How long does it take to publish a story?

[Audiflex]

I’ve published a few stories since I’ve been on this site and normally they take a few days to publish, but I have one story that I’ve been trying to get published since November and it’s just stuck in pending. Is it normal for this to happen?

Cheers

P.S Apologies if this is in the wrong thread.

That actually sounds unusual. It's worth reaching out to the site’s support team or checking their FAQs for any updates or delays in the publishing process. Hopefully, they can get it sorted for you soon.

 

[Dearelliot]

Waiting two weeks today. In the past they usually were published in 4 or 5 days, but that was maybe in 2023.

 

[drkgod]

I’ve been waiting for a week, and still pending. Anyone else waiting in queue longer than the specified 2 - 5 days?

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

Are you guys tweaking stories after they're listed as published? I put a new chapter in the queue Weds and it's ready to go on Saturday, so stories are still getting out in the usual time frame.

 

[RejectReality]

Everyone experiencing these long waits should probably steel themselves for the possibility they're getting flagged for AI. There is a bug that causes submissions not to show up in Laurel's dashboard, but it's way more rare than this. Something else is going on, and that's the most likely culprit IMO. The queue is moving along regular as can be for a fair number of us. My last two were 2, and then 3 days from submission to publication. Both were actually pre-approved with future dates within the first 24 hours after submission. ( Granted, they were short. One's a single Lit page, and the other isn't much longer )

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

Both were actually pre-approved with future dates within the first 24 hours after submission. ( Granted, they were short. One's a single Lit page, and the other isn't much longer )

Same here, but nothing I write is ever short, lol.

 

[lovecraft68]

Right now what people should do is if the story is still not published after 5 days-with no rules kickback-delete the story and republish. Things are simply going into some type of limbo where Laurel is not 'seeing' them. I know several people this has worked for and the second effort went through within three days.

 

[RejectReality]

Right now what people should do is if the story is still not published after 5 days-with no rules kickback-delete the story and republish. Things are simply going into some type of limbo where Laurel is not 'seeing' them. I know several people this has worked for and the second effort went through within three days.

That's what I used to tell people, but things have changed. I've had at least three people say that ended up being a zero sum effort after I suggested. Still sitting for more than a week even after resubmission, which pretty much never happened in the past.

I suppose it's worth one attempt, but after that, it's not the submission bug void you're in. It's something else.

 

[NasoNocturne]

Everyone experiencing these long waits should probably steel themselves for the possibility they're getting flagged for AI. There is a bug that causes submissions not to show up in Laurel's dashboard, but it's way more rare than this. Something else is going on, and that's the most likely culprit IMO. The queue is moving along regular as can be for a fair number of us. My last two were 2, and then 3 days from submission to publication. Both were actually pre-approved with future dates within the first 24 hours after submission. ( Granted, they were short. One's a single Lit page, and the other isn't much longer )

I think you're probably right about the AI flagging although I don't claim to have anywhere near the experience others do here.

Actually find the AI part a little depressing, published the first part of a story I was writing without problem but when I submitted an edit it got an AI rejection. Somewhat ironic since my only changes were changing the title (stupidly as first time author didn't think to check that my title wasn't taken), adding tags and correcting typos.

I had hoped to change the title and create a manual series but since I already have the next two chapters ready I ended up deciding to just submit with the old title so that it would be added to the automatic series - just didn't feel like waiting a couple of additional weeks to potentially be rejected again. Still only a few days into waiting on my second chapter so too early to tell what the outcome will be.

I totally understand the concern about AI but the AI rejections are pretty depressing since I know I used zero AI (included grammerly which I've seen others mention). After the rejection I tried to figure out what caused it but after looking at various sites all I could determine is that AI detection is pretty bullshit. As an example, the first chapter of my story is rated as 0% AI by quillbot, 14% AI by gptzero and 36.9% AI by zerogpt - Chatgpt and Grok both rate it as highly likely to be written by a human.

Don't really have answers and I empathize with Laurel's position but honestly the whole experience sucks and even though I know the AI rejection is probably system generated it still feels accusatory. Was pretty excited to start writing (do some non-erotic writing for work) but the publication process is so painful it's kind of killing my desire.

 

[RejectReality]

I'm shaking my head lately at all the just be patient replies to these. Really? Anybody saying that, how long was it from submission to publication of your last half a dozen works? I betcha the answer is going to be 2-3 days, and maybe rarely, 4-5. ( Coincidentally, exactly what the FAQ says ) I'll go even further. I can't think of a submission that wasn't posted that quickly since at least 2010, though it was probably earlier. Even when it was longer, when I first started, it was a week on average.

If:

It's in the pending folder and not the drafts folder.
It's not illustrated, audio, an image, or an interactive story. ( The last two I threw in just because I've heard about images taking a long time and I haven't a clue about the processing of interactive )
It's not an edit of an existing published work.

And:

It's been longer than 7 days. ( Let's be generous and say 2 weeks for a brand new author with no or very little published work yet, though I think you'd be hard pressed to find examples of anyone who had to wait more than the stated 2-5 days even when they were brand new, prior to the AI prohibition going into force. )

There's a frikkin' issue.

Open it, preview it, hit the publish button, and reset its position in the queue. If it's still sitting untouched a week later after doing that, write it off, and take that one to another venue. The odds of falling into that bug where it doesn't show up in the submissions queue twice in a row are miniscule. There's something else holding it back ( probably an AI flag ) and there's no point beating your head against a wall.