Co-posting suggestions for a new story

[W_L]

I have written a month's worth of a new story, but I feel like expanding my posting options in case readership is too low on GA for this genre.

The story will be a Sci-Fi/Historical Fiction set in the Late Ming Dynasty China, it has genres related to Progression fantasy, STEM, Steampunk, Silkpunk, and Wuxia. It's a danmei inspired novel, written in English.

In the past, I have co-posted on other sites, like IOMFATS, and I've written with other authors collectively shared universe, but none of those places seem to fit this new story.

Off the top of my mind: I am considering two sites to co-host my new story that might work.

1. Scribble Hub- Alot of former LGBTq Royal Road authors for Progression Fantasy have moved here.

2. Archive of Our Own- It's essentially everything, plus the kitchen sink in terms of stories. I'm not sure if I'll attract many readers there for this kind of novel.

I am thinking Scribble Hub would be a good place to co-host this story, what do others think? Or do you have other suggestions?

Edited July 2 by W_L

[ReaderPaul]

@W_L, as a reader, I had not previously heard of Scribble Hub.  I have heard of and have read stories on ao3 dot org but sometimes their search feature is slightly problematic until one learns the quirks.  But a lot of sites are really a problem.  If you want to be found anywhere, other than here, I would suggest ao3 dot org (also reachable at archiveofourown dot org) .

[Krista]

5 hours ago, W_L said:

I have written a month's worth of a new story, but I feel like expanding my posting options in case readership is too low on GA for this genre.

The story will be a Sci-Fi/Historical Fiction set in the Late Ming Dynasty China, it has genres related to Progression fantasy, STEM, Steampunk, Silkpunk, and Wuxia. It's a danmei inspired novel, written in English.

In the past, I have co-posted on other sites, like IOMFATS, and I've written with other authors collectively shared universe, but none of those places seem to fit this new story.

Off the top of my mind: I am considering two sites to co-host my new story that might work.

1. Scribble Hub- Alot of former LGBTq Royal Road authors for Progression Fantasy have moved here.

2. Archive of Our Own- It's essentially everything, plus the kitchen sink in terms of stories. I'm not sure if I'll attract many readers there for this kind of novel.

I am thinking Scribble Hub would be a good place to co-host this story, what do others think? Or do you have other suggestions?

Archive of our Own is severely bloated. I thought it was also highly skewed around "Fanfictions," and "Fandoms," more so than original fictions? Either way, the bloat on that platform + the general content that's popular there, I agree, I doubt there would be an audience there? The bloat and general engagement makes the whole ordeal seem less organized and author friendly. 

I do not have any information on the other one though, I have never heard of it. 

[W_L]

@ReaderPaul and @Krista,

Yeah, I agree with the assessment on Ao3, it's a nice place for fanfics though.

Scribble hub is a place I recently discovered from authors I followed on Royal Road initially. LGBTq authors seem to have a decent following over there, Then, I found a nice gay baseball romance story called The First Out by Rick Bauer that was moved over from wattpad to it. It does show they have some serious authors on the site.

There are also some spicier stories, both the kind with explicit content and adult issues. Those stories like most on bigger sites seem to garner the biggest readership.

I just want to cut a niche for myself as a historical gay fiction author, not seeking the 40K readership at the top, but I'd be happy to share my story with more people.

[Luca E]

I took a look at Scribble Hub because I was curious, what I found was a lot of Lesbian stories and some gay boy stories all terribly written and basically teenage stuff written by hormonal teenagers who are just discovering their sexuality and want to express it. Well they probably want a boy or girlfriend to have sex with. It's full of stuff like I wrote age thirteen. As for any serious gay themed stories, I didn't find any and wouldn't post there. Royal Road is okay, but demands an investment in mutual reviews and commenting. If you find any serious site post a link, I wouldn't bother with Awesome dude or Castle Roland, if they're still even functioning, it would be a miracle if you get a reply on a submission. You could look at The Story Lover. Good luck.

