How long is the delay in publishing, please.

[JacobRiley49]

Hi, I submitted a story on 26th April which was rejected on 28th April due to a comment at the start which contravened a rule. I took the comment out and resubmitted on 28th April and 1st May. Still not been published. Is there a delay please, and if so how long?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Patience, grasshopper. First time writers can expect to wait a week or so, because of the added level of vetting to check content. Your clock restarted with the second submission date - once it's in, don't pull a story back to the Draft, coz that resets your place at the end of the queue.

 

[JacobRiley49]

Patience, grasshopper. First time writers can expect to wait a week or so, because of the added level of vetting to check content. Your clock restarted with the second submission date - once it's in, don't pull a story back to the Draft, coz that resets your place at the end of the queue.

Thank you for your quick reply. It was my 2nd submission but I have another 5 ready to go. They are parts of a much longer story. Should I submit them all at once, or space them out a bit?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Thank you for your quick reply. It was my 2nd submission but I have another 5 ready to go. They are parts of a much longer story. Should I submit them all at once, or space them out a bit?

If you submit them all together, and it's clear they are chapters (Title Chap.01; Title Chap.02 etc), and you add a Note to the Editor, Laurel will release them once every 24 hours - unless you ask for a longer interval. The site looks after all of the chapter joining up, you just need to keep your story titles the same (an algorithm sorts in alpha-numeric order).

Alternatively, you could submit the next chapter as soon as the last one is published, although you have no real control over the timing if you do it that way. I'd suggest the former approach, it worked fine for me in a seventeen chapter novel, and is no extra effort for the site.

How long are your chapters? Many new writers submit short chapters by Lit standards, and it might be better to release your whole story as single standalone piece. The general consensus is that a good chapter length is 2 - 3 Lit pages (7500 - 10,000 words), but that's implying a fairly long story, if you have three or four chapters (my long story was 104,000 words - and there are far longer stories here on Lit).

As an aside, there is no known limit on a single submission - I've seen an eighty Lit page story, about 300,000 words.

 

[DHerbert]

If you submit them all together, and it's clear they are chapters (Title Chap.01; Title Chap.02 etc), and you add a Note to the Editor, Laurel will release them once every 24 hours - unless you ask for a longer interval. The site looks after all of the chapter joining up, you just need to keep your story titles the same (an algorithm sorts in alpha-numeric order).

Thanks for that. As a fairly new writer myself I wasn't aware of that and have been taking the 'post the next chapter once the previous one went live' route.

 

[JacobRiley49]

Thanks for your full and clear reply. I will submit the first 5 or 6 chapters which should all be 2 or 3 pages. Then add the rest as I write them. I will just wait for the delayed one to be posted. Cheers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Thanks for your full and clear reply. I will submit the first 5 or 6 chapters which should all be 2 or 3 pages. Then add the rest as I write them. I will just wait for the delayed one to be posted. Cheers.

Sensible plan, and the chapter lengths are about right.

Be aware your View count will drop off dramatically over the first three chapters, but at that point, I figure your readership is pretty much in for the ride. It gives you a bit of an idea how many readers are actually staying with the story - most bail out in Chapter One.

 

[HBuff]

For what it's worth, I submitted my very first story here on April 23. It was rejected three days later because I had missed the bullet point saying that Literotica doesn't publish non-consensual fanfic. I have removed all references to celebrities and modified the plot to make my story an original work. I then resubmitted it on April 28 and it got published on May 6.

It took eight days, so about a week, and there are probably two reasons for this... I was a first-time writer, and I think there were a lot of other stories during that week; the week before looked quieter.

The publishing process went smoothly. The reason for the story rejection was very clearly stated so I had no problem fixing the issue and resubmitting my work.