What's considered published?

If they're private (password protected) then most publishers won't consider them published. I don't fully understand the rights Google or Facebook have, but I don't think they have any worrisome rights.

If Google takes rights through use of Drive, a whole lot of writers are in the deep stuff.

Chekurtab said:

Is the material published or not? Does Google or Facebook have any rights to the files?

Click to expand...

No and no.

Publishing does not include saving it to a semi-public location.

As for rights, you maintain all rights until you assign them away.

Jeff

It's is not considered published. Password protected or private/secret material is considered by the vast majority of publishers as the same as if you passed something around to a few friends or an offline critique group. That's because of a few reasons, but the main ones relevant to you are that it's unlikely to have a strong effect on the number of copies a publisher acquiring your work could sell, does not make the material available for anyone to read, and doesn't implicitly grant some other company first rights.


As far as Google or Facebook having rights, that's still a bit of a controversy...

Forget what is or is not technically "published". Editors can buy any damned thing they want, as long as you don't sell or sign away the rights to someone else. Just use common sense and don't post it on your blog or your website.

You're fine. If you can name the people who have seen your work, then you're okay. Published means nearly anyone can get it by normal means, searching on the web, buying it from a store etc.