To remove/delete or not to

As a writer of short fiction I have a lot of tales out there for readers to follow. As of this month I have been collecting together the various tales into collections and trying to decide if I should remove them from individual sales once I have put out the collections or if I should leave them up.

Now I can see both sides of this issue. Some of those wonderful tales have received the much coveted reviews and some have not. Removing those that have not received reviews would hurt nothing really but those that have received reviews would make them disappear.  Not something a wise writer would wish for.

Also I do not know how that would effect my author ranking on places like Amazon. I mean after all it is all about ranking over there. If your rank drops down, you drop off of pages and advertizing. Not something to even think about!

So should I remove tales or not? I am not sure.

In other news I find myself trying to decide if I should take some of my longer short short stories and post them up on a new pay site I found. It is called QuarterReads.com and so far I have placed one tale there. With no movement I am rethinking this place. It is nice that that only take work up to 2k words and that for each read past the opening you get 25 cents. That is a good thing. I submitted a bunch of my longer flash fictions and poetry and they were not accepted, which surprised me. When I queried them they said they were either too short or seemed incomplete. Now that really was odd. I don't post anything for sale that I consider incomplete but it seems the 'reviewers' there thought they were.

I have a couple tales I plan on finishing and placing there as a test. If they either are rejected or don't spark any interest, I will write off this site. I will keep you readers updated as I do.

Now as we all know this Friday is that most fun day, Halloween. The kids will be going out trick or treating and us silly adults get to dress up, at least for a little bit, as something scary or funny.  I don't have a lot of pictures of myself in costume but how about I put up what I have? This should give you all a good laugh. I am no model...so just be warned!

Okay I was the one in the red and the last two were a very long time ago...I haven't looked that good in decades!  Horrible what old age does to a woman huh? the one in red was from 1982 and the last one? Well I was a kid of 13!  So Happy Halloween Everyone!

The importance of remembering where you posted your work

As a long time scribbler yet only short term published author I have had the fun and joy of trying to remember where I might have posted my work while it was in the stages of being finished. The last place that I remembered I had posted things was over on the erotica site, Literotica. (Yes i write erotica too). Now I had a small following over there with people bugging me from time to time to complete some of the partial stories I posted up here.

For the longest time I forgot that I had work up there. Now I am doing my best to pull those stories down so that i can complete them and of course publish them. Let me tell you this is not as simple as hitting the remove or delete key. It is a bit of a pain in fact.

You see the moderators over there seem to be none existent. I have emailed them multiple times requesting they remove titles or even delete my account with no response in the past TWO YEARS! I have managed to remove titles from the site by submitting the title with revised in it and a note in the body that it is being removed for publication. It takes up to a week but they do pull them down.

For the one or two at a shot it is not so bad but when I have 17 chapters of one title and six more chapters on two other titles, that is a lot of work and annoying.

Folks you better remember this when you post. The work you put up is yours but you have to fight to keep them in your hands. In this world of writing and publishing things change on a daily purpose. From getting signed to a small publisher that seems to disappear from one day to the next, to deciding to rewrite a work that you thought you were done with over a decade ago, you will need to find work arounds.

So do your best to keep your work in your hands. If you decide to post on free sites make sure you can remove things easily and quickly. And never post the complete work if there is a chance that you can sell it later.  Take it from the mad writer, you will regret it.