[ReaderPaul]

48 minutes ago, Luca E said:

I took a look at Scribble Hub because I was curious, what I found was a lot of Lesbian stories and some gay boy stories all terribly written and basically teenage stuff written by hormonal teenagers who are just discovering their sexuality and want to express it. Well they probably want a boy or girlfriend to have sex with. It's full of stuff like I wrote age thirteen. As for any serious gay themed stories, I didn't find any and wouldn't post there. Royal Road is okay, but demands an investment in mutual reviews and commenting. If you find any serious site post a link, I wouldn't bother with Awesome dude or Castle Roland, if they're still even functioning, it would be a miracle if you get a reply on a submission. You could look at The Story Lover. Good luck.

AwesomeDude dot org is active.  Castle Roland is not very active for the last several months.

[E K Stokes]

My experience of AwesomeDude is one of being rejected and told to rewrite the story I submitted. When I said I had received some positive comments here and only wanted - like you - to expand my audience, the guy basically said get lost and don't send us anymore of your stories find another site.

We all start somewhere and hopefully improve, we don't need pompous, self-righteous responses. I think they were pissed at spending time giving advice I never asked for and wasn't going to take. I do listen and take on-board comments and suggestions about my writing, but I prefer to move forward with new stories than rewrite old ones.

You decide if that site is worth your time, you have my experience.

The other sites I can recommend are: IOMFATS and The Story Lover, but that said the best site is this one by miles!

[W_L]

6 hours ago, Luca E said:

I took a look at Scribble Hub because I was curious, what I found was a lot of Lesbian stories and some gay boy stories all terribly written and basically teenage stuff written by hormonal teenagers who are just discovering their sexuality and want to express it. Well they probably want a boy or girlfriend to have sex with. It's full of stuff like I wrote age thirteen. As for any serious gay themed stories, I didn't find any and wouldn't post there. Royal Road is okay, but demands an investment in mutual reviews and commenting. If you find any serious site post a link, I wouldn't bother with Awesome dude or Castle Roland, if they're still even functioning, it would be a miracle if you get a reply on a submission. You could look at The Story Lover. Good luck.

It's hard and I don't disagree some of the most popular gay boy stories on scribble hub is much closer to nifty erotic stories than GA.

However, the top story with 40K readership, though, I will give the author credit for writing 264 chapters and 442K words.

The Grandmaster’s weird disciple [BL]

It's one of the reasons why I am tempted to co-post on there, I'd be happy with 1% the audience or 0.1% even, since I am writing essentially an English Danmei.

Royal Road has had some bad history with LGBTq authors: abusive homophobic comments with minimal oversight, and a LitRPG heavy readership that demands a certain formulaic things. It's where I go for non-LGBT fantasy and kingdom building stuff, but as a gay author, I am not interested in a combative relationship.

6 hours ago, ReaderPaul said:

AwesomeDude dot org is active.  Castle Roland is not very active for the last several months.

 

2 hours ago, E K Stokes said:

My experience of AwesomeDude is one of being rejected and told to rewrite the story I submitted. When I said I had received some positive comments here and only wanted - like you - to expand my audience, the guy basically said get lost and don't send us anymore of your stories find another site.

We all start somewhere and hopefully improve, we don't need pompous, self-righteous responses. I think they were pissed at spending time giving advice I never asked for and wasn't going to take. I do listen and take on-board comments and suggestions about my writing, but I prefer to move forward with new stories than rewrite old ones.

You decide if that site is worth your time, you have my experience.

The other sites I can recommend are: IOMFATS and The Story Lover, but that said the best site is this one by miles!

Good to know about Awesomedude, I don't think I ever worked with them before.

Castle Roland is interesting; More than 10 years ago Roland and I were writing in the Clan Short shared universe, but it was a long-time ago. The site has changed a lot. I might check to see if there's room for me, since he does fantasy settings.

IOMFATS is fine, only problem is my story's genre and overall readership of IOMFATS isn't really geared toward this kind of story. I post over there under the pen-name Wendell Locke.

I do love GA and have written here for years, but our readership sadly is just not high enough for certain kinds of stories. 

---

Thanks for the suggestions and thoughts on sites for co-posting, finding a place to branch out audiences and go into the deep end of BL/Danmei stories is like apartment hunting.

