A bittersweet announcement today: our Worlds website will be closing down. Please make sure you have all your stories saved, or posted on your own blog (which you should do anyway!) Keep reading for backstory, our reasoning, and a bonus at the end!
Why is it closing down?
We have three main reasons, but first, a little bit of background.
Back when Worlds was introduced into the LegendFiction world, our communities were separated into two groups within two different community websites – SmartCatholics and CatholicHomeschool.
Worlds gave us a central place where authors could manage their profiles and share content. But today, we are all together in one place. So now, we will be closing down the subsite, and hosting all contests and all content inside our community.
We all certainly loved how we authors could create profiles for free, share stories, leave feedback, and discover other authors, like a Netflix for story content.
But there are some downsides.
- Our very small team of volunteers struggled to keep contests going and moderation happening
- New members were always confused about remembering logins and where they should be posting things
- Authors were posting stories in (maybe) 4 places – their document, in the community, on Worlds, on their own websites
So our team of mentors huddled together to brainstorm how to make everyone’s lives easier and better, and decided to shutter the subsite. Here’s how everything gets better:
- Everyone is invited to post their stories within a special space called ‘Story Feedback,’ within the LegendFiction community.
- We’ve replicated the neat tagging system using hashtags, and set up a template for categories and audiences so that people can sort entries, and discover more of the content they want.
- Spam will pretty much disappear, since only members can leave supportive comments
- No more confusion exploring three different websites and remembering different logins
Moving forward, we encourage every author to start their own free website, like WordPress.com or Substack, as their new home online to share the stories they want.
Some of you will join other online communities to share your stories with brand new readers, and grow your fan base.
This is one of the big reasons why Worlds will no longer continue. We had thought it would be a good way to help authors get discovered. But all it did was confuse new members – except for the few Legends among us who figured it out.
It’s really important that LegendFiction is a safe place to chat and explore storytelling together. But then our authors need to head back out to social media and your own websites, and build your own audiences.
This is actually one key reason why we’ve added a new bonus: we’re seriously ramping up our attention to Instagram, hosting flash fiction prompts, inspirational art, and featured comments. This is a way to help us meet new people, share your work, and tag your accounts – so that we’re all working together to grow audiences.
We’re still building this out, so if you’re not engaging with us on Instagram, head over to do that!
And lastly, very soon, we will be announcing a new contest for LegendFiction, purely for our members, and everything will happen within our epic community.
See you there!
0 Comments