Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Posting Excerpts and Publishing

General Writing Discussion
#1

So, my question is simple. I’ve been considering posting excerpts from some of my longer stories (novel/novella length) on my FA page, but I’m unsure if this would adversely affect the possibility of the piece getting published. I don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize the already slim possibility that anything of mine would be published, and I didn’t know if there were any conventions regarding this.

Also, I apologize if this isn’t the intended forum for this; it seemed like the most suitable place?

#2

In my opinion: sit on it while it does the rounds of publishers. If it gets accepted, post an excerpt to promote the publication; if it doesn’t, pop the whole thing up on FA.

#3

If it gets accepted, then go ahead and post a couple of tidbits to get your followers to really get excited for the story. Hype it up. Until then, I wouldn’t post anything.

#4

Anything that’s posted in its entirety where it can be viewed by the general public is considered published, and the only way you could then sell it to an editor would be as a reprint. That goes for posting to FA, to a blog, to your own website, whatever. The only exceptions are generally for critique groups that are password-protected or where you have to register to see the work. (This is why sites like Critique Circle make you register before you can see any of the current stories up for crit.)

I’ve occasionally skirted this, when I really needed feedback, by posting something to FA as mature, so that only FA members could view it and it wasn’t visible to the general public. Not an ideal solution, especially from FA’s perspective, and that probably only works if you’re trying to publish the piece outside the fandom. (I’ve noticed some fandom calls for submissions now mentioning that things can’t have appeared on FA/SoFurry/etc., so I guess the ‘mature’ workaround wouldn’t work in that situation.)

As far as excerpts, it would depend on how long an excerpt we’re talking about and how much it represents percentage-wise of the whole work. I mean, if something is 40K words and you post the first 1 or 2K as a teaser, that’s not a big deal (and like Sean says above, that’s good marketing once something’s accepted). But if the story’s 5K and you post 2K of it, that’s probably putting up too much. There aren’t any hard-and-fast percentage rules that I’m aware of, but generally you do just want to give a taste, so maybe 10%-20% of the finished word count, max.

#5

There are no hard and fast rules-- I’ve had publishers find on the internet that I never expected to sell and buy it from me, while I’ve had others make me swear on a stack of a bibles that it was never on the web. Most seem happy with “take it down before the published version comes out”.

I know of no publishers who object to “writer’s workshops”, which are e-mail lists accessible by members only. I’ve been posting to two of these, one of them for about fifteen years and the other about ten, that combined probably have a thousand members. That’s enough of an audience, in my experience, to learn things from. While one specializes in transformation-type novels and stories, which I write a lot of, even they tend to accept purely furry stuff nowadays so long as it doesn’t get excessive. These mailing lists can be found at:

http://lists.integral.org/listinfo/tsa-talk

and

http://lists.integral.org/listinfo/furry-lit

#6

From my own selection for ‘Abandoned Places’, anything that was published online I immediately tossed into the trash bin. (and yes, I had some people that had posted their work and then submitted it despite me flat out stating I wouldn’t accept that, and I know Roland ran into the same situation with ‘Punked’)

I would say don’t post it.

Some editors will not publish works if ANY form of it is printed online. Mostly because they want to keep that strictly for teasers when the anthology is actually in print, so they can link the preview to the anthology itself. If you prepost it, this is harder to do.