I wanna tell you a story.... (abctales.com)

Member Name: indychick_uk

Product:	abctales.com
Date:	27/11/01 (69 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A large archive of stories to read, Easy and free to submit as many stories/poems as you like

Disadvantages: As there is a large archive stories don't get many reads

Some time ago, quite by accident, I ran across a wonderful site on the internet called abctales.com.

The site is the brainchild of John Bird, the co-founder of Big Issue, and Gordon Roddick who has also been involved in Big Issue. The site is primarily an online story archive. As a member you can publish your stories, read other people's stories, enter discussions and competitions.

The reason it’s called ABCtales is that each member creates an “ABC” set in which to post their stories and can then submit one story for each letter of the alphabet. You can create as many sets as you like, I personally have 3 sets called “Wendy’s Travels”, “Wendy’s Poetry” and “Wendy’s Writings” in which to submit the different sorts of work I’ve written. This is quite a neat idea and can act as a spur to writing – “I need something beginning with X…….”

The editors of the site "cherry-pick" any stories they particularly like and these stories are marked accordingly for people to go look at. (A bit like “crowning”)

In addition, each month a paper magazine is published and distributed free via The Body Shop and Hammicks Bookshops and a certain number of stories from the web site are printed in the magazine. A small payment is made to the author for this but the main payment is seeing your writing in print on a page - I speak from experience here as one of my stories was published in the May edition. The circulation of the magazine is 30,000 at the moment but they state they wish to increase that to 150,000. The target audience is primarily ABC1 (I presume that’s some sort of demographic categoraisation), 18-35 and female.

Part of the proceeds from the site is donated to the Big Issue Social Development Fund so not only do you get to read some great stories but your making a contribution to a worthy caus
e at the same time. The site is free to use however so the proceeds come from advertising which is usually fairly unobtrusive and generally relevant eg bookstores.

Main features

On the front page the index is broken down into several areas, Readers, My ABCtales.com, Community, Freebies and About US

Readers

Under this heading are links to the archive of stories, which can be searched in several different ways.

“Public Gallery “– this is the entire archive and you can choose to search by “cherry-picked”, by author, by date entered, by genre, by letter (ie which letter of an ABC set it’s posted under), or by times read.

“Story Gallery “and “Poetry Gallery” are sub-divisions of the Public Gallery and can be searched in exactly the same ways

“Story Search” is quite a powerful search tool which allows you to search for words or phrases in a story’s title, text or author description, and also allows you to pick only stories entered in the last week or in the last two years (although I believe the site’s only been in existence since 2000)

“Find an author” and “Last 10 entered” are pretty self-explanatory.

The final way you can search the archive for something to read is via “Random Story”, this is a great way of finding something that you might otherwise not have read. I imagine it generates reads for stories which are not in the “A” section or on the last 10 list

My ABCtales

This is the section for writers, it allows you to register, create ABCsets, submit stories or poems and edit your details. It’s all very easy to use.

Community

This is a fairly new innovation for the site and has been up and running for a little under a year. There are discussion boards for, “Writing from ABCtales.com”, “Writing
from elsewhere” , “General Discussions”, “Getting Published” and “Writing Tips”. Any member can start a thread or add to one.

The Discussion Board for “Writing on ABCtales.com” tends to be where members alert others to good new writers or stories but also people talk about the art of writing, why they write, what they write about…

There is also a Link Directory where anyone can suggest a link to a good site they’ve found.

Freebies

From time to time the site runs competitions, some are writing competitions – at the moment they are running a competition in conjunction with the Cartoon Network to write a script a trailer for a show called “Home Movies” – and some are obviously marketing/advertising based to raise revenue for the site – eg win a mobile phone cover from Makemyphone.com.

About Us

Here you’ll find a lot of information about the team behind ABCtales.com, led by John Bird and his wife, Diana. There is a short biography of all the staff, which numbers only 8.


Overall

The site is very friendly and there are clearly some good writers out there submitting stories. The navigation and layout of the site makes it very easy to use and it has a very “clean” feel to it. It doesn’t have many “bells & whistles” but what it does, it does well.

According to the Public Gallery there are currently 9,912 stories online to read, so it’s clearly popular. It’s a site I visit from time to time, not every day or indeed every week, but when the inspiration takes me, or when I need inspiration I’ll visit and submit or read a story.


So - if you fancy seeing your name in print or at the very least on the screen - go post some stories. Or if you just want to read some original, witty, thought-provoking stories - go read

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