Maybe because some of the sites you mentioned publish any crap sent to them, while here you have to use understandable English. I've had stories almost rewritten, considering the typing errors and punctuation mistakes the monitor had to correct. I've also had about eight stories rejected, but now I've learned (mostly) and get published fairly quickly.
All stories here on Lushstories are verified by volunteer members. During holidays, the verifiers are not as active, as they are spending holiday time with families, like everyone else.
Other times story submissions may come in at a much higher rate than others. So during holidays and during an unusually high rate of submissions, we may get a bit behind. But we always catch up and quite often log in to verify and find an empty submission queue.
Most of the time we're very fast at verifying. Here at Lushstories we go to great measures to make sure the stories are of higher quality than most sites, and to protect against plagiarism and stolen stories. Other sites that give very fast story approval don't do that.
I don't get this rush to publish stories. Why are authors so impatient? LS is a great site, but it's not a site for professional writers. There's no money in this. Neither the authors, nor the story verifiers (READ: moderators, not editors) are paid for their work.
Furthermore, if the goal is to prove that you're a credible author, I have to say that (in my opinion) the bar is set fairly low on the quality of stories the site accepts. This is by design to create a community of writers (and not stress out the volunteer mods too much), but basically, if your story doesn't violate any major taboos (like or bestiality) and is relatively free of spelling and grammatical errors, you're pretty much guaranteed to get published*. Yes, there are other sites with even lower standards for publication, but with such a high acceptance rate for stories, getting published here isn't going to contribute to building a professional portfolio as an author that is going to impress anyone who matters. So, what's the hurry?
BTW, if you submitted to a professional literary journal, the turn-around time can be months long, and the rejection rate is much much higher. Here, we're not competing for page space.
*Just because there are low standards for acceptance doesn't mean that the stories published on this site are consistently of a low quality. There are many talented writers who publish here going far above the bare minimum to just get published.
Post-avant-retro-demelodicized-electro-yodel-core is my jam.
Please tell me how it only takes a day or two to get on Lit?? You must be writing within a genre that doesn’t get many submissions.
To get in the best places, it takes a little more effort and patience. Lush is one of those best places.
Usually mine are verified within a couple of hours. Longest I’ve ever waited was a couple of days. Sometimes things slow down the verification process... things like Moderators having to do things in real life, maybe they are sick, or their children are sick, they have jobs that they actually do get paid for, unlike here where they are gracious enough to volunteer what little spare time they have so people like us can upload our stories for free ?
The most recent one that Amy and I wrote together went through in less than 24 hours...in fact I have a feeling it was same day.
To me all the moderators do a marvellous job here on lush to get our stories verified. It doesn’t really bother me how long it takes for a moderator to get to my story or poem to verify it. I always find that it takes on average around 12 hours for a poem to be verified. Sometimes I have had some verified within minutes of being posted or another has taken up to 48 hours to be verified. Many factors can be taken in to account for how long it takes for a story to be verified. How long the queue is can be biggest factor in getting your story verified. Moderators are only volunteers so there can be a limited number of them online verifing stories. Gold members always take priority as so do competition entries. So be patient and your story will eventually get verified. Some of the moderators have become good friends of mine and I fully respect everything they do for this site and giving up there time to help out the site
My stories typically run five days for verification. I'm assuming comments reflecting hours or one or two days are reflective of Gold status..
I don't find five days to be onerous, however, it would be great to be able to submit more than one story. I get the out of sequence thing in a series, however, that could be gotten around if you had other stories in different categories. I know I currently have a couple waiting to go that are not connected to each other.
Just some thoughts.
At times the mods are stretched thin. They will get to it.