Am I considered published?

And if you've done it once, you can do it again.

I have two published short stories, not self published. I'm published and so are you.

But when I send out queries for my WIP, I probably won't cite them as anything of significance.

AFAIK, that makes you ineligible. Might want to check the FAQs if they have them. Sometimes standards differ. Password-protected writing forums like SYW are always okay. Sometimes they'll take stuff if you've only blogged stories. Usually they spell it out. If they don't, I'd consider myself published even if I only blogged stories--best to err on the side of caution.

Find out what they mean by "Published"

For most places PUBLISHED means a trade published novel, but self published is ok.

Some may mean a self published novel (this is rare though, I've never come across any competition that considers this a publishing credit to be disqualified under).

Some may say "no more than three publications in a recognised journal." Think either an SFWA pro-paying market, New Yorker or Granta, NOT My Buddy's Kickstarted Antho Which Got Me Thirty BucksSome may say "nothing with a distribution over 5000 copies".

Best to check out the FAQ. It looks like you're OK though...

Can you link to an example or two, Treehouseman? I have the same impression of what counts as published as mrsmig and Cathleen. Guidelines from contests and publishers vary, but I've never run into the view that a book available for sale on Amazon wasn't published.

Anna Iguana said:

Can you link to an example or two, Treehouseman? I have the same impression of what counts as published as mrsmig and Cathleen. Guidelines from contests and publishers vary, but I've never run into the view that a book available for sale on Amazon wasn't published.

Click to expand...

It's not that, for example, getting a short story published isn't being published. It's more whether that publication will make someone ineligible for certain things. For a publisher, published is published in most cases. For a contest, published may be overlooked if it didn't hit other criteria (usually pay rate, distribution, etc). Contests (and similar) for new writers are generally hoping to promote those who haven't had much of a chance, hence tending to overlook tiny publications and sometimes not counting self-pub. Publishers are more concerned about how being public might influence future sales, and that can mean being more strict about it, down to not wanting to take stories that have been on Patreon and the like.

If you're hoping to enter a competition which is for unpublished writers only, check the competition's T&Cs to see how they define "published". Often, it means having a whole book of your own published by a trade publisher; sometimes, it's having anything published anywhere in any way. So the answer is, it depends.

Anna Iguana said:

Can you link to an example or two, Treehouseman? I have the same impression of what counts as published as mrsmig and Cathleen. Guidelines from contests and publishers vary, but I've never run into the view that a book available for sale on Amazon wasn't published.

Click to expand...

Sure, these ones are from Australia (I'm Australian so I tend to look into these first off):

https://overland.org.au/prizes/vu-short-story-prize-for-new-and-emerging-writers/

https://writersvictoria.org.au/resources/opps-and-comps/gmw-emerging-writers-comp

http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/com...wards/Pages/lord-mayors-creative-writing.aspx


Note that these are all "big" writing awards here for unpublished writers with 4-5 figure prize money. Self Published books are, for all purposes, not considered as a credit to disqualify from entry. It holds true for many New/Emerging writer competitions in Australia!

Thanks, Treehouseman. OP, I think Treehouseman and I were speaking to two different questions, as Polenth's post explains. There's a difference between whether your work is published (in ordinary usage, I'd say it is) vs. whether your work is considered published for the purposes of a contest (a definition often drawn more narrowly, as Treehouseman's examples show).

I noticed another ambiguity lurking in this thread -- the distinction between an unpublished author, and an unpublished work. The strictest definition of "published" would make almost everyone published one way or another -- even a poem published in a school journal is "published."

But it's relevant to make this distinction in certain contests. Some are for unpublished authors, which by definition means for unpublished works; others are for unpublished works, and the author's publication history is not considered.

This was of special interest when I entered my first collection of short stories in the annual Iowa Short Fiction competition. They consider any unpublished first short fiction collection, even if the author is a well-known published author. This was a surprise -- I was competing against authors who might have published a dozen novels, but who were offering their first short story anthology, so I was up against published authors as well. They also didn't mind that some of the stories in the collection had been on Amazon in "Brain Frieze" for well over a year. They didn't consider that to be "publishing" in the context of this competition.

Allen