My experience with republishing stories, some after rewriting

[8letters]

You might be considering taking down one of your stories and republishing it for a variety of reasons:
* You think it would do better in a different category
* You gave it what you think is a poor title and you have a much better one now
* You have an idea for rewriting it that you think will make it a much better story
* Your story got one-bombed and never really recovered
* You published the story as a small series and think it would do better as a long stand-alone story

Quick FYI - I’ve seen title changes and category changes for stories. If your story is relatively new, I’d suggest asking Laurel about making those changes.

So if you take your story down and then republish it, what will be the impact? Will readers not read the new version because they’ve read it before? How much of an impact can rewriting and reposting your stories have? Let me share my experiences to hopefully answer your questions.

I took all of my stories down in January. I started reposting them in August. Here’s been the results so far:


When I asked Laurel about republishing my stories, she said:

We would love to have you publishing on Literotica. If you're reposting previously published work, you may want to put a note at the beginning alerting readers that the story has been on Lit before. This will avoid us receiving false reports.

Also, do know that a work must be new submission to Literotica in order to be eligible to win in all Literotica contests - including Monthly and Special themes. That is, previously submitted stories - even if they have been removed from the site - are not eligible to win (though, again, you are free to submit to a contest).

Based on that, I added an intro to all of my republished stories that said when it was originally published and when I took it down.

Notes on the changes to the re-published stories in order of their republication:
* “A Week at the Lake with My Sister” - this story has a long history. It was originally posted as five chapters posted over five days. It’s a brother-sister-brother’s girlfriend story with a very manipulative sister. Chapter four got a ton of negative comments. The reader lilshymynx convinced me to rewrite the story so that the manipulative sister doesn’t win. I rewrote the last two chapters and published the five chapters as one big (17 pages) story. The Original Posting numbers are for that version. When I decided to repost it, I added a page-and-a-half epilogue to the story
* “The Twins Go Camping” - this is a rewrite of my very first story, which was split over two chapters, “Heather and Michael Ch. 01” and “Heather and Michael Ch. 02”. The original story was 13K words evenly split over the two chapters. I did a massive rewrite - adding a Chapter 00 and expanding the other chapters - taking the story to 34K words. I also changed the title. The ratings for the original two chapters when I took them down were 4.51 and 4.69
* “Cycling Weekends with Sis”, “Sister Has a Plan”, “Cruise Doubledate With My Sister”, and “My Day as a Pool Boy” - no changes other than adding an intro
* “My Sister Set Me Up on a Blind Date” - I rewrote portions of the final scene, did a clean up pass in Grammarly and replaced the intro
* “My European Summer Vacation” - another story with quite a bit of history. It finished second in the 2016 Summer Lovin’ contest. During the editing process, I decided to cut out a big section to get the story down to seven pages for the contest. No one in the comments complained about the length and many asked for the story to be continued for at least one more scene. So one year after I published the original version, I published “My European Summer Vacation (With+)”, which had the section I cut out restored and the additional scene many commenters asked for. That is the version I used for the Original Posting numbers. I did a clean-up pass using Grammarly, revised the intro, and reposted the longer version under the name of the original version
* “Comforting My Little Sister” and “My Cousin Shows Me Around Campus” - For each story, I did a clean-up pass using Grammarly and added an intro
* “A Week at the Lake with My Sister (Old)” - this is the original version of “A Week at the Lake with My Sister” posted as one big story with an intro added. Laurel was nice enough to let me use a title that exceeds the usual title maximum length. I posted it because I got several comments on “A Week at the Lake with My Sister” that they preferred the original version
* “My Lingerie-Loving Sister Moves In” - I did a clean-up pass using Grammarly and added an intro

Notes on new stories:
* “Dad's Bowling Night with Mom” - it was a test story to see how to people would respond to me publishing again on Literotica. It got massively one-bombed shortly after it was published. I think the one-bombing led to Stachnash getting permanently banned
* “Beach House Weekend with My Sisters” - my entry in the 2023 Summer Lovin’ contest. It wasn’t close to having one of the top ratings, but had the second most number of views, the second most number of comments and the most votes
* “Giving Thanks for Lingerie” - a pretty typical story for me

My observations:
* Most of the ratings are surprisingly consistent from before I took them down to now
* Adding the epilogue to “A Week at the Lake with My Sister” seems to have hurt its rating a little bit but increased the frequency at which it draws comments
* Doing the big rewrite of “Heather and Michael” was a big success, pulling the story into my top tier in terms of rating
* I have no idea why “Sister Has a Plan” got so many votes in its first two days and why “Cruise Doubledate With My Sister” and “My Day as a Pool Boy” got so many views
* “My Sister Set Me Up on a Blind Date” got a nice bump in its rating. I think some of it was the rewrite of the final scene, but I think the prior posting for whatever reasons had a rating lower than what it should have been
* “My Sister Set Me Up on a Blind Date” and "My European Summer Vacation (With+)" had similar number of views in their original versions. With the reposted versions, “My Sister Set Me Up on a Blind Date” has almost twice the views of “My European Summer Vacation”. The one disappointment in reposting my stories is that “My European Summer Vacation” hasn’t gotten the number of views I think it should
* “Comforting My Little Sister” and “My Cousin Shows Me Around Campus” continue to show the lack of interest in the I/T readership for cousin stories
* “A Week at the Lake with My Sister (Old)” surprised me in terms of I didn’t think people would read the alternative version of a story published recently. I’m not getting the negative comments I was getting with the original posting of the story
* “My Lingerie-Loving Sister Moves In” - No idea why the big bump in rating

 

[alohadave]

Quick FYI - I’ve seen title changes and category changes for stories. If your story is relatively new, I’d suggest asking Laurel about making those changes.

