Thursday, May 15, 2025

Random Writing Tips – Repost your stories

 

Ten or fifteen years ago, I came across a site where you would post a blog/story/whatever, and for every view it got you would get a penny.  So I started posting whatever I could thing of to get some money.  In the following few years, I found a dozen or so such sites.  Some I actually did get money from, but others would have like a $5 payout minimum, and I’d be at $4.50 and they’d go belly-up.  All the sites I knew of eventually died, and I don’t know if such sites still exist.  I imagine they’d be quickly overrun by AI crap. 

Anyway, besides all the general posts about movies and society and whatnot, I also posted some of my stories.  For the simple reason that if someone read one and liked it, maybe they’d go and buy some of my books.  I don’t know how successful that was, but it did lead to some issues.  For one, most publishers won’t take previously published works.  Even stories posted on little known sites that died after three months, count as previously published. 

So what to do with a bunch of stories I can’t submit to publishers?  Some I republished myself as part of a collection.  But that still leaves a bunch of stories.  These may not be the very best of my writing – since those stories I put in collections – but they’re not garbage.  Well, most of them aren’t garbage, hopefully.  But instead of letting them gather dust in a forgotten corner of my hard drive, I’ve started reposting them, mostly on my blogs.  Because the main reason I still post stories is to give a free taste of my writing so maybe someone will check out and buy one my books.  And while writing a new story each month for my blog would be fantastic, there is this thing called life that often gets in the way.  So these okay stories that I can’t really do much else with, are prefect to fill in the busy months.  I spent who knows how much time working on them, I might as well get as much use from them as I can.

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Image from Pixabay.


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