Wednesday, November 5, 2014

How to post at YVNY

The hardest part about posting a story at Young Voices is finding the place where you sign in, but you'll see it if you scroll to the bottom of the screen and look hard. (Once you've found it, you might want to bookmark the sign-in page to make it easier the next time.)

But you're not ready yet, because you shouldn't compose your story on the YVNY posting site, for three reasons:

1. If something happens, like the site crashes or you forget to hit "publish" before you exit, you'll have lost all your work.

2. When your story has been edited, approved and added to the web site, you should pull up your original story and compare what you wrote to how it came out on the YVNY site. By seeing what the editor did, you'll learn and become a better writer. But you need your own copy to be able to do that.

3. When you post a story, I'm going to assume it's ready to go. So don't put it up there until it's done, because I might put it up on the site before you were ready to have it go live.

So write your story in Word or some other word processing program on your computer and save a copy, and go to the YVNY site to post it.

Sign in, go to the top left and look for "Story." Click on that, then click on "New."

You'll see this screen:

Write a headline in the box at the top.

Then paste your story into the larger box, and give it a good look to make sure you didn't accidentally leave part of it off, or accidentally include some junk at the end. Make sure it's broken up into nice, bite-sized paragraphs with a space between each one.

Then add your pictures by clicking on that little Media box just above where you pasted the story. Just follow the instructions.

Add your name in the box that says "Writer's Name" and your age and hometown where it says "Writer's Job Title."

Then scroll down and you'll see this:

You'll see a box of categories on the bottom right.

If you are writing an opinion piece, check off "blog" and your region.

Otherwise, check off "article" for an article, "book" for a book review, "entertainment" for a movie or play or concert review or "other stuff" for other stuff (We're not sure what that is, either. But if you have a really unusual piece, ask me and maybe that'll turn out to be the answer.)

Then check off your region.

You're almost done. Take a minute to give it one more look to make sure you've got everything right, and then hit the blue button to post it.

Remember that you won't see it on the YVNY website until it's been approved and edited, so don't panic!

One more thing: Once you've posted a story, be sure to check your email every day until you either hear from me about something you need to fix or you see your story on the site.

Still having problems?

Email me with questions about writing and editing.

Email Mary Miller if you are having problems with your user name or password or that sort of thing.