What Site Should I Use to Post My Furry Stories?

This article was originally posted on The Furry Writer.

This is a good question that might come to mind when you’re looking for places to upload your latest anthro fiction tale. It’s also one that might not be answered as easily as you’d like if you’re a newcomer to the fandom or the world of writing furry fiction.

There’s a few sites and ideas I have in regards to where you can post your stories. Let’s take a look and see what’s out there.

1. Fur Affinity

You can’t have a discussion about uploading furry works without bringing up Fur Affinity, it seems. The site’s still going strong as the place to post up your furry artwork, with no real serious challengers in sight.

It seems to work well for artists – but what about those of us who are more text-based? It makes sense to want to post to FA. You’ve got the biggest furry art site, and a rather active userbase. It’s got to be the right choice, right?

Well, this is where we run into some problems.

While the site works great for artists I honestly can’t say the same for our writing friends. Not only are “Recent Writings and Stories” underneath “Recent Submissions” on the main page, but they also have smaller thumbnails, so they aren’t quite as eye-catching.

And then there’s the text editor. Or rather, the lack of.

If you’re doing a story submission you’re asked to upload a document. If you actually want the text to appear on the page, you’ll have to save it as a .txt. Oh, and you’ll have to make sure you encode it as a UTF-8.

For those using Microsoft Word, this means you need to make sure to not just save it as a .txt , but also make sure it’s encoded as Unicode (UTF-8). I’m still stuck using an older version, so the option to do this pops up once I click Save after selecting Plain Text.

What? I found out about Scrivener and I never looked back.

Now what if you don’t want to use the ol’ Plain Text file? No on-screen text for you! Sure, you could cram your submission description with the story text. And if you want anything like bold text? Brush up on your BB Code. Images are out of the question completely. Especially if you opted for the Plain Text format.

Not to mention…the site still looks like it belongs in the 2000’s.

2. SoFurry

While not the powerhouse that Fur Affinity is, SoFurry is an all-around strong option for those furry writers who want to throw up their fiction online but stay firmly among their fandom members.

The submission process is far easier than in FA. All you do is click “Upload”, click “Story”, and you’ve got your text box and are on the way to story time. No need to fuss with the “correct” file format – you can just copy and paste in your text from whatever word editor you use.

A word of caution though – sometimes my line spacing is off when I paste the text in. Nothing a few backspaces can’t solve, but be wary of that.

• 

• 

The text box is also nice as there’s basic formatting options too, so no need to memorize BB code to do things like lists, bold text, and italics.

I’ll admit though, the way things are laid out on the page is a little odd for me. Plus your description will appear above the submission. I suppose that makes sense but keep that in mind when crafting your submission descriptions!

You still can’t add images though. Well, you do have the ability to add HTML to a submission, but I haven’t played around with it yet.

Also, if you’re a writer who occasionally draws, or gets commissions that go with your story, image submissions are also available on SoFurry.

All in all, not a bad site! Definitely check it out if you want a solid site while still remaining firmly in the furry territory.

3. WattPad

To be honest, I don’t have a ton of experience on WattPad, but there are a few things on it that are worth noting.

For starters, we’re once again greeted by our friend the big empty text box. In fact, the text editor barely has any buttons or text at all. This makes it great for those looking for a more distraction-free aesthetic. That also includes the text formatting options, which only appear when you highlight text.

On the positive side, you can finally add images freely to your chapters.

Oh yeah, I should probably mention that.

WattPad doesn’t let you upload individual one-off pieces, but whole stories. Those of you who do short stories might have to get creative, like making a “Story” that’ll simply serve as a collection for your short pieces.

You might also have to get a touch creative – stories will need an image to serve as the cover for the story. You can even add individual header images for each chapter in your story!

WattPad also has a couple of other neat features to take note of. Do you struggle with keeping notes for your story? You can actually add private notes to any of your stories, like who the main character is, their traits, and more.

Personally, I like to use Scrivener to keep track of my notes, as you can do all kinds of folders and categorizations and other neat things. But for those who either want a quick solution or want to keep things more or less on the same page, it’s a neat feature.

WattPad also offers monetization options. If your story gets enough reads, you can apply to have it enter its monetization program and earn actual money from your story. The tradeoff, though, is that readers will have to buy coins and purchase the story in order to read it.

So, it’s a sort of mini self-publishing deal. But this does differ from some other monetization strategies. For example, Medium lets you make any of your posts part of the Partner Program. Folks are still able to read the story, and income is determined by views and read percentages.

But Medium’s a completely different beast. It’s more for traditional blogging – but if you want to be adventurous and post your furry stories on there, go ahead! It’s free and joining the partner program is free too.

4. Your Own Site

What? Posting your furry stories on your own website? What are you Nicholas, crazy!?

Nope! In fact, it’s a smart thing to do – having your own website helps to hedge your bets in case something happens to whatever page you have your story on. Imagine if you only uploaded to FA, and suddenly something happens to the site. Uh oh, there goes all your work!

But this is perhaps the most….open-ended method to use. There’s a plethora of sites out there and both paid and non-paid options. For example, my friend uses LiveJournal (yes it still exists) to host their own story saga.

This site is hosted on BlueHost and is powered by WordPress. I even played around with making a new site for my friend’s story on WordPress.

I’ve been using BlueHost for a few years now, and they’ve been pretty good to me. Plus, the ability to make as many subdomains as I want with no extra charge means I can just fire up a new one if I get a new story idea. And BlueHost makes installing WordPress on it really easy, so within the hour I’m browsing themes and ready to rock and roll.

This kinda stuff is a little more advanced, so younger writers might want to stick to using the other three sites. Well, that and a BlueHost site is also a monetary investment, but on the other hand, you can make money using things like Adsense if you get enough traffic, or try out things like affiliate marketing.

But say you like the idea of blogging it up, but you don’t want to make the leap quite yet but want to experiment. Check out Blogger, which is a platform owned by Google. True, you won’t get your own domain name (unless you pay for it), but you can still play around with themes and blogging a story without having to invest money. A good first step and honestly I tried this out myself many years ago.

There are site building tools like Wix, but I haven’t tried making a story site using those, so I can’t give my honest opinion. You’re welcome to try and let me know how it works, though!

Conclusion

So! We’ve gone over quite a few options. But, what is the best site to post your story on? I suppose that’s for you to answer yourself – it really depends on what you’re looking for, and what kind of storytelling you want to do.

Aside from building your own site, I’d reccomend SoFurry at this time. I’m going to play around with Wattpad, especially once I get another personal project of mine off the ground.

The best way is to get out there, experiment, and find out what works best for your needs.

Except for FA. I still can’t honestly recommend that site for writers. But the others are cool!