How long is it taking to get published?

[herdirtymind]

Hi

I'm experiencing delays in getting my stories published on Lit at the moment. Before Christmas, it was taking 3 days precisely, from submission to going live on the site.

Now, it's taking anywhere between 1 day (freak occurance, which only happened once) and 6/7 days.

Is everyone else experiencing the same thing?

Thanks!

HDM

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Make sure that you don't include weekend days into the time you say it is taking. I've never seen one of my stories go from pending to posted over a weekend. I suppose it could happen, but I've never seen it.

Other than that, it took only a couple of days for my last two stories to get posted after submission.

 

[GinnyPPC]

Do people notice a difference in posting time if they copy and paste text into the editor versus submitting a word document? Is that a variable in how long it takes to post?

 

[AvroAnson]

It took Harper Lee 55 years and only occurred post-mortem, a real bummer all its own. My last offering, two days.

(Moral of story: publish here, not with some high-falutin' New York publisher.)

 

[MartaMaine]

Posted 2 stories so far, both pasted in and on the same day.

First was published 2 days after submission (on a Sunday) and the second after 7 days. interestingly, the first was 11k words and the second was only 3k

As far as I'm concerned, it happens when it happens.

 

[SimonDoom]

Make sure that you don't include weekend days into the time you say it is taking. I've never seen one of my stories go from pending to posted over a weekend. I suppose it could happen, but I've never seen it.

Other than that, it took only a couple of days for my last two stories to get posted after submission.

I believe stories get posted on weekends at about the same rate they do on weekdays. I'm not 100% certain of that, but I know many stories do get posted on weekends.

 

[yibala2]

Six or seven days doesn't sound unusual, unfortunately. After seven, I would be concerned.

I have two stories currently pending. One for five days and one for four, as of this morning. I'm surprised many people get stories posted in two days... I think it may have been that quick for me once or twice, but usually it has taken longer.

I'm curious about whether pasting into the editor makes a difference. I've never done that because I don't trust that the formatting will come out the way I intended. I suppose I could scroll through the editor, but it is much easier to view a Word document.

Yib

 

[KeithD]

Nearly consistently two days for me, whether weekend or not.

 

[HeyAll]

From what I can see, there are a lot more stories now. If you look at places like Group Sex or Lesbian, there used to be only a couple of stories per day. Now there are a lot more. So the wait time could be longer.

And people have said before that experienced writers tend to get approved quicker. I don't know if that's true or not though. It could be that newer writers get more scrutiny.

 

[SimonDoom]

From what I can see, there are a lot more stories now. If you look at places like Group Sex or Lesbian, there used to be only a couple of stories per day. Now there are a lot more. So the wait time could be longer.

And people have said before that experienced writers tend to get approved quicker. I don't know if that's true or not though. It could be that newer writers get more scrutiny.

My last story, in January, took either four or five days. That's the norm for me. I'm going to publish at least two more within the next two weeks so I'll see how it goes then.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I observed about a week ago that the New roll had gone onto a third page a few times recently, longer than it usually is. During that time, my 750 was published in two days, but another story, less than 3k words, took eight days. Maybe the submittal backlog is bigger lately.

 

[LexxRuthless]

Do people notice a difference in posting time if they copy and paste text into the editor versus submitting a word document? Is that a variable in how long it takes to post?

I asked Laurel about this in a PM last week. She replied:
"If you're hand-adding the HTML, then there's no need to upload a doc. The only real reason to upload a Word .doc or .rtf is if you are using Word to "bold" or "italic" text and want us to do the conversion to HTML. If you are confident in HTML enough to add the bolds and italics, you should definitely cut and paste the text in rather than uploading. It saves us many steps and decreases the time it takes to get the story live."

 

[Rustyoznail]

I asked Laurel about this in a PM last week. She replied:
"If you're hand-adding the HTML, then there's no need to upload a doc. The only real reason to upload a Word .doc or .rtf is if you are using Word to "bold" or "italic" text and want us to do the conversion to HTML. If you are confident in HTML enough to add the bolds and italics, you should definitely cut and paste the text in rather than uploading. It saves us many steps and decreases the time it takes to get the story live."

