Tips for Authors from a reader. · 11:26am Aug 22nd, 2012
Lets get clear with this. I'm NOT a writer. I suck at it(i tried), but what i am is a reader and as such i have criteria to what i read and what i just dismiss. Here I'm gonna list those criteria and hope it helps someone.
So lets get started:
1)Word count
I know it can be hard reaching a certain word count, but if you stay below it you won't get me as your reader. If you reach an average of 1.5k words per chapter(Prologue not counted, they are allowed to be short) i have no problems with your fic. 1k-1.4k and i may read it if i have a good mood or it sounds interesting. anything below 1k and the changes for me reading your fic is close to zero. If you have 3 chapters with 600 words then just fuse them together, because i read 1 1.5k-chapter but i won't read 3 600-Chapters.
Now to the word count of a first release. If you have at last 1.5k over all chapters i will read it. If you have just a prologue with 600 words the best you most likely get is a spot in my read later list(and it's rare that something gets of that list).
There is one other thing, which annoys me only AFTER i faved a fic, which fit into this category:
To many words: simply put if you have more then 2.5k words per update i only read it if I’m in the mood(which is the reason i have 40 fics, where i still have to read the new update). if you are below 2.5k words i normally read it as soon as i see the update.
2) Description and Title
Okay this is Important and many(even some good ones) make the mistake to not include in this what the Story is about, and thus make me think that it is a Story about a Topic i don't like. As two examples i give Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying and Two's Company, Three's a Crowd. Both are good fics, but the Title and the Description cause some problems for me.
In the sun-fic i though it would be the basic Trollestia or Evil-Celestia-fic and i don't like those, so naturally i ignored it until someone told me that Celestia is nice there.
With TCTaC the problem was that i though it is a silly fic about someone starts living with Octavia and Vinyl and the shenanigans this causes, but when i started to read it it was kinda a let down that i got something completely different. It's a good fic, don't get me wrong, but if i expect something and then don't get it, i get a little bit peeved.
3)Emotion
This is the hardest one for me to talk about, because i don't really know how to do this. The basic idea is to make me feel what the character feels. If you make Twilight happy as she can be , then i want to feel some of that happiness to. When the father is sad that he has to let Rainbow-Dash go, then give me some of that sadness. Make me feel with the characters. Sadly i can’t tell you how to do that
The next one is only important for things I already faved, but i still think it is worth to be noted.
4) Rewrite
If you are i the middle of your fic and thinking "hey this thing sucks let's rewrite it." Let me tell you this: DON'T. It means that we(the readers) won't get a Update for a long time and when we get one, it means it's mostly stuff we already read. But if you really have to rewrite please tell us exactly what is new.
Let's imagine you have added a whole new scene in chapter 1 or make it so that Twilight confesses to RD instead of RD to Twilight in chapter 5, tell us in the comments or the Authors Note about it. We already read 95% of your fic and the other 5% is the only interesting part for us. if i want to reread your fic, then i reread your fic.