How to find good stories online for free

It can be difficult to find good books to read in the M/M genre, especially when you are looking for genre-style stories, so I thought I'd offer a few good links for places to look for that sort of story. The best three sites I've found are Goodreads, Fiction Press, and Archive of Our Own, though there are many others out there.

Goodreads

Goodreads is a lovely site with so many things to offer. There are special groups for you to chat about specific genres or even specific authors or books, and then there are the lists. All help you connect to others who enjoyed the same book you did, and which might have lists of other books of the same sort for you to try. Obviously, not all the books you will find here are free, but there are many that are, and even if they're not, you can always put them on your Amazon wishlist for later.

Some good places to check on Goodreads:

• M/M Romance group -- you will need to request to become a member, but they're usually pretty good about adding new members.
• M/M Books that are/were available online list
• Favorite Unpublished M/M Stories list
• Unpublished or Free M/M - Scifi/Fantasy Edition list
• Online M/M Stories That Deserve To Be Published list
• Great M/M Webcomics list (not strictly books here, but definitely worth looking at)
• LGBT Webcomics list (ditto above)

Obviously, this is in no way a comprehensive list, but it'll give you a good place to start.

Fiction Press

Fiction Press is the original work sister site to Fanfiction.net, and works in basically the same way as the fanfiction site, up to and including groups. Obviously, groups can include anything the moderator decides, and there are many groups that focus on slash stories.

Some groups to look into:

• - slash stories -
• Slash, Slash, And Then Some More Slash!
• Slash Love
• Slash Fantasy
• Completed Slash
• Human Prisms
• Slash: Completed Works and Oneshots

Again, nowhere near a comprehensive list, but all of the above lists have over a hundred story links each. Certainly plenty to choose from.

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

Though AO3 mainly has Fanfiction, some original stories do make it onto the archive.

Some tags good for finding original stories:

• Original Work
• Celtic Mythology
• Greek and Roman Mythology
• Norse Religion and Lore
• Religion & Lore
• Ancient Egyptian Religion
• Arthurian Mythology
• Christian Lore
• Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms

Most of these will be generally filled with fanfiction, so you will have to do a lot more digging than at the other two sites (unless you don't mind fanfiction, which is fine, too), but there's still plenty there to be found, and it's well worth looking.

Other Sites

There are plenty of other sites out there as well. You never know what you might find.

Some places I've found other works:

• Gay Authors - a forum that specifically hosts stories about LGBT characters.
• Smashwords - has books for free as well as those for a price.
• Adult Fan Fiction - lots of stories here, though the quality is not always the best.
• Nifty Archive - featuring all sorts of LGBT stories.

There are others out there, but those are the main ones. There's always Amazon, too, though that can be tough given the filters they have in place. But hopefully that will give everyone a good list to pull from. Good luck, and happy reading!

My favorite Reading Sites

So having written up a couple of review posts now (I have one scheduled for Wednesday, and I'll try to do another for next Saturday, so that we've got a regular schedule), I realized I should explain where I go to get all these things.

My top two, are of course Amazon and Goodreads. But I also have used Fiction Press and Archive of Our Own (aka AO3) to download free fic for my kindle over the last few years. So here's a rundown of each of the sites I have or will have listed with possible links, and what you might find or run into there. If you ever find you can't get into a site for any reason, let me know. I'd rather provide multiple links, then have people go without a story they might enjoy.

The big four:

• Amazon.com - Obviously the biggest of the group, though I will very rarely link to it here unless I'm talking about a specific book that's currently on sale that people might enjoy. You can find many free or cheap books here, but I will make a much more detailed post about that in the future.
• Goodreads - This will probably be the site I link to most. I keep track of all my reading and books here, and if you want to buy or find a story, this is the first site I would recommend going to, as they provide links not only to Amazon, but many other booksellers, as well as links to the online page if the story is posted free. If you don't have an account at this site, I highly recommend it. It's just a great community.
• Archive of Our Own - Aka AO3. This is a fan-based fanfiction website, though there is some original fic here, usually fairy tales or RPF (real person fic). The benefit of this site is that they have the built-in capability to download the entire story in several formats: Mobi (Kindle format), EPub, PDF, and HTML. No need to transfer it anywhere to get it working on your device. Simply download it to your device and you're ready to go.
• Fiction Press - The non-fanfic sister site to Fan Fiction.net. This has been running a few years less than FF.net, but that's still a longer time than almost any other fiction site on the web, and the wealth of stories is immense. To download from this, you'll need a special program called the Fan Fiction Downloader (which I will go into in more detail in another post).

Other possible sites:

• Livejournal/Dreamwidth - Aka LJ and DW. These are journalling sites, though they are less used now than they once were. Occasionally, posts will be locked, so these stand a higher chance of being inaccessable, but if I do link there, I will try to post an alternate link just in case.
• Adult Fan Fiction - One of the few remaining responses to FF.net's purge of adult material. I probably won't link here much, but occasionally this is the only link there is. You will have to pass an age restriction page, but you should be able to get through, regardless.
• Tumblr - I haven't actually found any that I will need to link to here. Yet. But I won't rule it out, either, as it has become the new alternative to LJ/DW above.
• Author Personal Websites - Some authors do still host their own sites, and when there is no other link, I will post a link to that, though unless it's a story that is free online, I'm more inclined to post a link to the Goodreads page. I may link to the Author's website when it comes to their profile, though.

There are probably others I've missed, and I will likely add to this list when I think of them.

What about you? Where do you find your slash stories most?