Lessons Learned (or How to Get Your Story Read) · 6:16am Jul 27th, 2013
So, Foal of the Forest is nearly finished. The final chapter is on its way to getting published and I can move onto the sequel after I do some important work on my other stories first. All told, this story turned out to be an unqualified success for me as, while I optimistically hoped that people would like it, I never, for the life of me, expected to net over two-hundred favorites for it before it was done, much less how many likes it got. I owe a lot to my readers for that. Thank you everyone for your support.
But now, as this chapter of my...well....chapters comes a close, I get to turn back and indulge in some self-congratulatory retrospection framed as a help-guide for getting your stories read. There have been several such guides produced before, many by authors much more successful than I. However, there are some things that I think that they might have glossed over in what can make a story successful on this site. I also happen to think that there's no single path to success and writing a better story doesn't necessarily guarantee it. I've seen lots of really well-written stories get more or less ignored by the readers at large and seen fics of relatively questionable quality get elevated to stardom. So while being a better writer helps (I cannot make any real claims to being a better writer), it's by no means guaranteed to get you the number of readers you deserve. So, here is a guide to the things that I think helped Foal of the Forest become such a hit that you too can try to help boost your readership (maybe get featured someday, I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that one).
Get as Much As You Can Done Beforehand
One the pieces of praise I noticed my story garnering from a fair few readers was the speed at which it updated, which brings to light the biggest thing I did that probably helped to make it so successful. Most of the thing was already written. As I've pointed out before, Foal of the Forest is the first fifteen or so of a total of forty-five written chapters. What's gone up over the past few days and what's going to go up over the next few weeks is the product of the better part of a year's worth of work, already done, with only light editing and proofreading being done as each chapter gets posted. Having those chapters already done meant that I was free to post them at my leisure, without worrying about keeping people waiting or trying to rush to finish the next one so that my readers don't completely forget about me. Ideally, you should seek to have your story finished before you start posting, but obviously, I haven't done that. But I'm at least far enough ahead to have a comfortable buffer before I catch up to what I've already written. This brings us to my next point of advice, which is:
Pace Your Posting
Let's say you've followed the above piece of advice and have most, if not all, of your story written in advance and you are now poised to post chapters at your leisure. Now the important thing to do is moderate the pace at which you post your chapters can affect how many readers you manage to garner. First off, you don't want to post all your chapters at once (more on why later). Second, you want to maximize the exposure your fic has. Unless people stumble across your story in the archive, either because it has a character tag they were looking for, or if someone trips over it at random, the main way your story is going to attract readers is if it appears on the front page. Naturally, this means that the more often your story appears on the front of the site, the more people are going to see it and, by extension, the more readers you will attract. This means pacing your update schedule in at least twenty-four hour periods. Fimfiction will only bump an updated story to the front page once a day, so getting your story to appear on the front page as many times as possible necessitates spacing your updates out so that at least a day is between them to ensure your story appears on the site's front every time you post a new chapter.
Start Small, But Not Too Small
The readers of online fiction oftentimes have claims to their time that mean they can't invest all of their time in reading your stories. And with dozens of new stories popping up over the course of a single day, with many thousands already written, a reader has a lot of options to sift through. Unfortunately, because of time demands, your average reader is likely to gloss over a story that starts right off with a ten to fifteen-thousand word chapter. In all likelihood, you'll mostly attract a few dedicated readers. It's better to start off with building shorter chapters to draw readers in. Once you have a more dedicated reader-base, who see your story as a worthwhile investment of their time and attention, you are free to start increasing the length of your chapters as you see fit (to within reason). This is the same reason for why you want to avoid posting all of your chapters (or more than a few) at once, (besides the fact that it reduces the number of times your story will appear on the front page). Posting your whole multi-chapter story in one go is a good way for it to end up buried in the depths of someone's read later list, where it can be forgotten instead of being actually read. At the same time, starting with chapters that are too short can work against you just as well. The minimum submission length for the site is at least a thousand words for a newly submitted story. However, if your first submission hovers at, or just over, that limit, it's highly likely that it will be dismissed as something that you didn't spend a lot of effort on. I find that somewhere around the five to seven-thousand word mark to be what seems to have worked for me.
Choose Your Character Tags With Care
You have five slots to fill with character tags, so you need to be careful in your selection. Group tags, like the Mane Six tag or the Cutie Mark Crusader tag take up an entire slot, which can be a waste of space if the mane six are in your story, but only one or two of them actually feature into it, to say nothing of the fact that those two group tags are among the most common tags to pop up on the thousands of stories that flood this site, which means it could make it very hard to find your fic through a character tag search. If your story has the mane six, but features one or two characters, it's better to pick out the characters who will feature in your fic and only throw up the Mane Six tag if you have the room for it.
These are some of the things that I though helped at least draw people to my story initially. I hope this is actually of some help to everyone who reads this blog and goes on to make story submissions of their own. If not, well at least I tried.
Hmm, something to keep in mind. I like to post my fics as I write them. I have honestly seen the result of this as I have a hard time holding to any schedual. As for tags... Well I will need to think about that to be honest.