I've been pondering the best way to "share" my work with others who may be interested in reading my novel. Obviously, I have been posting it here on Holyworlds as I continue to craft it...but as I talk about writing on, say, my Twitter page...I don't have any way to share what I am doing with people who may say they are interested.

I've considered a website where I can post all or parts of what I am writing, updating it as I go along. I hesitate to call this an 'author website' though, since my goal is to get feedback rather than to get sales. I hesitate to post all of my work though...especially since its at an early stage and not final-draft quality. I'm also a little worried about it getting stolen.

I am very early, still, in my writing journey. I'd like to someday get published, either through self-publishing or, if I'm lucky, with the help of an agent. Is anyone else at this stage...or have you been....that could give me some advice? Thanks!

Another thing you should be aware of is that under United States copyright law (though I am not a lawyer, just an aspiring author and self-published poet who's read up on this enough to be dangerous), essentially every legitimate publisher (that is, every publisher that is not a "vanity press" where you pay them to see your name in print, or a "print-on-demand" "publisher" where they print what you tell them, distribute it to any bookstore that wants it, and take their cut) will want "first rights" of some kind---that is, the right to be the first to publish the work in whatever form they're concerned with. If you post most or all of a work on a publicly-accessible website, you can't give them "first electronic publication rights" or "first electronic serial rights," because you've already been the first to publish it online. This is why I self-published my poetry collection: all of the poems had already appeared on my blog.

The Holy Worlds rooms where posting long passages for critique is encouraged are set up so that only HW members who are logged in can read them, and there are few enough people on HW that it shouldn't count as a "public" website. Similarly, putting text in a Google Doc and only sharing it with specific people isn't "publication." And if you accidentally publish something and then take it down before many people have seen it, that's probably OK too. But be careful what and where you share your work if you want to be able to get it traditionally published.

That said, there are websites devoted to sharing rough drafts with readers and getting critique; I'm still firmly enough in the worldbuilding, concept-building, and high-level-outlining phase that I haven't bothered to more than bookmark one and forget it if I come on it in passing.

Thank you so much for that point of view that I hadn't really considered before. That has definitely given me some more to think about.

May I ask for the link you have to the website for critique? Thanks!

While I had a vague recollection of a website in mind, I don't remember its name or anything about it. Like I said, when I happen on a site that's not immediately useful to me that I expect to be able to use in a few years, I bookmark it and then forget about it.

But I looked through the about 2200 bookmarks I've tagged as "writing" (most are either articles about various aspects of writing or web pages that I thought of as sources of worldbuilding ideas), and found a couple. One is a site that I've actually used, but hesitate to recommend; the other I hadn't remembered. (Both are big enough sites that I wouldn't post more than a handful of chapters of anything I wanted to get traditionally published.)

• WEBook aims or aimed to be both a social network for writers and readers and a publishing company. I used it, and put some of my work on it, but then the site went down. It later came back up, with claims that a coalition of users had bought it. Between those events, I read an article (which I didn't bookmark and so can't link to) alleging that its Terms of Service were more user-unfriendly than most such sites, and so much so that it recommended avoiding putting work on the site. I took nearly all my work down when the site came back up.
• The other service I had bookmarked is Booksie, and I know essentially nothing about it (though I did verify that it's still or again up today).

Thanks! I'll do some more research into those before jumping in. I appreciate the help!

When I want to share outside of HW, I go for Google Docs.