Failed Projects: Take Down or Leave Up

[Rhonder]

I'm in the "leave it up" camp. I don't mind and actually enjoy people being able to go back and see all of my work, regardless of whether it's finished or not.

The only scenario I could see myself feeling embarrassed or needing to remove/hide that is if there was a large number of unfinished projects in my wake, such that new readers seeing that might lose faith in my ability to finish anything lol. But at that point, there are more important problems to address than trying to hide the past, imo

[MShadowlawn]

Unless I'm genuinely embarrassed by the shitty production quality of my work and don't feel at all like cleaning it up, it stays up. For most cases, I define a failure as a story I can't complete in a way that makes me satisfied, IE it gets killed by bad planning or a lack of motivation.

I suppose I could also call a story a failure if it doesn't get any publicity, but I don't like dwelling on that kind of "failure" because at the end of the day damn near anything can find commercial success if sufficiently marketed, and posting my work online, on websites like Tapas, isn't exactly the pinnacle of advertising excellence...

And it's for that reason that I keep my backlog up. I mean, who knows? Maybe fans of one work will actually grow more attached to another, failed project of yours that you've had rotting around in the compost heap for a while, developing a cult following if/when you decide to revisit that idea.

Example: Monsters In Plain Sight is my very first work, and was planned to be way longer but I realized that I had no idea where I could take it in the long term, so I pretty much just clipped it off at what I felt would be a good stopping point. While I would consider it to be fairly crusty and rough around the edges prose-wise(At least, compared to my TRUE POWER™), in terms of Bruce Anders' POV I absolutely adore it and I would love to either extend or completely redo this story later on down the line. For those interested, here it is:

Monsters In Plain Sight | Tapas

[Xentama]

If they ain't hurtin' anyone (including yourself), I say keep em up.

although I will add maybe put a Postface at the end or something, so people aren't waiting with bated breath. it doesn't have to be anything fancy, just 'I'm not interested in this anymore and I want to move on' is fine.
I just think it would give the audience closure as well as yourself.

[Bokyongyo]

I’ve had a few failed projects on Tapas and looking back wish I actually didn’t delete them but I also can understand why I did. I was in the mindset that I didn’t want anyone to see my failed “older work” so deleting them in a way kind of made me forget about them and also not giving anyone the chance of seeing how bad certain elements were

However I like to see improvements in my writing and art now so actually keeping them up could’ve helped with just showing others that improvement as well. So it really depends, I lean now more toward keeping them.