TUTORIAL: How to utilize Groups to promo your story · 4:08am Jan 15th, 2021
This guide is mainly for people who are new to Fimfiction, because there's no great "How to Groups" tutorial on the site. I've explained it a lot over the years to new people, and I wanted a permanent blog I could just link to, plus I figure it might help some of the new authors following me (and even some long time ones don't really get the importance of this). Because it's aimed at new authors, I'm gonna explain pretty much everything in detail, assuming you know nothing about how groups work.
For this blog post, I'll be using the story Off to the Races by applejackofalltrades as an example fic. You don't need to know anything about the story really, but it is a good read.
So first off, what are groups and why should you use them? Groups can be made by anyone for (very nearly) any purpose and serve two functions (not all groups utilize both functions): a public forum and a story notification system. I won't be focussing on the forum for the most part here, but some group forums can be a lot of fun and worth checking out.
The more important feature, for our purposes here, is the story notification system. This is how you get your story in the feeds of people who might be interested in your fic. So our example story, Off to the Races, is an Appledash shipfic. The author did put it in the Appledash group, which was a good call. That meant people in that group had Off to the Races pop up on their feed, which is great! But it also might be of interest to people who aren't in the Appledash group, like fans of Applejack as a character, or Rainbow Dash, or shipping, or lesbian ships, etc., and there are groups for all those things!
So let's start with one of the biggest groups on the site: the shipping group. This group has over 9,000 members [insert meme here], meaning that you have a lot of potential readers there, even if it's such a big group it could get lost in the crowd. Still, you can put your fic in as many groups as are fitting to your story, so absolutely go for it! Now, how do we add our story to this group?
To add a story to a group, you need to be in said group. Click on the "Groups" button up in the top left corner, then use the search box to find the group (for the "Shipping" group, we can just click it because it's big enough to be on the front page). From there, click "Join" and you're in the group. Easy, but maybe not actually ideal. See, because you want to join a ton of groups to add your story to, you maybe don't want to see every notification from those groups. There's a quick solution to this:
Just hit that settings button, and you can toggle off the notifications. You can see that I turned off both "Story added" and "Forum thread post" from my notifications for the Shipping group. That's because I'm not active in that group's forums, nor am I interested in seeing my feed flooded with every ship fic on the site. This does mean that not all 9,000 members of the group are going to get your notification, but that's why we cast a large net! Because see, I do get story notification for, say, the Sunshyne group, because I want to know when there are new Sunshyne stories.
Anyway, we're in the group, we may have adjusted our notification settings to suit our desires, now we can add our story to it. There are two ways to do this, but I'm only going over the fast way (which is also the only way to add someone else's story a group). First, before we do this, join as many groups as you can think of to promote your story. Join all the groups, then we'll add the story to all of them at once. You can of course go back and add it to others later, but no sense in not doing as many as possible all in one go. Remember, there are over 13,000 groups on Fimfiction, if you can think of a type of person your story might appeal to, check if there's a group for that thing!
So right, once you have the groups you want, click that button up there. It's on every story's title cards, both your own and other people's, so you can be a pal and add other folk's stories to groups like I'm doing here. Once you click that button...
...a popup of all the groups you're in comes up. As you can see, I'm in a ton of groups. Most of these aren't groups I'd add Off to the Races to because it doesn't fit most of them, but right from what we can see, I know it fits Shipping and Slice of Life, so I can add it to both of them. When I click the shipping group...
...it pulls up a list of folders and subfolders. Right at the top, there's an Applejack x Rainbow Dash folder, which I can click on to add it to the folder. And that's it! It's in the Shipping group! Now I can hit that "Return" button and add it to other groups!
Now, let's see the before and after. Here's what the author put the story in:
And here it is when I was done:
From two to thirteen, and there I'm certain there are groups I didn't think to put it in! In the process, I made the story pop up on my feed. I do have notifications for a lot of these groups turned off, but one of them I have story notifications turned on for. Only one, but that's why you spam groups; just the fact that a group has members doesn't mean you're going to be visible to those members, so get yourself out there as much as possible!
Now, there is one more thing I'd like to talk about, and that's a few specific groups that I did not include this story in but which might help it quite a bit. Those are The Shameless Self-Promotion Bureau and I Just Want a Comment. These groups are more for the author to promote their own work, so I didn't touch them, but I recommend it. I mentioned that I wasn't going to talk about forums here, but this group is the exception to that. Most groups do not want you to make a forum post that's like "Hey guys read my story please" but these groups actively encourage that. In here, you can plug yourself with an actual hook to telling people what your story is like and why they should read it rather than just being a name in a folder. If you're good at this sort of thing, it can help a lot! And there's no reason to pick and choose, you can and should do both!
Maybe one day I'll update this blog with a guide on how to promote your fics in these places. Today is not that day though. For now, I hope this gives you a basic understanding of how groups work and why you should use them, and if you've found it helpful, consider sharing it around to help other folk, especially the newer authors on this site!
This is a great tutorial, I'm glad you made it! I'm doubly glad you helped me out with this haha, thanks! I learned a lot from this, I'll keep this in mind for the future :>
5436233
Happy to help
This is the kind of thing I really wish somebody had explained to me when I first joined the site. Thanks for the writeup, I'm sure it'll be really helpful for future writers.
5436239
Yeah, it took me a while to get the hang of this stuff as well. I feel like Fimfiction should have an official guide to this in the Help section, but oh well, hopefully this can help some folks out!
I've always been shocked that most new writers didn't know how to use groups. But then I realized that most people came from sites where they weren't a feature, whereas I have been on Fimfic since before I even had an account. Of course I'm too used to its features.
5436274
Yeah, before writing on Fimfiction I used to write on DeviantArt (don't recommend that) so groups weren't really a normal feature to me. I'm lucky that when I first published Inner Strength, someone threw it in the TwiShy group, which gave me my initial audience because at the time there were a few dedicated TwiShy fans that read all the fics for that ship. It wasn't for like six months and several stories later that I actually learned how groups worked.