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First off, let's see if we can't draw an accurate picture of the plusses and minusses of putting one's work up on the Net. Some people will argue that you should never put a story up on the Net, on the grounds that that just gives the entire world an opportunity to steal and copy your work. Such people are right about the 'opportunity to steal' part, of course -- but that's always been a danger, any time a creative work is presented to the public! If you run into someone who is particularly insistent about this point, ask them whether plagiarism was invented before or after the World Wide Web; their answer should be instructive. In any case, there is a 100% sure way to prevent your work from being plagiarized: Namely, never allow anyone to see your work, for any reason. Now, some authors might think that's a Good Thing... but I disagree. This site is written from the presumption that you, like me, want your stories to find an audience. With all that said and acknowledged, here are the major good and bad points of publishing on the Net:
For an author, the most reasonable way to think of the Internet may be as a kind of 'loss leader' -- that is, you're giving away material in hopes of attracting the attention of someone who can and will pay you for your words. There are three major ways the Net can give you an audience for your stories: Mailing lists, web sites, and 'bulletin board' forums.
An Internet mailing list is more-or-less a group of pen pals who send messages to each other, united by their common interest in one particular topic. For some mailing lists, the topic of interest happens to be the craft of writing, and these are the lists you want to get involved with. Mailing lists require a minimum of technical expertise; if you can send, receive, and read email, you can participate in a mailing list. One thing to be aware of is that mailing lists tend to want pure, raw text, not Word files or HTML or anything else fancy. The main reason why is because you're sending your messages to a central computer, which relays them on to the other members... and many of these list-computers aren't set up to deal with fancy-schmancy email messages. A fancy-schmancy message almost always will go through, mind you, but it may show up in other list-members' emailboxes heavily larded with extra characters which make it unreadable, among other unappetizing possibilities. All in all, you're better off taking the path of least resistance and just sticking with plain text. From personal experience, I can recommend the TFWF (Transformation Writers' Forum) mailing list. The TFWF list was created specifically for the purpose of helping writers improve their craft; while science fiction and fantasy is TFWF's primary focus, we'll give critiques on any stories.
Just so you know: HTML stands for hypertext markup language. If you decide to put your stories up on a website, it would be a good idea for you to get cozy with HTML. A web page, aka 'HTML document', is like a movie script. Just as the script has all the lines that the actors are supposed to deliver, so does the web page contain all the text you're supposed to read. But a script has more than just the spoken lines; it also has stage directions, extra stuff which tells the actors how they're supposed to deliver the lines. The stage directions don't actually show up on camera -- the actors never recite them or anything -- but they affect what does show up on camera. Similarly, a web page contains 'tags', extra stuff which never actually shows up on screen, but still tells your computer how to display the text that does show up on your screen. Here's a simple example: On the left is a piece of a webpage, with its tags marked out in red, and on the right is how that particular piece of webpage will look when it shows up in somebody's browser window.
Yes, this means web pages are a bit more complicated than plain old email -- but by the same token, web pages offer more control over how your text is presented to the reader. Be sure to only use this great power for Good; just because you can play fancy tricks with color, that doesn't mean you should play those tricks. In particular, there are combinations of text color and background color/image that will make your text nigh-unreadable -- so for God's sake, don't do that! On-paper publishing offers the most control over presentation, of course, but also makes it more difficult for you to get your stories into the hands of a reader. It's all tradeoffs, and you'll have to decide for yourself which end of which tradeoff is more important to you.
If you want to go the website route, I have good news: You don't need a specialized HTML-editing program. A web page is just a generic, normal, average text document, such as you can create with pretty much any word processing program whatsoever -- even SimpleText (on the Mac side) or NotePad (on the PC side). But while you don't need an HTML editor, you may want to use one. The question is, how do you feel about typing in HTML tags manually? If you don't mind doing that sort of thing, great! You're good to go, and have fun. On the other hand, you might wonder why any writer should have to worry about the details of HTML, any more than they should have to worry about the mechanical intricacies of a printing press. This is certainly not an unreasonable attitude; if you share it, you'll want a program that takes care of the details without bothering you about any of that stuff. The simplest and least-expensive option may be the word-processing software you already have. If its save as command allows you to save a document as a web page -- look for something along the lines of save for web or save as HTML -- that may be all you really need, to start with. However, I think you'll be better off with an honest-to-god HTML-editing program. Suppose your website consists of more than one HTML document; can your word processor help out with site navigation, i.e. the clickable hyperlinks that send people from one page to the next? Also, a word processor's built-in HTML generator may yield bloated documents that are thickly encrusted in irrelevant 'behind the scenes' crap which never actually shows up on screen. The HTML documents generated by Microsoft Word, in particular, typically consist of more than two-thirds irrelevant crap... which, in turn, means that if you've got two web pages with identical content, one of them Word-generated and the other made with a true HTML editor, the download time for the Word webpage may be more than three times as long as that of the 'real' webpage. Nevertheless, word-processors can work for this purpose. They can generate HTML documents without requiring any special training in HTML, or extra money spent. All I'm saying is, if you go this route, you should be aware of the possible problems, and you should be willing to consider other options. The HTML editor I use -- GoLive, from Adobe Systems -- is worth looking at. It offers the best of both worlds; you can just write and let GoLive handle the details, and you can also get your hands dirty with the actual HTML tags when you feel like it. However, you should be aware that GoLive is an industrial-strength program which may be far more powerful (and far more expensive!) than you really need, so it's also worth your while to look over the many other alternatives. In this context, it may be worth noting that faithful reader Martin Diehl recommends the Windows-only application TextPad as "a really good bare-bones HTML editor". And whether you use MacOS Classic, OS X, or some flavor of Windows, you'll want to browse VersionTracker, whose purpose in life is to be the 'go to' site for info about all the latest versions of every piece of shareware and/or commercial software for those platforms. Once your HTML documents are finished, you should consider checking out their 'browser compatibility' -- i.e., see how they look in a variety of different browsers. Why? Because you can't know which browser J. Random Websurfer will be using when he views your page. This matters because the same HTML tag may not be handled exactly the same way by all browsers, or even by different versions of the same browser! You can spend hours and hours tweaking your HTML so the page looks perfect in Browser X... but if it looks awful in some other Browser Y, all websurfers who use Browser Y will not know, or care, that it looks great in Browser X! Browser Y's users will think your page looks awful, end of discussion -- and they will be right. The question is, why alienate potential members of your audience when you don't have to? If you're going to proof your pages in different browsers, I recommend that you check them in, at minimum, the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. If you can scrape up copies of these browsers that are a couple of versions old, so much the better -- like I said above, different versions of Browser X may handle some tags differently. And finally, there are many other browsers than just Netscape and Explorer. So if you're really serious about browser compatibility, you should consider checking your pages in Safari, Opera, Firefox, and iCab, among others.
A 'bulletin board' forum is not unlike a mailing list. But rather than everyone sending messages to a central collator who then relays those messages to all list-members, as is done in a mailing list, a 'bulletin board' has its members log in to a centralized website, to which all messages and responses are posted. I can't say I've had much experience with this sort of forum, but their users do seem to enjoy them. FanFiction.net is a quite extensive forum. Its users have posted tens of thousands of stories, organized so that locating a specific story about as easy as you could expect from a library of that size. |