I did this with one of my stories when I wrote a sequel to it.

She changed the title and category for me and all the stats and comments remained on the story when it posted as a new story.

 

[FifthEstate]

I am in the process of rewriting my only story that does not have a red H. It was also the only 750 word story I’ve published. The rewrite won’t change the story arc, but it fills in all the blanks that 750 words didn’t allow me to do. The story titled “All It Takes is a Change” has a current score of ~3.85 on 468 votes, 38 favs and 18k views. I plan to take the old story down before publishing the new. I will have a note in the opening paragraph acknowledging the change.

So help me understand, if I republish in the same category with the same title, will it be published as “new” if that is my desire? Does it change if I slightly alter the title?

 

[ElectricBlue]

I am in the process of rewriting my only story that does not have a red H. It was also the only 750 word story I’ve published. The rewrite won’t change the story arc, but it fills in all the blanks that 750 words didn’t allow me to do. The story titled “All It Takes is a Change” has a current score of ~3.85 on 468 votes, 38 favs and 18k views. I plan to take the old story down before publishing the new. I will have a note in the opening paragraph acknowledging the change. So help me understand, if I republish in the same category with the same title, will it be published as “new” if that is my desire? Does it change if I slightly alter the title?

If you delete the old story, your new offering will be "New". I'm assuming it's going to be far longer than the original 750 word story?

 

[FifthEstate]

If you delete the old story, your new offering will be "New". I'm assuming it's going to be far longer than the original 750 word story?

Yes it will, thanks.

 

[Djmac1031]

Interesting.

I've done a few rewrites; most notably on The Devil And Angel Em to sync it slightly better with the prequel I'd just finished for it.

But there are a few of my earlier works I've considered completely reworking, especially a few series that could have just been one story.

Plus I know I could vastly improve them.

An idea to keep in mind for sure.

 

[HeyAll]

Interesting thread, I've also taken down stories and then reposted them before with major edits. Two quick thoughts.

1) Laurel is right when talking about false reports, because when I resubmitted (even years later) there were a bunch of comments with people saying, 'Is this a repost? I think I've read this before.' There was even one story (can't remember which) where someone said that the original version was better.

2) This may be a coincidence, but I've noticed that repost stories (with the note at the top) tend to get placed at the bottom. Again, could be a coindence.

 

[nice90sguy]

My experience republishing stories under my new (current) name is that reputation counts for a lot. The same stories have different ratings than previously, sometimes significantly. This is probably in my case partly due to lower readership numbers in comparison to before, and therefore being more sensitive to 1 and 5 bombs.

My story "I Married My Sister" used to have a 4.8 score and a lot of votes. It's now at 4.38 with about 20 votes. Same story. It's one of my personal favorites, not high on sex, but really cleverly plotted, and pretty funny.

My non-erotic mystery story has just 1.7k views! Now I know non-erotic stories really don't belong here, but even so, I was shocked how few readers it got -- that didn't happen to me when I was NoJo.

But that's actually one of the main reasons I changed my username. I wanted to remove the loyalty bias from votes and readers, and start again.

 

[FifthEstate]

But that's actually one of the main reasons I changed my username. I wanted to remove the loyalty bias from votes and readers, and start again.

Makes for an interesting experiment most of our egos couldn’t handle…

 

[alohadave]

Makes for an interesting experiment most of our egos couldn’t handle…

Stephen King wrote the Bachman Books to see if people liked his writing for what it was, or if it was all name recognition. If he hadn't been found out, the next book he was going to publish under Bachman was Misery.

 

[nice90sguy]

Makes for an interesting experiment most of our egos couldn’t handle…

Perhaps, but the experiment is a sort of egotistical action anyway, seeking self-validation

 

[AwkwardMD]

Surprised to see removing plagiarism didn’t make the list, if only for completion's sake

 

[Stimtheone]

I thought about re-publishing stories as I re-read some of my earlier work and cringed at the many issues I had back then. BUT re-writing them while keeping them to be the same in most of everything would give only a small improvement. And maybe I'd be the only guy to notice, or maybe a couple of really astute readers.

 

[8letters]

Surprised to see removing plagiarism didn’t make the list, if only for completion's sake

Can you give me an example of a story that has been reposted because of removing plagiarism?

Let's say an author published three Illustrated stories that used the setting of a computer game, and that author realized that if they were going to lecture other authors about plagiarism, they shouldn't have such blatant copyright infringement in their own library. If such an author took down those stories and rewrote them to give them a generic setting, I could see that as reposting to remove plagiarism. But I know of no authors who have done such a thing.

I'd like to thank you for bringing up the "Are My Brother and Sister Lovers?" fiasco. I've been posting here regularly for months, and no one has asked me about it. I thought when I published "Are My Brother and Sister Lovers?" that it was within the site rules. In my interactions with Laurel since then, she has said nothing that would lead me to believe that I was wrong. I was the one who requested the story be taken down. As far as I can tell, the story would still be up today if I hadn't done so. I think today that I should have then (1) reached out to JCMcNeilly before I published to ask permission to use their sentences and (2) I should have given JCMcNeilly attribution at the beginning of the story.

I have no plans to republish "Are My Brother and Sister Lovers?".

For people unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, I'm talking about this thread.