Two stories that were slow to update here that seem to have disappeared. Cannot remember the titles or authors.
1) took place at a comic convention, something involving an amulet and MC building a harem at the con due to influence?
2) Do over, MC was a teen girl in a trailer park, sent back by malfunction in MRI. Keeps getting beaten by enemies and rivals.
2, the do-over with MRI and trailer park, is probably "Trailer Trash" by fortysixtyfour. It's not here anymore, but is available elsewhere. Updates have been very slow and getting slower; the last one was in late December. With its large scope and the author's apparent health issues, I doubt it will ever be finished.
With its large scope and the author's apparent health issues
I thought his problem was his bank account's health issues, and with a recession seemingly on the way those issues are going to get worse.
The reason he left here was the way he "publishes" his stories, he puts his chapters up on Patreon for a couple of months before posting them on a site which offers them for free but encourages donations. SOL's TOS allows the site owner to retrieve updates posted elsewhere to stories which are here (after some time) and add them to the version here. 4064 took grave exception when exactly that happened.
The solution for this - from an author's point of view - is to remove their stories from this site. He did.
Another author who ran foul of that is GMW with her "Spitfire & Messerschmidt" and she eventually went the same route (as an aside, I thought the updates made the story worse).
My feeling is that that part of the TOS is more trouble than it's worth, although I could see the value in updating something like https://storiesonline.net/s/46723/car-54 from the author's site - he vanished in late 2020 and does not appear to be coming back.
GMW's updates made it worse, no question. She agrees, and has written about it elsewhere.
It's a big mess of people playing games and counter-games, because we haven't figured out a way to compensate online authors yet that works well for all parties involved.
The key is, you can always make money off of your work on SOL by offering the story on Bookapy. However, these people are looking for 'donations' per chapter, with no plans to complete the whole story.
I can understand their frustration, yet when you openly flaunt the rules, you get what you deserve. Some of our longer epics are facing the same issue, as they're now looking for some way to monitories their efforts, yet publishing seems beyond their expertise.
It would be nice having another way of earning money from our efforts, yet that's not part of the whole SOL 'amateur" writer model.
However, the other problem are the SOL readers, who unlike most sites, won't pay like is required on most sites. They instead prefer to read the whole story for free, and then purchase the book just to encourage the authors to continue.
Too much of a 'good thing', I guess.
As for GMW, part of her current problem is that receiving the online per-chapter feedback is what keeps most of us from getting carried away with our stories. So without the feedback, she can't control her own stories. Again, hardly an uncommon problem with most 'untrained', non-professional authors.
GMW had a stroke 15-20 years ago and her health subsequently declined to the point she could no longer write to her previous standard. Her own site permits (encourages) user feedback so lack of feedback was never a problem, I'm unsure of the timeline but believe she did not turn her attention back to Spitfire and Messerschmidt until around 2017.
4064 posts "Re: Trailer Trash" as he writes it (once the newest chapters have been on Patreon for a while) and Bookapy is for finished stories so pretty much unavailable to him.
"All parties involved" includes:
* Web site operators, who want enough revenue to cover their costs and something for their time.
* Authors, who range from those who just want someone to see what they wrote to those who are trying to make a living without dealing with dead-tree publishing houses. Financial expectations seem to be only weakly correlated with story quality.
* Readers, who vary widely in budget, willingness to pay, and how much they read. Some come from the dead-tree world, and think $5 for an ebook is cheap. Others come from usenet and the 1990s web, and think any price is too much.
* Payment processors, who seem to think that charging $0.30 USD per transaction is cheap.
In the last 15 years, I've read about 10,000 stories on three main sites and a few smallerones. At typical bookapy prices of around $5 each, I couldn't have afforded more than maybe 500 of them. And if I'd had to buy before reading them, at bookapy prices and the typical SOL range of quality, I doubt I'd have bought any and certainly not 10.
"* Readers, who vary widely in budget, willingness to pay, and how much they read. Some come from the dead-tree world, and think $5 for an ebook is cheap. Others come from usenet and the 1990s web, and think any price is too much."
Yeah. I'm between the two.
I have perhaps half a dozen content producers I support through Patreon. And there's another 3 or 4 authors who I support via Bookapy purchases (or similar).
But as much as I would love to support more authors, their writing quality isn't good enough to justify $US5 ($A8.50) for what is essentially a short story.
I don't know what the solution is.
Yeah, that's long been as issue for most of our Australian authors, so you're hardly the only one. But that's the beauty of advertising your publication on SOL, as the readers CAN read it for free, as at least for me, offering comments and feedback is just as valuable as purchasing a copy. Otherwise, most novelists never receive any direct feedback, to help refine their craft. Thus, any contribution is valid, whether it's financial or just upvoting my efforts so more readers will notice and appreciate it.
Heck, send me a private message and I'll give you the eBook, just for this feedback! ;)