I'm deactivating my DeviantART account after 11 years. I haven't used it since 2014. I'm pulling a few poems from there that I'd like to keep. If I were to tweak them and submit them, would they still be counted as "published" or because I deleted them, it's now ok to submit them?
If it’s anything like fiction they’re going to be considered previously published by most markets. You can’t give first rights pursuant to a sale. However, not all markets care about this. Even though they’re deleted it seems likely they’re still archived online somewhere.
Looking at DeviantART in the internet archive, they have tons of archived pages full of user uploads for the time period you are talking about.
IDK, but I did a quick inquiry and pulled up this: http://writersrelief.com/2013/11/19/what-is-considered-previously-published-writing/ It seems that since things have changed from the good old days of hard copy, if something you wrote was published in an anthology was considered previously published. It goes on to further stat that now if it is posted anywhere online, that it is too considered previously published. So it seems it might be simpler to pub yourself, and dodge the traditional route due to this odd technicality.
theres a deviant art internet archive? where is that? I had a little over 200 things posted on my page. I deleted all but 38 (an old fan fiction from 2007 that I think i'll leave there), yet its still saying that I have 130 items still in my gallery. I'm thinking the others must be archived?
It’s not specifically for devisntART. The internet archive goes around capturing all kinds of pages, those included.
Does that only apply if you’ve posted the entire work online? Or even parts of it still count? What if it's your rough draft and not the final one? Sorry I'm still new to all this.
I'm curious too. If you rework something from online (let's 70% of content and change the title) is that then considered not previously published?
If it helps, I got the following response from a prospective publisher when I asked about this: "A significant rework would have to change the trajectory of the story in a major way. It can be familiar to a reader of the original, but must be different enough that they can't predict the course of events. Generally, I'd expect a large amount of extra content, changes to the plot, and a different ending." Different places might have different opinions as to what constitutes a major rework, but I'd wager this is a good rule of thumb.
The reason it's still considered published is that you can still find everything you wrote, the date you wrote it on at the wayback machine. It's an internet archive organized by year. Gets a bit creepy at times. Everything is archived there and sits. Can be a blast from the past, or a nightmare of misdeeds forgotten. You can find a lot there. It's a bit of a rabbit hole. Just posted this in case anyone was interested.
You can't unpublished things. I've had work published in a print journal with no trace of it online. It doesn't mean it hasn't been published even if only in a small print journal. Your best bet would be to try and sell those things as reprints. There are places that take reprints and would not have an issue with this.