Edited July 3 by W_L

[CassieQ]

10 hours ago, Krista said:

Archive of our Own is severely bloated. I thought it was also highly skewed around "Fanfictions," and "Fandoms," more so than original fictions? Either way, the bloat on that platform + the general content that's popular there, I agree, I doubt there would be an audience there? The bloat and general engagement makes the whole ordeal seem less organized and author friendly. 

I do not have any information on the other one though, I have never heard of it. 

It's been many many years, but AdultFanfiction.org had an entire section for original fiction.  It's where I started out, but it's been ages so I can't say if it's still a worthwhile place to check out.  

[Ron]

Why hem and haw about where to post? Just post it on all of those various venues that you have considered. What have you got to lose?!

[Mike Carss]

53 minutes ago, Ron said:

What have you got to lose?

For me, it's the time required to set up the landing page for each novel and post individual chapters, and my catalogue only consists of three novels and two novellas. What about those who have literally dozens of works? 😓

[Krista]

6 hours ago, CassieQ said:

It's been many many years, but AdultFanfiction.org had an entire section for original fiction.  It's where I started out, but it's been ages so I can't say if it's still a worthwhile place to check out.  

I haven't heard of AdultFanfiction.org, I've heard of Ao3 and Fanfiction.net, Fanfiction if I'm remembering correctly is rather bloated as well, but has a cleaner look.

I tried to look at AFF.org, and encountered a bug loop. I'll have to see if there's a way to get around it when I have more time, to determine if it is a clean UI and the levels of bloat. And by bloat, I don't mean there's "too much writing..." bloat to me, is the categories are extremely bloated, to where stories are mislabeled so their search functions are pointless. You will always have a difficult time finding specific genres, stories, characters that you want to read about. Far too many tags as well, which also adds to the search feature being difficult. 

I am a cleaner, less is more sort of person. Too many tags doesn't help me determine if I want to read a story.

[Ron]

39 minutes ago, Mike Carss said:

What about those who have literally dozens of works?

I wasn't suggesting that every story requires such a broadcast. The author is not speaking about dozens of works but one stand alone story that they are not sure will gain a broad audience. Why not vary one's options for such a story?

[Krista]

47 minutes ago, Mike Carss said:

For me, it's the time required to set up the landing page for each novel and post individual chapters, and my catalogue only consists of three novels and two novellas. What about those who have literally dozens of works? 😓

I mean, that's up to the author to decide, right? Authors should champion their own stories, if they feel like cross-posting to different areas and has the will and attention span to do it, who are we to judge?

The downside being that with multiple sites hosting your work, there's more you have to pay attention to as far as protecting your story from thieves who steal it and promote the writing as their own.

I used to post to: Yahoo Groups, Nifty, GA. I have a story on Fanfiction.Net that I abandoned, and that same story cross-posted to Ao3. I've since had my stories completely removed from Nifty. They didn't protect me, or help when some of my stories were stolen and posted elsewhere without my permission. Some of those sites were very... bad, as far as what else was mingling with the story they stole. 

And some hosting platforms has rules about cross-posting one should be aware with, some places don't like to host/platform stories or authors that spread themselves all over the place. 

[Jason Rimbaud]

9 hours ago, E K Stokes said:

My experience of AwesomeDude is one of being rejected and told to rewrite the story I submitted. When I said I had received some positive comments here and only wanted - like you - to expand my audience, the guy basically said get lost and don't send us anymore of your stories find another site.

We all start somewhere and hopefully improve, we don't need pompous, self-righteous responses. I think they were pissed at spending time giving advice I never asked for and wasn't going to take. I do listen and take on-board comments and suggestions about my writing, but I prefer to move forward with new stories than rewrite old ones.

You decide if that site is worth your time, you have my experience.

The other sites I can recommend are: IOMFATS and The Story Lover, but that said the best site is this one by miles!

