How To Archive Your Fics On LJ/IJ/DW/JF

[rodo]

*sigh* I'm behind schedule, and I kind of lack a proper topic for this week's meta (I can only think semi-properly because I'm on ibuprofen anyway), so this is what you get instead:

Archiving Fic on Blogs

I just spent half the day organising my fic on my DW account, for various reasons:

1.) The import helper does not change the links at the bottom of a chapter that leads to the next one. I had to do it manually, because otherwise people would have ended up on IJ instead.

2.) I revamped my tagging system. I added genres, ratings, warnings, pairings and several story tags.

3.) I used all that to finally put a sticky post at the top of my journal with links to (almost) all of my stories and various tags.

And that, of course, reminded me of how ill equipped journals are for fic archiving. Because most people don't bother with a "next chapter" link at the bottom of a chapter or with a link to the first chapter, in case someone wants to read all of the fic after it was posted. I know a few people who don't tag consistently or simply forget to tag a chapter altogether. And very few people keep a list of their fics in one post at the top of their journal or elsewhere. And if they do, it's almost never up to date.

I think I mentioned in another post that I am a lazy reader. If I can't find the first chapter easily enough, I won't read the story, even if the summary on chapter 25 sounds really interesting. And if you forgot to link to the next chapter once, or didn't tag it, I might simply assume that there is no next chapter (that happened to me before).

I know that it's a bother for the authors, but if you don't tag and link, nobody will read your fic. So here's what you should do:

1. Use consistent and transparent tags: For example, if your fic title is One Day, I Went Swimming, use that as a tag. And use it all the time. Don't use short versions like One Day and/or Swimming, because if the reader clicks on them, he will only find some of the posts without any chance of finding the others, and these tags aren't as transparent as the whole title. Especially if swimming is your hobby and you tag posts about that the same way.


2. Link between posts: Links to the first and the next chapter are very useful for the reader, because it makes it easier to read the story. You should, if possible, link to all the previous chapters as well, because someone might have read chapters 1–5 but missed 6–9.


3. Put links to all of your fics in one place: That doesn't have to be a post at the top of your journal. It can, in fact, be anywhere, as long as you put a link to it in your link list or profile. Or you can link to the fics themselves in your profile or link list (if there are only a few). You can, of course, also link to an archive.


4. Update the link list regularily: If your list is two years old and I am looking for a fic you wrote a year ago, I won't find it. You should also highlight changes like a flock on all NC-17 fic or a deletion. It's annoying to follow a link only to find out that the entry is locked or that the fic was deleted.

Apologies for the mistakes I probably made. As mentioned above, my brain is not fully functional at the moment.

Comments

[denise]

FYI, we do have plans for fixing things up a little to make content-management and indexing a lot easier (so, no having to remember to use tags/update links/link between posts/etc) -- check out the auto archive spec.

[rodo]

It'll only be for paid users though, right?

[denise]

We haven't decided -- probably what'll happen is we let everybody use it, but let paid users have multiple index pages.

[rodo]

Ah, cool ^_^.