Hi all, I need a bit of advice, please. A while ago I 'gave' some stories to a publisher to include in a Kindle anthology. I didn't think to find out what I would get out of it. Nothing as it turns out. The publisher, I found out later, does not pay any of its authors. So I wondered where I stand. Can I get those stories back (they are only in an ebook) and use them somewhere else? I didn't sign a contract.
It sounds to me that if you didn't sign any paperwork, or emailed or verbally made any agreement to give up your rights to this work in any way, you still own those rights.
I suspect you did this all online so you need to be certain anything you sent back to this 'publisher' didn't include some clause in the small print that might cause trouble. Anthology publishers sometimes do this because they don't want writers posting articles the publisher intends to charge for in the public domain.
Hopefully that won't be the case.