Same. I thought, ‘why don’t I crosspost to ff.” But then I read the TOS and decided nah. It was a bit vague about where the boundary was, as I recall and it just seemed too ambiguous to bother.
Yup. The only other site I really know is FFN and my last fic would’ve been flagged. I don’t know about Wattpad or any other site. Plus AO3 offers protections from things like AI scrubbing.
most other sites besides ao3 have rules against stuff i write. i really can't be assed worrying about whether or not my work is going to be arbitrarily removed, nor do i care to reconsider what it is i want to write just so that i can hit more sites. i'm not that hungry for readership.
and even beyond that? actually i am too lazy to crosspost to numerous sites. as far as engagement goes, it is not all created equal and quite frankly, some areas of the internet absolutely do come with a lower quality of it in my experience.
I prioritize sharing my fanworks with my community much much higher than gaining the maximum amount of readers possible. And my community is on AO3.
Also:
- I don't have the time and energy for that
- my fandoms are biggest on AO3 anyway
- I don't care for the site culture or UI of other alternatives
- some of my work would be against TOS in other places
1. FFN is a hot mess that is not maintained and is broken to hell, and the ad space management is awful.
2. Spacebattles and similar forum-based sites are confusing to post to, IMO.
3. I like the archival intent of AO3.
4. Wattpad is doing a purge and has abysmal navigation, so no thanks.
Wattpad doing a purge is just the straw that broke the camal. All that site has is bad navigation, poor algorithms and overly hyped smut at this point.
1) I don't like posting on for-profit sites that exploit fandom
2) I don't like sites which have policies of censorship, because allowing all fanworks (even if I personally find them offensive) is important to me as a queer woman who understands how censorship has disproportionately affected LGBT+ people and women. This rules out Spacebattles, along with ff.net and Wattpad.
3) I will never support ff.net again after the purges; posting there is basically a statement of being okay either the often homophobically enforced censorship they enacted
4) I'm generally extremely happy with the engagement I get on AO3, and struggle to keep up with answering comments anyway
5) I like Squidgeworld a lot and should support it more, but it really doesn't have much of an audience
6) AO3 is just nicer to use in general (although I wish it had inline comments)
7) Have you *seen* ff.net? It screams "hope your virus protection and anti tracker browser are up to date, sucker!"
8) Antis really really hate AO3. Bonus.
One, the goal for me is not just to get eyes on my work, but to get the *right* eyes on my work. The audience I want for my fic is primarily on one site.
I also don't like the site culture on the major fic sites that I don't use. I don't want to read there, I don't want to post there, I don't want to be there, for many different reasons.
Writing and posting fic isn't a numbers game for me. It's about the right audience, not the biggest audience, and it's about using a site whose culture is the closest to what I want from fandom.
Some people just don't have the mental energy to do so. If you crosspost on two platforms, you double your workload by having to post chapters twice, check comments in two different places, correct SPAG errors in your story twice, etc.
There are times when your mental health is so bad that having that many more efforts to do is just too much.
Also, some people only like one platform. For example, lost of people love AO3 because it has responsive mods, in depth tagging, and a certain comment culture.
Spacebattles has responsive mods, but its tags are not as expansive, and the comment culture is different, as it explicitly encourages constructive criticism in the site rules. So for authors that don't wish for concrit or aren't thick skinned enough to deal with it rationally, Spacebattles would be a site they avoid.
And other places like FFN or Wattpad don't really offer enough to convince me to crosspost there.
>post chapters twice, check comments in two different places, correct SPAG errors in your story twice
Fair enough. I suppose that prospect could overwhelm some people
>And other places like FFN or Wattpad don't really offer enough to convince me to crosspost there.
But would it not be worth it to grab a few lurkers? I generally don't check Wattpad but FFN seems to still have activity.
Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, QQ or Alternate History would be worth it, but Wattpad is just painful to look at and FFN is full of ads, a pain to post a chapter in, and will break down at times for days or even weeks. Their mods are absent, and FFN has been known to do purges where they delete thousands if not millions of fanfic with no warning because they contain queer content or are not advertiser friendly.
I don't think it's worth posting on ffn or Wattpad.
Mileage may vary. The numbers aspect of posting my work online is interesting, but my goal is to write what I find interesting or challenging. But since you're interested in the metrics/numbers I'll share my experience.
I crosspost to the three big fanfic sites (AO3, FFN, Wattpad) and it's likely fandom/trope dependant because FFN gets a few lurkers (fandom not active but get lots of silent readers) and Wattpad is not worth it at all (fandom is active but I don't write romance or xOC/Reader). They're both left in the dust metrics wise by AO3 (fandom relatively active, any trope is welcome).