Awesome Dude does have some particular submission guidelines. For one, they must see the entire novel before they consider hosting it. Then they will pair you with an editor of their choosing, and you must make the changes they suggest, whether you agree with them or not. They decide the posting schedule, the photo (you can choose one from their approved list, but they won't accept any AI), and pretty much the design of the piece. And they only use word.docs. I left there about a year ago, haven't gone back since. 

Not because of the posting guidelines but for other reasons that I won't bother going into here. 

[Myr]

I'll weigh in here to clarify a few things.  Every site out there has its quirks, advantages, and disadvantages.  From a Gay Authors standpoint, we support crossposting on whatever sites you want to post at.  For our promoted authors, we ask that you post to Gay Authors first.  

And while authors can certainly post about their individual experiences with different sites, please be careful to not paint an entire site with the same brush as, for whatever reason, what you experience may be an individual issue versus a common one.  We certainly have come down hard on people in the past for reasons specific to them.  Obviously, we don't do that to everyone, and I wouldn't want other places portraying us as such. Thus, I give respect to others.

I am crossposted on FanFiction.net for my FanFiction stories.  I might post to AO3 sometime.  I certainly read fanfictions there the most these days.

@W_LMy research is telling me that your story type is appealing to a younger demographic, which Gay Authors is currently weak on.  One of my main focuses on the massive software upgrade that's going on is to do a large overhaul of Gay Authors with a focus on appealing to the younger audience while maintaining functionality for power users and simplifying things for the non-power users.  And once we have all the software in place, I'll be working specifically to expand Gay Authors' audience base.  It's hard to do so now, since we are viewed as clunky forums and lists by modern standards.

[ReaderPaul]

1 hour ago, Myr said:

I'll weigh in here to clarify a few things.  Every site out there has its quirks, advantages, and disadvantages.  From a Gay Authors standpoint, we support crossposting on whatever sites you want to post at.  For our promoted authors, we ask that you post to Gay Authors first.  

And while authors can certainly post about their individual experiences with different sites, please be careful to not paint an entire site with the same brush as, for whatever reason, what you experience may be an individual issue versus a common one.  We certainly have come down hard on people in the past for reasons specific to them.  Obviously, we don't do that to everyone, and I wouldn't want other places portraying us as such. Thus, I give respect to others.

I am crossposted on FanFiction.net for my FanFiction stories.  I might post to AO3 sometime.  I certainly read fanfictions there the most these days.

@W_LMy research is telling me that your story type is appealing to a younger demographic, which Gay Authors is currently weak on.  One of my main focuses on the massive software upgrade that's going on is to do a large overhaul of Gay Authors with a focus on appealing to the younger audience while maintaining functionality for power users and simplifying things for the non-power users.  And once we have all the software in place, I'll be working specifically to expand Gay Authors' audience base.  It's hard to do so now, since we are viewed as clunky forums and lists by modern standards.

@Myr, I am confused by the term "power-users" and "non-power users".  I read more stuff here on GA than all other story sites put together, with IOMfAtS and CastleRoland being the next two after GA.  

[Myr]

1 hour ago, ReaderPaul said:

I am confused by the term "power-users" and "non-power users"

People who like the features of Gay Authors (Power users) vs people who think Gay Authors is too complicated and needs to be simple, "Like Nifty".

[ReaderPaul]

Thank you,  @Myr.  That makes me a power user,  then.

[Jason Rimbaud]

On 7/5/2026 at 12:48 PM, Myr said:

People who like the features of Gay Authors (Power users) vs people who think Gay Authors is too complicated and needs to be simple, "Like Nifty".

Well, the ability to manage my own silly writing is the main reason I decided to stay at GA. Other sites wanted too much back and forth, or I had to rely on them to post things, and they always wanted it in a different format. And the guidelines aren't restrictive, or at least they aren't unreasonable. So I can't wait for the new updates. 

 

 

[Myr]

4 minutes ago, Jason Rimbaud said:

So I can't wait for the new updates. 

Me either!  Hopefully entering alpha testing this week.

5 minutes ago, Jason Rimbaud said:

ability to manage my own silly writing

We used to have to do that before we went to our Story Archive software.  We have over 80 chapters per week... if we had to manually post and review those, we'd go crazy.