On second thoughts, have just read the article by Writer Beware posted by Victoria Strauss, and the The Short Story Project rights minefield seems littered with the usual nukes.

@Garbonza I'm still trying to decipher everything. that's why i asked for personal experiences. Thank you.

Great for you. Sorta, likewise here. But, write for yourself. Only you. You will write more if you do not consider what anyone thinks.

Now you have a reason to wake.

"" Dance like no one is watching. ""

Thank you. I actually came across this article myself this morning. It is the thing that had me questioning. When the contest was posted, the website had not yet been completed. The owner of the website is Israeli and seems to be a writer himself, although I cannot find anything he wrote online. Also, I caught a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne on there. I'm not sure how he posted to the site from the grave?

The fine print on the site, and the owner's responses to the interviewer on the Writer Beware site is acceptable to me. But there are a couple things that concern me about putting my work on there. I'm sitting on my couch thinking that it is a way to have more readers, but I'm also trying to figure out if I need that?

@Lillyfield41 -- Two questions for you: Are your short stories genre or literary? If they are genre, in which of the genres do prefer to work?

@evidentialist i just wrote a mystery inspired by an old movie i watched recently. i write in many genres, but my favorite has been historic fiction.

@Lillyfield41 -- Aaaand, what sort of word counts are we talking about here?

@evidentialist short stories are around 3,000 words. Novels are around 80,000 words.

@Lillyfield41 -- The submissions page at TSSP indicates a maximum of 2500 for shorts they will accept. You'll have to trim your stuff to fit or write new and shorter.

Have you considered setting up a commercial account with WordPress? You could market your already written wares there and word count wouldn't be a problem.

@evidentialist i have a website already. thank you.

@Lillyfield41 Around 80,000 words for a novel sounds good to me -- Have you found this length commercially acceptable? It is very deflating to find Stephen King novels and another by a New Zealander that won the Booker Prize three or four years ago at 900 pages-plus. I submitted an idea to a publisher here (NZ) for a series of three "short novels" pitched at 60,000 words each. His reply was he didn't know how to market "novellas". On correcting him, saying novellas were 30,000 words, I got no reply.

The longest short story I've ever written was around 12-15,000 words (unpublished). The one I'm working on right now is 4,500 words and most of mine are 2,500-3,000. The anthology I'm included in limited my story last year to 3,000 words; this year, 1,500. Do you standardise yours at around 3,000 and does that work commercially?