sites like Cracked.com, the age of the storyteller in the delivery of information has returned. I say it’s returned because, believe it or not, the cold, impartial delivery of information, the one we associated with news greats like Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw, is not the way the news used to be delivered. I happened to learn this when the Seattle Times completed a project where they digitally archived their entire library of past issues, making them available to the public.

When a large ship that had sunk in an accident in the Puget Sound was being exhumed, the Seattle Times included the original article discussing the sinking. How shocked was I, upon reading it, to see long descriptions of the sinking, of the people escaping the boat—it wasn’t news, it was narrative, it was a story.

For a while, this type of information delivery went away, but it’s making a comeback, and the advantage is to creative writers. This new sub-genre of non-fiction is sometimes controversial and I refer to it as creative non-fiction, where the use of storytelling elements are applied in order to make a story, or a series of events, more consumable for an audience. Like it or not, Aristotle wrote over 2,000 years ago, in his Poetics, that human beings are basically only interested in one type of story, and we only want information delivered to us in that format.

Creative writers, take advantage of this as you embark on blog posts about vacations, or trips to political rallies, or to delivery information about something you’ve been studying. Be sure to put it in a three act structure, be sure to make sure you have a clearly established protagonist and antagonist, show the battle that is occurring—use your storytelling nature to deliver information, it’s how human being have been consuming information for thousands of years, fiction or not, and it’s the way readers most prefer.

Guest post by Justin Ordoñez. Justin Ordoñez wrote a book called Sykosa. It’s about a sixteen year old girl who’s trying to reclaim her identity after an act of violence destroys her life and the lives of her friends. You can find out more about Justin at his blog, http://sykosa.wordpress.com. You can also find Sykosa, the novel on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007N709IG/

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