Huh. Didn't realise they had to hand-code the tags for italics and bold. That is archaic.

Another reason to keep the formatting to a minimum.

 

[GinnyPPC]

I asked Laurel about this in a PM last week. She replied:
"If you're hand-adding the HTML, then there's no need to upload a doc. The only real reason to upload a Word .doc or .rtf is if you are using Word to "bold" or "italic" text and want us to do the conversion to HTML. If you are confident in HTML enough to add the bolds and italics, you should definitely cut and paste the text in rather than uploading. It saves us many steps and decreases the time it takes to get the story live."

Thanks, I am fine with the HTML, but will keep it to a minimum to keep the hand editing down.

 

[yibala2]

I asked Laurel about this in a PM last week. She replied:
"If you're hand-adding the HTML, then there's no need to upload a doc. The only real reason to upload a Word .doc or .rtf is if you are using Word to "bold" or "italic" text and want us to do the conversion to HTML. If you are confident in HTML enough to add the bolds and italics, you should definitely cut and paste the text in rather than uploading. It saves us many steps and decreases the time it takes to get the story live."

Gee, it would be nice if this were posted somewhere in instructions. I could have saved myself and them time.

Thx,

-Yib

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Do people notice a difference in posting time if they copy and paste text into the editor versus submitting a word document? Is that a variable in how long it takes to post?

Yes it varies. Laurel does it all by herself. I've assumed the factors are how many she has to go through, how much work a story needs, how often a user uploads, and how many mistakes they make, is it a story in multiple submissions, as a few ideas behind the time it takes.

 

[MsNatalie99]

I have waited eight days for my stuff to be published before. My current one is sitting at 6 days. I don't really worry about it. I've noticed that the wait can go up when there are contests going too. Just kinda is what it is.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Huh. Didn't realise they had to hand-code the tags for italics and bold. That is archaic.

Another reason to keep the formatting to a minimum.

Man... this whole site is archaic. The forums are still called bulletin boards on the main site, this site remembers when Jeeves was in butler school, it probably saw the birth of Geocities. It's as old as AS$Tr.

 

[SisterJezabel]

Man... this whole site is archaic. The forums are still called bulletin boards on the main site, this site remembers when Jeeves was in butler school, it probably saw the birth of Geocities. It's as old as AS$Tr.

And that's what a lot of us love about it too.

 

[shutterpsb]

I usually submit my stories during the wee hours on a Wednesday morning. They end up being published on Friday morning. So two days I guess.

 

[ElectricBlue]

As to the question, it's usually 2-3 days for my stories, but my latest was put in on the 11th of Feb. I've never had it take this long.

We need one of our boffins to do a volume analysis. I suspect it's significantly higher than this time last year due to Covid dynamics.

 

[lovecraft68]

And that's what a lot of us love about it too.

It has its charm for us older not so techy sorts. But the recent upgrades to our control panel and other things were done because the younger more tech savvy people were heading over to wattpad and other modern sites and Lit was losing ground in the search engines.

 

[SimonDoom]

I submitted my most recent story, a little over 8,000 words, on the afternoon of the 19th, and found out it was approved and pending publication for the 22nd when I woke up this morning, the 21st. That's fast for me -- only about 30 hours from submission to publication (assuming publication occurs on the normal schedule). I submitted my story by uploading a Word document, but my story was fairly short and it has no special formatting, per my usual.

 

[MartaMaine]

I submitted a story yesterday evening and it looks like it's being published tomorrow.

 

[GinnyPPC]

We need one of our boffins to do a volume analysis. I suspect it's significantly higher than this time last year due to Covid dynamics.

Boffin - such a great word. I just wish it was used more here Stateside. We have Nerd and Geek, but neither of those are quite the same.