Young Writers Society

As a young aspiring writer in the age of social media, I'm keen to put my work (though mostly fragments and ideas in progress) out there on the web for exposure, encouragement and critique. I always worry, though, that I'll might want to use some of these fragments later, develop them into full stories or poems and try to get them published, and I won't be able to because they are already in the public domain. Is this a problem, or am I worrying for no reason? I'm aware that there's a way to publish work on the internet and retain ownership, as professional bloggers and webcomic artists do, but does that work for an amateur posting on social media sites, and if so, can anyone tell me what is involved?

I'd suggest you read this first. It's about that very "retain ownership" thing you talked about, and how to do that. 90% of social media does not let you do that.

Interestingly, though, by publishing your ideas you protect yourself from the very thing you're worried about: somebody stealing your ideas. By actually putting a date, name, and IP to them online, you can prove that the work is yours.

By all means, put up your work! Just be very, very careful about whether or not you retain ownership of the work itself when you put it up. As soon as a site talks about you not being able to take your work completely off it, only put up small teaser snippets of your work so publishers can still say they were the first to publish the whole thing.

Also, if you are worried about copyright/retainment issues, try posting a link to your work rather than the work itself on the social media website. Since the actual work is hosted on a different server than facebook (or whatever other social media platform you use), no-one can claim ownership of it.

Thank you both very much for your advice. Do either of you (or anyone else) know if publishers in Australia would operate the same way as in the UK? And can you suggest a sites where I could host my work and link easily to it?
Thanks again!

Unfortunately I don't know about Australia. I would try to find a really good Australian specific publishing guide and read it cover to cover. Dive into everything you can online.

I need to re-check a few sites for ownership, but if you want to poke around hosting sites, feel free to run them by me so we can figure it out!

Just curious- why exactly would one want to post their work on social sites? They're designed with short, to-the-point posts in mind, so user might not have the patience to read a literary work there.

You want to put your work up to get a following of people, as a sort of safety net for publishers and agents; if you have a large following on social media, then agents and publishing houses will be more at ease your story will actually sell. Plus, building a platform online helps you find agents because of how many of them are in Twitter.

Blogs, for example, are long form social media. Twitter is microblogging, and is the shortest form of social media that's popular with mainstream right now. But you can share long articles on Twitter (that's actually about half of my Twitter feed on any given day) and participate in conversations that get agents slightly more interested in you, over somebody who's sent their manuscript in cold.