What follows is my answer to a question I was asked on Quora, the international crowdsourcing Q&A website. In 2018 I got the nod as a top writer on Quora, a website I enjoyed because I could help people by answering their questions, from silly to curious, earnest and serious, and everything in between. In 2019 I dropped off from being so active on Quora because I'd amped my participation on Medium, a platform that pays its writers whose work is being read and appreciated.
Q: How effective is a personal website for short stories?
When the internet was first emerging I created a website and shared poetry, art, journalism and short stories…. among other things. There were not a lot of websites in 1995–96 and I even got a badge from the St Paul Pioneer Press as a Top 5 Minnesota Websites of the Week.
One day I got contacted by a poetry website in Croatia. They asked permission to translate my story Duel of the Poets into Croatian as a centerpiece. (The story now appears in my book Unremembered Histories.) A few months later a Russian website contacted me to translate another one of my stories into Russian.
Later, a French grad student was given the assignment to translate a story by an American writer into French and he selected my story Terrorists Preying. This was especially interesting because the word Preying is a Homonym for Praying and he had trouble trying to convey that in his translation.
Still later, I was contacted by a pair of young filmmakers for permission to make my story Episode on South Street into a short movie. I said I was honored and within the year it was on Vimeo.
I never made a penny, but felt honored and gratified that my work was appealing to readers. So I go back to the question “How effective in what way?” Keep in mind that the whole world is uploading content at dizzying speeds and your little batch of stories may never be seen at all if you don’t also find ways to let people know they are there. According to this website “There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating.”
I think a website is useful for having all your work in one place. The downside is that most publications consider your work “published” if you do this, and you will have trouble selling it later.
I did it in order to share my work with readers. I disliked the whole game of sending things to publishers and waiting for rejection slips. But if you do decide to put your stories online, you can also repurpose them and share them on. Medium, which is a community fo writers.
As a final aside I'll mention here that also used the website to share a few stories my children wrote. We were homeschooling for a while and in 2000 or 2001 I shared a long cowboy story my son had written and two of my daughter's stories. As it turns out, one of my daughter's stories was published in a California periodical and another in a New Zealand publication. No money in either, but it did make me a proud papa.
I hope this has been helpful.
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