from a writer's digest article: "The biggest con you face by giving away your writing online is that you could potentially hurt future book sales. Those who take a stance against free online content are fond of asking: Why would people pay for the content if they could pop onto your website and read it for free (after all, isn’t that one of the major reasons newspapers are struggling)? Many agents and editors are also leery of attaching themselves to writing that’s already been published online—because once you post it online, it is considered published, albeit digitally." But I would say that if you publish a copy of the book online, then take the whole work and "improve" it in a sense, then publish it through a publishing company so that the "finished" work is bigger and better than the "beta" novel that's posted online, that should be fine