Ever since Yahoo! 360 shut down their doors, I have been a writer without a home, so to speak. When Yahoo! was at its peak, it was the meeting place for everyone. You could get hundreds of reads by avid readers just by joining a group or two. I had a 360! page that was maxed out on friends, and my story posts were getting thousands of hits a day. I was getting positive comments and feedback from readers around the world. And about the time that I finally figured out what I was doing in the whole indie-author publishing biz, Yahoo! shut down the 360 pages, leaving those thousands of readers not knowing that I had just had my very first novel published.

Undeterred, I moved over to My Space with the rest of the herd. Unfortunately, the fans never found me. And about the time that word started getting around that Nicola was back at her desk pounding the keyboard, everyone left My Space for the new online crazy known to others as Facebook. Well, FB was just not something that I could really get into. The lack of blogging made it really difficult for a writer to be able to post novels and stories. And the very limited character count on the status left a lot to be desired as well.

 Undaunted, I went in search of a new place to post my graphic fiction. Now the internet has offered up a lot of sites and forums to post on, but in the past five years, even though I have looked at literally dozens of forums and sites, I have not found a single home for my brand of filth that I have been comfortable at save for XNXX. So as a duty to my fellow writers who may be looking for a place to cool their heels and get a lot of exposure, I shall systematically go through all the different sites I have tried, what I liked about them, and what ultimately caused me to turn my back on them.

 First, however, I would like to give a bit of advice to any who is looking for places to post their fictional material. There are a few rules and things you need to know before you go signing up for sites and posting your hard work for the world to read.

 1.  Know the Rules.  This is incredibly important. The last thing you want is to have your work pulled or your account banned while your work remains in cyberspace with you unable to get back to it to add to your online portfolio.

                 A.  Find out what ratings they allow and make sure you are not posting anything above the rating. If all they allow is MA and you are pretty sure your stuff should be rated MA17, then it is my opinion as a writer that you should not risk having your work pulled or your account banned.

                 B.  Find out what genres and themes are allowed. This is especially important if you are writing erotic fiction and posting to adult sites.  While you are writing fictional stories regarding fictional, non-existent characters, a large portion of adult sites apparently do not know the difference between real people and fictional characters and will not allow any story to be posted that contain certain themes or characters below a certain predetermined age.

                 C.  Find out what happens if your story gets reported. You need to know if you will have the option to do a rewrite, if it gets pulled regardless, or if you will get banned from the site without any explanation and without any chance to fix the problem.

 2.  Read the fine print i.e. the Terms of Service.

                 A.  This is where you will find out what themes will be allowed and what will result in your story getting pulled. 99% of your story forums and blog spaces will not allow anything that they deem “pornographic” or “obscene.”  This means that even though you are writing about people who do not exist in a graphic novel that depicts the rise and fall of society, it will not be allowed on most forums. In other words, even though The Hunger Games may be a bestseller, it would not be allowed to be posted on boards like Aimoo and Proboards because of the graphic violence, and even though it contains no sex, it would not be allowed on adult sites like Literotica and Lushstories because, again, the people who run the places apparently do not know the difference between fiction and reality (but seriously, they do not allow any characters under the age of 18 regardless of content of the story).

                 B. Make certain you are not giving up your copyrights or agreeing to some other moronic stipulation by posting on a site. I have come across a site that stated you were giving up your copyrights by posting anything on their site and they had the right to do whatever they wanted with the work, including claiming it as their own and having it published. In addition, I came across another story site that made you agree that when you became a member, you would not try to seek out publication with any other publishing house except for the ones THEIR SITE was partnered with.

 In following posts, I will explore different sites, what I liked about them, what they got right, and what ultimately made me decide that they just were not worth wasting my hard work on by posting to them.