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Authorstand.com - can anyone advise me about this site please?
Hello
If a story appears on here, which I believe means it is downloadable to the world and his wife:
http://www.authorstand.com
is the story considered as published?
Comments
Personally I'd consider it more like self published as it appears anyone can post anything - the work is not selected.
If there was some way of showing it hadn't been downloaded and it was withdrawn from the site maybe that would be acceptable.
Did you have a particular market in mind?
That's just it as I think I've found a winner to a competition on Authorstand.com, has won a comp despite it being stated they don't want entries that have been published before.
I am not talking about Erewash Writer's comp btw, the one I recently organised but another comp organiser who sent me their comp results recently.
I didn't realise that.
How confusing.
For example, some comps may state that publication on a personal blog doesn't count, others that any online publication is publication proper. If you - and anyone else who wanted to - were able to read this story in advance of the comp results coming out, and it's not a private site, then IMO the story was published.
Someone recently queried Woman's Weekly on their guidelines page about a story that had been online and whether they would still accept it as unpublished. The response was they could discuss it and it would depend on how may people may have read it.
The one grey area is perhaps the time at which the guidelines apply. For instance, should the story be unpublished at the time of entering the competition, at the closing date, when the results are announced, or when the anthology is published and/or the winning stories are uploaded to the website? Very few competitions make it explicitly clear whether they are after first publication rights or not.
I usually play it safe and don't publish anything competition-ready online anywhere, and once something's in one competition, I consider it locked down until the results are announced. I'd hate to be stripped of a prize because the organisers found my work somewhere else, but then if they say they want unpublished work, that's what they should get.
That's a good standard to work to Danfango, and one I agree with entirely.