Uh Oh!

A friend of mine joined YWS recently. But she was inactive for quite a while so I asked her why she didn't use YWS anymore. She told me that she had heard it's extremely hard to get your work published if you have already posted on the net.
I realized that I had a couple of short stories that I some stuff I wanted to get published and I posted them on YWS. Will they be rejected by editors, magazines or publishers?

Yeah that was my main concern when I joined this site. I've been submitting some of my work to literary magazines lately. If it was on a site I used for writing I took it down and waited awhile before sending it out.

If you send your work off to be published and it is still somewhere on the net they will not take it. Take it down from whatever site it's on before you send it off. If you are planning on getting something published I wouldn't post that anywhere online as a whole. Say you're writing a book and you want input on what you have. Just submit a small portion of it on here, get some critique, take it down and apply whatever critique you received to the remaining sections.

Or if you have a friend on here or someone you trust that is good with critiquing maybe somehow contact them, email it to them and have them email it back with edits and input.

Also, if you are going to send something out to be published do not send the same thing to multiple places.

For this site since you can't delete threads that you made (or at least I don't think you can) just edit the thread the story is on and replace all the text with an explanation on why it's gone... like "This has been removed since I'm sending it to a publisher, thanks for everything" or something cheesy like that.

That's all I have to say about it; I hope it makes sense.

A lot of places will state if you need to take it down. If they don't, take it down anyway or ask them.

With novels, I highly doubt they would take it if it was on the Internet. I've found several places that don't care if the short story's on the Internet, though.

~JFW1415

Yes! Sometimes people have blogged the chapters of their books and THEN got published!

According to Miss Snark, unless is has an ISBN number you should be in pretty good shape. (link) Of course, stuff like that varies but as a general rule you're fine.

I've been wondering the same thing. Though I think it's different for me as I write in Finnish and then translate it. So the published work would be in Finnish and what I've posted on the Net is in English. Is that still the same? I don't know.

Demeter wrote:I've been wondering the same thing. Though I think it's different for me as I write in Finnish and then translate it. So the published work would be in Finnish and what I've posted on the Net is in English. Is that still the same? I don't know.

Hahaha... that's kind of awesome.

Most likely, your stories and stuff will be so crappy that nobody will bother stealing them, so no worries! ^^

Thanks a lot, Snoink.