This protects the writer's electronic rights to the story, and it still gives readers the "first page" of a story in manuscript format. It also doesn't tie up the website space with stories.

But maybe I'd better explain why the "13 lines" in the first place.

If you set up your manuscript properly, you will double-space between each line of text, giving you 25 or 26 lines on each page.

The first page of each manuscript should start the text halfway down the sheet of paper, to allow room for the name, address, word count, title, byline, and room for the editor to make notes to the typesetter as needed. So the first page of a properly presented manuscript only has 13 lines on it.

That's for a short story manuscript, though. Novel chapters can start closer to the top because a novel has a title page with just the name, address, word count, title and byline--plenty of room for editorial notes to the typesetter.

Anyway, the first 13 lines implies the first page, and many editors will only read the first page of a manuscript before deciding to reject or to read on.

Damon Knight (author of CREATING SHORT FICTION as well as a professional editor) used to give feedback to people online on the first 13 lines of their stories because that was enough for him. We figure that readers here should be able to make a similar judgment on your story openings. I (Kathleen) have also run some useful in-person workshops at science fiction conventions and writers conferences using the same 13-line approach.

Now, for the electronic rights question. Even though most publishers are not likely to make use of the electronic rights to a story, for several years now, they have insisted on controlling an author's electronic rights and have included "deal-breaker" clauses about those rights in every contract.

New writers, who have no clout, must agree to let the publisher control electronic rights in order to make a sale--novel or short story.

If the electronic rights have already been used up by the author, by publishing the story on a website (which is accessible to the whole world) for example, then the publisher can't control electronic rights. Unless the author's work has phenomenal sales potential (as in the case of some self-published works such as THE CHRISTMAS BOX), the publisher is not going to be interested in publishing a story or novel without that control.

Even if publishers don't have any use for electronic rights.

They anticipate having use for them in the future and don't want to have to negotiate for them later.

So, you may ask whether or not the first 13 lines of each chapter will total enough wordage to constitute the using up of electronic rights.

And you may want to know if printing out copies for your family and friends counts as self-publishing.

The answer is that it all depends on the numbers.

If you have gazillions of 13-line chapters in your novel (and some novels have chapters even shorter than 13 lines), you could certainly end up putting a majority of your novel online.

If you have 15 chapters in your 90,000-word novel, that's 15x130 (ten words per line) words which is 1950 words--only about 2 percent of your novel.

If you're concerned about posting the first 13 lines of each chapter in a group discussion area on this website, feel free to just post the chapter title (or Chapter 11) when you start the topic for that chapter.

If Chronicles has a family numbering in the thousands, then printing out copies for them would count as self-publishing. Print runs of less than 100, though, don't usually concern major publishers. Nor does privately emailing copies of your work to a few people in your writing group.

The concern publishers have is that there be a large enough market for the work to make it worth their time to publish it. Anything you do to lessen the size of that market makes them less interested.

I don't think the bean-counters are ready to be convinced that electronic publication will lead to enough requests for a printed version to make it worth your while to self-publish online first. For now, I'd recommend that you err on the side of caution.

One or two online samples that aren't very big (meaning a substantial percentage of the whole) are probably all right--it's as grey an area as defining "fair use."

As I said, the publishers are concerned with anything that makes it so they don't get to claim your electronic rights in the contract. Once you've sold a novel, the publisher would probably ask you to remove samples from your website--and replace them with a link to the samples they would want to put on the publisher's website.

The privacy of the critique group, as well as its smallness, protects your electronic rights just as printing out copies of the manuscript and handing them out to an in-person critique group would not violate first publication rights. The number of people who see your work in both cases are miniscule compared to the nubmer of people the publishers are hoping will buy your work from them.

It's a matter of numbers.

I hope this helps.