Writing Tips

Getting Found and Seen

In best case this may mean a couple of days delay, but in the worst case it can lead to abandonment as the flow has been broken. A broken flow can make a temporary abandonment become permanent.

This is what prewriting is for.

It's basically just writing a bunch of chapters ahead of time and then not posting it until the day you've scheduled. While it's not as satisfying, readers will in the end prefer the consistency over sporadic updates, and it will keep your ranking far more stable.

In addition prewriting also lets you fix problems you only realize later when working on another chapter. This can be changing names of characters you haven't introduced yet because you didn't like them after all, or it can be letting you fix things after looking at it again after having left it for a couple weeks. We all know that looking at it again after leaving something for a week will make the you from a week ago seem like a maniac.

4. The 10 Chapter

This may be obvious, but some readers don't want to read stores before they're certain that the author isn't going to abandon it.

In addition, many readers want to be able to binge read stories.

This essentially also means readers are likely to pass by your story until it reaches past the 10th chapter. The 10th chapter shows that you've put a certain amount of determination into this project.

Of course, if they go in and find that it's 10 chapters of 300 words, then they'll likely drop it within a couple chapters, as those 10 chapters come to be around 1½ actual chapters.

5. Tags and Keywords

Choosing the tags for your story is important, as it determines the categories you can compete in when it comes to ranks. Without choosing these well, none of your effort anywhere else will come to fruition.

Major tags such as 'fantasy' and 'romance' are useless for getting ranks. They're simply too competitive and you won't get to top 1000 without already being popular. They are however good for search tags, so don't forget to add them.

Unique tags such as 'StoryByTheBestWriter' or 'heisintoher'(73 stories in total) won't help you either because readers won't be searching for this or look at its top stories. You might get #1 quickly, but #1 only matters if people look in that category.

These two types can still be used as descriptive tags, but they're not going to help your rank.

Ideally you'd want tags around 21k, 10k, 4k and 1k in size among the tags in your story.

21k is a good search tag

10k is looked for often, but shows specific directions

4k is a niche

1k is a small niche and less than this and it too little

Niches are good ways to get attention, as people reading niches often have too little to read of something specific they like. If it's well written your story will spread beyond this niche and that's when 70-200k tags get interesting.

70-200k tags are popular search tags. It's still above genres, but tags such as 'war' and 'magic' belong here, which are quite general terms. 

Be careful with choosing synonyms for popular tags. For example, traveling instead of adventure gives a different impression of what your story is going to be about. Your attempt to find good tags, should not prevent your tags from telling what your story is about.

Choose meaningful tags. 'Darkness' says very little about what your story is going to be about, as it's not very much more than an element description. Think about it like this: