#everyone line up for high fives for my amazing tag i peaked and can retire broke

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Source - Highpups

(Artist's Patreon)

[the-prophet-lemonade]

do you have any advice on getting a story to be seen? i made an ao3 account not too long ago so no one has seen my fic at the moment but i was wondering if you had any tips on that, or would i just have to wait?

hello! i can’t claim to know what makes a fic popular as it’s 99% luck, but i can speak for the remaining 1% that has worked ~reasonably~ well for me in the past. 

i think there are three key elements to getting a fic “seen”: marketing, branding, and presentation, and they’re all very important. this post got very long, so please find everything under the cut! i hope it helps :-) 

i. marketing

fic marketing may seem a bit narcissistic if you haven’t done it before, but trust me on this: it’s the best way to attract readers and you deserve to promoted your story as something you worked hard upon!

drumming up hype for a fic is great. you can do this by posting on social media, providing sneak peaks on your twitter, involving yourself in the fandom community and discussing your wips with other fans, and just generally being excited about what you’re creating. engaging with other people’s writing is also a great method to help boost your own stats … get involved with reading other work and leaving comments for other people, because they will be more likely to return the favour! when someone comments on my fics, i often go and check out their profile and see what they’ve written, as it’s highly likely we enjoy the same things! 

making promos is one of my favourite ways to engage with people about fics. once i post a fic/new chapter to ao3, i also crosspost promo posts with links and graphics to my twitter and tumblr. you will need a good hook to get people interested, but also an eye-catching image that summarises the story pictorially can be a great asset (you don’t even need photoshop, just a nice moodboard will do!). when using images however, it’s always important to think how the image size will appear in tumblr’s dimensions and on your own blog … make sure it’s not stretched or the resolution too low, and create something with a good visual flow i.e. the title appears first, then the necessary information, then any teasers or extracts. you need to make your fic post stand out on someone else’s timeline, which may already be filled with a bunch of other fic posts, jostling for attention. make it neat, clean, informative, and professional.

make sure to use the tagging systems efficiently for your chosen social media platforms: only the first five tags count on a tumblr post, so choose them wisely (i.e. use the key fandom tags first and save your personal blog tags for after), and only two hashtags count on twitter before it’s marked as spam, so go for the ship tag!

creating your own fic tag on twitter can also be fun, and i’ve seen a lot more people doing it lately too. you can encourage people to tweet along with a specialised hashtag and then you can find their reaction and engage with them later, which once again expands your fandom circle and will increase engagement on tweets associated with your fic.  

another trick i’ve learned is utilising time zones and understanding the demographics of the audience you’re trying to reach. i am very careful to post my fics at certain times of day in order to reach key people e.g. i will try to hit either europeans or americans during the evening, as this is when most people are home from work and wanting to read fic. as a european myself, especially involved in fandoms with high levels of european fans, i usually post during the early evening for CET time zones i.e. 7 or 8 pm and i tend to find this works for me. 

with tumblr, i often delay my promo posts so that i post when it’s likely to get maximum interaction (you can see when your blog is most active using your tumblr analytics) … use your queue if need be! 

i also take care in reblogging/retweeting my promo posts at certain times of day too. i will usually bump the post just before i go to bed, so as to grab americans in their early evening, and then i will bump it again in the morning when i wake up, to catch australians and west coast americans still awake. i then usually keep bumping my promos once a day for two or three days on my social media to cast a wide enough net to catch as many people who might be interested, as not everyone checks their timeline every day and social media swallows up posts so quickly, especially tumblr which is not built for original content creators to do well (lol). i will usually bump a promo post 5 - 7 times before retiring it and this is a model that’s worked well for me in the past, especially for droplets, which would get 500+ notes per chapter!  if you’re anxious about this, know that most people will only see your post once or twice because tumblr moves fast and swallows posts up very quickly, and sometimes people need reminders to read if they decide to save things for later when they have more time

ii. branding

the benefits of branding mainly come from experience, so it’s a tricky thing to utilise if you haven’t published fic before … but there are still tricks worth trying! 

