Archive your fics.

[icarus]

painless_j has declared this international Archive Your Fics Week.

For the good of the fans she asks that you archive your fics in a variety of major (and stable) archives. Your LJ could someday be deleted, or f-locked. You might marry the Prince of Bhutan and have little interest in such trivialities as fanfiction in years to come -- but people will still want to read your stories.

I have another far more self-serving reason to archive your fics in numerous locations: Marketing. In other words, building a readership.

How many times have I heard someone complain "I never get any reviews" or "My work is barely read by anyone"?

I always ask, "Well, where have you posted it?"

Invariably they say, "Just in my LJ" or "In my LJ and X archive." And I have to laugh.

I had a friend named Suzanne who had a sexy contralto voice and a southern accent, and at times like these I like to imitate her, "Well, honey, I don't see how anybody's gonna find that story hidden down there under a bushel."

Look at it from the readers' point of view: Your story is a moving target.

Especially in LJ. You post it on X day, at X hour, and only those people who happen to be looking at that point in time (or those who follow your LJ religiously) will even see it.

If you archive at ff.net there's only a window of about an hour where your fic is listed on the main page. At Fiction Alley, that window is a couple of days. Likewise other archives. At RS.org people have to be already looking for that pairing. And often people need to see an author's name or a story's name several times before they'll click on it, particularly if the summary doesn't grab them or it's a pairing or subject that's unusual. (This is is why many of the most inventive fics don't get the attention they deserve: they need heavier marketing.)

Adding your story to multiple archives places it on the table in front of different audiences, and gives those people who are what I term "hungry readers" (who graze multiple archives) repeat exposure to your name and the names of your stories.

Not only do you want to have your story archived in multiple locations, you want to archive it in various places within the same day or so. It's like playing an ad during the Superbowl. Yes, repetition is a good thing.

painless_j is correct, this kind of repetition is not the same as cross-posting in multiple communities (or mailing lists), because you are not flooding people's f-lists and emails. Archives wait for the reader to come to them.

Now, I will be the first to admit archiving in multiple places is a royal pain in the arse. In the past, I've kept as many as nine archives (and two or three mailing lists) up to date with all my fics. I recommend keeping three major archives up-to-date. That should be enough, without becoming overwhelming.

I recommend for Harry Potter readers:

Family fare: Fiction Alley
Adult fiction: The Restricted Section
One multifandom archive: either Skyehawke or The Archive At The End Of The Universe or Fanfiction.net

What if you have tons of stories? These days only my own personal website has absolutely everything, and I find the idea of uploading all 100 or so of my fics at The Archive oh-my-god daunting.

If you have many, many fics, what I've discovered is that you need a minimum of ten stories to make enough of a "bookshelf" to be visible in an archive. For archives outside your main three, pick your top ten fics and then provide a link to either a personal website or an archive where you keep everything.

Lastly, to reach your future loyal and beloved readers, there is no substitute for character and pairing-specific archives. They're obscure, yet, like that "special street corner" where your drug of choice can be found, the addicts all seem to know where to go.

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

LOL. Yeah, I've been pretty good about updating my site roughly once a month, though lately it's been longer since I haven't been writing as much as in the past.

What do you think of tags as opposed to memories?

'your lj could some day be deleted or f-locked'

I run into f-locking much more frequently than deleted journals. It seems to be a common occurance for people to have a public LJ and then run into problems with family, coworkers, friends finding it. *blinks* That's it for my rec-list.

Hey, do you know if Switchknife is still updating her rec-list? Because about a year ago I moved my website to Slashcity, but I kept the old one up. Now as of Jan. 4th, the old website is going away, and I think she's one of the main people who still has the old links.

Icarus

[lebannen.livejournal.com]

Tags are good, too. I think in terms of searchability, memories can be easier to find a particular fic, but when you're just browsing, tags are possibly better.

I think links to locked archives can be just as annoying as links to locked journals, and no recs lists ever seem to indicate them - probably for the same reasons as some people linking to f-locked posts on lj, they can read it so surely everyone else can? I think I wouldn't mind the existence of links to in-some-way-locked pages if they were labelled as such. I had dialup for a long time, and I'd find a rec list I liked the look of, open up half a dozen or so of the links in new tabs and go offline to read them. Eventually I got the hang of having to check that those links were working for me, but annoyed me that I had to do it, if you see what I mean? Thank you once again for your list, which works!

I think Switch is offline, and presumably not updating anything, unfortunately. A Google search for [icarus slash] finds this journal as the third link, and more specific searches go straight to the fic, so even if some of those links do go down (ok, on checking, some of them are down) you're not doing too bad for traceability! Switch also has some links to your journal, so anyone with any imagination at all shouldn't find it too difficult to get working links for Primer to the Dark Arts or Guy Talk!