HELLO
Posting a fic is kind of weird, and if you’re new to fandoms in general, it can be a little daunting.
You might be sitting there like “why is no one reading my fic :(” and chances are, it’s because you made a bunch of nonos in your post. Which is fine, we all do it at first.
Most of the tumblr fandoms post to AO3, as far as I’m aware, so this is mostly going to be geared toward people posting on AO3, but I’ll touch on LJ briefly as well (the LJ way of doing it translates really well to tumblr as well imo!!) :3
In order Imma go over the following, so scroll to whichever you want to read.
- Title
- Warnings
- Ratings
- Tags
- Summary
- Word counts and frequency of updates
- LJ
Okay, but… I have a slice-of-life fic in the works whose 30 parts vary in length between 650 words and 5000 words. However, they also vary in POV and include substantial time skips, so conglomerating several shorter scenes into one 3-6k word chapter is infeasible. Put together, the total length will be about 50-60k words, so posting it all as one chapter is a no-go. And since I’m writing the parts out of chronological order, the whole fic is going to be finished before I start posting it. I don’t want to wait a million years between releasing chapters of a fic that’s already done. If I posted one part every three days, it would literally take me three months to put out a fic I’ve already been working on for a damn year. I just don’t have that kind of patience. I’ve been writing fics for over a decade, now, and apparently I still tick half the inexperienced/asshole markers. >:|a
why would it be unfeasible to cut short scenes into one chapter. Just like separate with an asterisk or something? If it needs to stand alone as one chapter then just post the short chapter in quick succession to a longer chapter so you’re not budging other people’s fics down off the front page for the sake of like 500 words.
If it’s finished then just put in the notes “This is finished and I’m going to be posting at x times” and to be fair, you’d probably garner an awful lot more readers if you spaced a fic like that out over a period of several months because it gives people a chance to catch up?
It was just a list of suggestions for inexperienced writers not a personal attack on your posting choices. Like if you’ve been writing fics for over a decade then you’re obviously experienced so why would you like
even bother to read this in the first place never mind act like it was a dig at your posting choices when it’s headed with “If you’re new to fandoms” and “if you’re wondering why no one is reading your fics”