certain fic writers will attract readers to new fics just because their name is attached to it, and people know the sort of story they’re getting, they know how it’ll be written, the sort of tropes that will appear, that sort of thing. obviously, building up this sort of brand requires publishing a lot of work, and so it must be said that practice makes perfect: the more you write and publish, the more your fics will be seen and your audience will grow. people will regularly see your username in the tags on ao3 and be more inclined to click on you as someone who reliably produces good content. it’s important to remember that everyone starts from the same place and works hard to improve their craft; success doesn’t just come overnight (unless you’re in the right place at the right time) and any creator will tell you that compliments to their talent aren’t what matters, but instead, it’s compliments to their dedication and hard graft. 

another key thing about branding is how you present yourself online. the most important thing in my opinion is cohesion across your social media platforms e.g. having the same username on ao3 as you do on tumblr/twitter/wherever you promote your fic. having an easily navigatable blog with working hyperlinks and archiving of your fic work is also great. basically, building a clean interface for people to engage with your work is vital! having the same icon and username across all your social media makes it so much easier for readers to navigate between your fics and your promo posts … basically, the easier you can spell something out, the better

branding is mostly to do with how you advertise yourself, rather than the particular fic, although much of it overlaps. get your name out there by engaging with other writers and making friends and appreciating their work! this is often the best way to get inspired, plus you get to meet some amazing people. i recommend trying out for zines and big bangs and writing challenges, as these are good ways to show your work to already-established audiences. also, make yourself available by interacting with commentors or by opening up your inbox on tumblr to anons. try linking your social media and your inbox as hyperlinks in the authors note of your fic

iii. presentation

this is really fundamental and is often the main reason people will close out of your fic and not read to the end. people want to read fics that are easy to digest and have had care put into them. this includes a lot of things:

correct tagging i.e. are the tags coherent and not just rambling? are there appropriate trigger warnings in place? have you unnecessarily tagged every side pairing under the sun, rather than just the main relationship?

grammar and spelling. goes without saying … people are more likely to read things that look professional and have had care poured into their preparation. make sure you know how to use speech punctuation. revise how to use commas. avoid epithets (especially racially-aggravated ones). get yourself a beta if you’re worried, because betas are godsends!

paragraphing. so many people will close out of a fic if it isn’t correctly spaced. double spaced paragraphs look best on ao3 and i often won’t read a fic if the paragraphs are too long because it hurts my eyes to read. make sure you’re starting new speakers in new paragraphs. new ideas deserve new paragraphs. basically, every time the “camera” changes, you should be starting a new paragraph. not just a new line. 

summaries. i see so many fics on ao3 with summaries that are either apologising for being bad at summaries or apologising for a fic being bad/being a first fic, and like … stop this! own what you have written, no-one else will have written it the way you have and you should be proud of it. if you’re saying in your summary that it’s a bad fic, i’m not going to click on it as a reader. instead, utilise your summary to get people hooked … good hooks can be written a load of different ways, but the best ones i see often involved a snippet from the fic as a taster, and then a couple lines of blurb. get people excited! 

titles: i’m personally more likely to click on a fic where the title is either (a) correctly capitalised or (b) is clearly chosen for its aesthetic or meaning (i love long lower case titles with parentheses lol). choosing a memorable title is really helpful, especially one that can be shortened or abbreviated for social media (e.g. for hashtags)!

all this being said, traffic on ao3 is a crytpid at best and obeys little in the way of rhyme or reason. you can put blood, sweat and tears into marketing your fic, but sometimes, just being in the right place at the right time (writing for the right niche) is what does it, so being a fic writer requires a lot of patience. first and foremost, write for yourself. write what you want to read and enjoy doing it, because if you get sucked into obsessively checking stats, it’s only going to disappoint when you don’t achieve what you want to achieve. 

just keep persevering and keep writing and appreciating each and every person who takes time in interact with your fic and its promos … because ultimately, all it takes it that one reader to fall head over heels in love with your fic for everything to change. for now, just be proud of your work and keep writing!