Writers: Get Published Online

Ever since the success of our first Stories By Email website, our authors have been making quarterly royalties for their work since 2002. The money isn't enough to live on, but it's steady. We are launching this new edition of Stories By Email with the intention of continuing this tradition. You can be a part of it. Our authors write for the love of writing and having someone else read and appreciate their work. That's something we can guarantee if you're a good writer. The readers who visit Stories By Email definitely appreciate good writing.

As a Stories By Email author, you get to choose when and what you publish with us. You are responsible for editing and proofreading your own work. If you do a Google or Yahoo! search of proofreaders, you'll find hundreds of editors and proofreaders willing to offer their services to you at reasonable fees. Some of the better-priced editors and proofreaders we've seen include the following:

• Assonet Review
• Edits Online
• Perfect Editing
• Puffread — uses volunteer proofreaders
• Shelly Rosenberg

If you find other reasonably priced editors our authors would like to know about, contact us with the URL of the editor's website.

As a Stories By Email author, you get the opportunity to publish your own emailed ezine. The word ezine means "electronic magazine." In a sense, that is what an emailed story is....a part of an ongoing electronic magazine. There are no deadlines that you have to meet. Since the subscribers who receive your ezine have specifically signed up to receive your work, there is no need to have a regular schedule. You simply logon to your private SBE control panel whenever you are ready to publish your next story, load it into the system, and schedule the date for it to be sent to your readers. You can even reschedule a previously emailed story to run whenever you wish. Of course, if you're smart, you won't send your stories out as repeats too often or your readers might just as quickly unsubscribe from your email list with us.

Once your stories have been loaded and scheduled to send, they are automatically included in our online listings on this website as well. This way, visitors to the site can read your stories at their leisure without having to subscribe to you ezine. Of course, if your writing is good enough, many of them will subscribe anyway once they've read your previously published work!

Getting back to royalties, you may be wondering how we earn the money to pay you. Royalties are paid out of revenue from advertisers. You say you don't notice the ads on our site? Good! That means we're doing our job in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. The ads are little text ads that will appear in the bottom-left portions of the pages. On many pages, you'll simply see a link entitled Link Ads. This link goes to the site where our links are sold to advertisers at very reasonable prices. Other pages will have other links in this position. These are actual paid links.

The way we calculate your quarterly royalties (as well as the royalties of our other authors) is that we track the readers who visit our site and count up how many of them visit your stories online to read them. Your readership is then calculated as a percentage of total readership for the website. This percentage is applied to 40% of our  earnings from the advertisers. The result is the amount you collect in royalties. Please note: when you sign up as an author, you will be asked to provide an email address through which you can receive royalty payments via PayPal. PayPal is the method we use to send royalty payments to our authors.

So are you ready to get started? Click here to set up your account.