Have you posted your entire manuscript online?
Congratulations, you just published your manuscript.
When you post your work online, whether on your own website or someone else’s, it’s available for the world to see. Even if you take it down, Google caches copies of web pages and the Wayback Machine also archives web pages, so it’s still there, available for everyone.
You used up your first publication rights. When you approach a publisher/agent, they’ll most likely reject the manuscript out of hand because those first rights are taken. It’s now much more difficult to sell the manuscript.
If you posted that manuscript to a password protected site, it’s not considered published. Google and other search bots can’t index those pages, so those pages can’t be found in search engines or through cached or archived copies of those pages. In that case, first publication rights are not used, and posting it online will not be a barrier to publication.
Having said all that, if you plan on editing it fairly heavily, then I would suggest taking down your work – and immediately – edit it, then submit the edited portion to agents/publishers.
If you want to have something online to attract a new audience, you could consider posting excerpts such as the first chapter or two.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve heard that and thus only put things on site that I’m not looking to place with a publisher. I do have the first chapter of a novel in progress on a couple of sites but will be revising it a lot so hopefully that won’t count against me. If I’m stuck I guess there is always Lulu.com.
Anyway, you can put a command in the header of your site that tells robots not to index a page or cache it. I looked it up because while I didn’t mind the indexing of my short stories, I really didn’t want them saved for forever and a day on someone else’s server.
Here’s some info on it:
http://www.i18nguy.com/markup/metatags.html
I just read an article about this so thanks for posting. I belong to a site called TheNextBigWriter that is password protected. It provides me with feedback on my short stories and novel I am working on and I don’t have to worry about first publication rights.
http://www.thenextbigwriter.com
- M
Indigo & Mike – If your work is on a password protected part of the site that is not visible unless you have the password, such as the Share Your Work part of the AbsoluteWrite forum, then the search engine bots can’t find your work, and then it’s not considered published. If you did that, then you’re completely safe. If you didn’t, then take a look at this thread on Absolute Write. It’ll answer a lot of questions, I hope.
And I’ve realized that I need to clarify something. I’m going to do another post to explain things in better detail.
Cool site! Helpful topic!
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you!
I am in the process of completing a nonfiction (a new scientific theory dealing with space-time geometry and fundamental forces) manuscript and I want to have it published do you have any advice or suggestions on how I may accomplish this? thank you for any help you may provide christina
I would suggest that you join a writing forum like AbsoluteWrite. There are boards there geared towards nonfiction writing where you can get a lot of your questions answered.