For an aspiring author, someone hoping to earn a living from writing, it can seem like defeat to give away work that took a lot of effort. There are plenty of places online to get published but almost none of them will offer the author anything for doing so. Sites that publish fiction are in general small businesses whose cash flow wouldn't support payment to authors. So the options for new authors wanting payment seem to be either to give your work away, or stay invisible until you manage to publish something. Publishing via commercial publishers has a very low success rate so often authors are better off publishing things themselves, an option becoming increasingly viable with print on demand services.
But we shouldn't be so negative about the idea of giving work away. When we get work published on websites, that's not nothing - we have already received something back, the readership. Making our writing available to readers means that our work has already had an effect. Someone, perhaps lots of people, have read your work. Had you not given the work away, they would not have been able to read it and although you might have considered it to be potential money in the bank. it probably wasn't.
So what are the benefits of giving work away?
- Exposure. People get to see your work, and your name. Of course not everyone visiting the site will read your work, but there will be some.
- Recognition. People will realise that your are a writer and when they see your name somewhere else, it will bring your work back to mind.
- Publicity. If/when you do publish something, these people are your potential market.
- Your CV. If you do decide to find an agent or publisher, you will have something available for them to see, showing that you are serious about writing and have delivered the goods. There are thousands, if not millions, of people who say they would like to write but haven't. You have. It's there to see.
Against that you can find some disadvantages as well, of course.
- Having given your work away, it's harder to get paid for it from similar places.
- You are devoting time to producing work which is not earning anything.
On balance, it seems as though getting the exposure and recognition is an important part of being known as a writer and unless you can get to that step, being published is rather difficult. Perhaps the best combination is to give away work in exchange for the publicity and exposure (so it's a trade rather than a donation) and then to consider publishing other material. It's more work, but useful work.