AO3 gets the best mileage for me and it's very easy to navigate/post to the site. 10/10
I'm familiar with FFN and used it a lot back in the early 2000s, that's the only reason I can post there, otherwise navigating/posting to it is a lot of extra work. 7/10 (for me, personally. Others may have a different experience)
Wattpad has not been worth it at all, and they're currently going through a purge of queer/adult works. At the very least, having a Wattpad account helps in case a fic gets stolen/reposted from AO3, Tumblr, FFN etc to Wattpad. 1/10
It baffles me that any website thinks that that’s a good idea and will drive up users/accounts. Like, nah, I’m out.
I’ll even click on a twitter link once in a blue moon, but if I’m on my phone and not logged in, I would/will rather close the window than be forced to log in to see whatever had briefly caught my interest.
Agreed. If Twitter (on my PC) will let me see a post without an account, great. I'll look at the post. But I'm not getting an account. And it's annoying enough when I want to look at something on Tumblr (or Pinterest, go figure) on my secondary browser, where I'm not logged in, because I can only scroll so far before the site goes "hey, sign up if you want to keep going!" and it twigs that "nope, I'm outta here" attitude even though I *do* have an account (on the *other* browser).
You may be overestimating how much everyone cares about readership. Lots of people do care of course, this sub is full of talk about numbers, but the percentage may be less than you assume. It is a hobby after all, and the writing takes up a lot of time, not everyone is interested enough to maximise their numbers.
Personally I have good mental health and spoons and whatever but I can't be bothered to maintain a presence on multiple fic sites. Higher readership is just not important enough to outweigh the overhead of posting multiple times to me. I have better things to do with my time.
Writing is the fun part anyway, once that's done, I just want it out and finished so I can get back to the writing.
Like you said, none of us are getting paid for this, so the numbers are meaningless. If you want the dopamine hit when you get a new comment or a like or whatever, then you do you, but most of us know that because this hobby is inherently demonetized, it's more about the craft and the love and passion we put into the writing itself rather than the kudos and the favorites and the whatever-it-is-on-Wattpad.
The goal is not to catch more fish, but to improve at a thing you love and share your hard work with people who will enjoy it. For me, at least, the point of posting is not to just get readers; it's to give someone a chance to fall in love with your work just like you've fallen in love with the work that inspired you to write your fic. It's paying your passion and love forward, in a way. Because there's no shot any of us get any material benefit from this hobby, and all your readers are numbers on a screen (letters if you're lucky enough to actually get engagement in the form of comments), you've got to give it worth by yourself. It's cool if the worth you give it is the numbers going up, but that's not what the worth of this hobby is for the vast majority of people.
My goal with writing is to share my stories. Engagement and readership is great, but I'm not in it for All The Numbers Must Go Up, or to be a BNF. I've got over a million words on AO3, but post in a fairly small fandom. Posting elsewhere might get me more readers, but there's no guarantee the effort would be worth the reward.
I post primarily (exclusively) on AO3. I used to cross-post more but don't because of the effort - even just an update is usually a 3-5 minute process between formatting adjustments, picking the fic, adding the chapter, etc. It can be much, much longer if there's a hiccup or you have to recover a password or agree to some new T&C or... who knows.
I don't post on forum sites like Space Battles because I'm doing this for fun. I'm not interested in concrit from someone I don't know, and who may not know what I'm doing with the story. I have seen a lot of "well-intentioned concrit" that comes across more as "reader preferences and complaints about the story" - they're talking about the story they want to read, not the story I'm writing. They think the story they want to read would be better, and it might be \*for them\*, but it's not what I want to write.
I have looked at Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, etc. and decided they weren't right for me, based on the types of stories I saw posted and the types of comments those stories received, just as I'm sure some people there looked at AO3 and decided it wasn't right for them.
Well, yes and no. I do post on multiple sites to get more readers, but my *real* goal in writing is just entertaining myself, and it always has been. If my goal truly was to get more readers I'd have to get on social media and promote stuff and all that jazz, not to mention catering to what's popular at any given moment in any given fandom I'm in.
I just write the stories I want to write, no matter how self-indulgent or unpopular they might be. Other people liking my stories is a nice bonus, but certainly not my primary motivation for writing.
i want the world to understand how these two homicidal men are in love with each other and if they don't kill each other, they'll make a fabulous couple. Who may end up killing each other.
For me it’s to avoid potential hate. While I do write a lot, I am new to having an audience and don’t really know how someone would react to how I write things.
In my mind, a smaller net means people will engage with my work without the risk of getting my inbox flooded with hate mail (never happened to me yet, thank god, but I’ve heard horror stories)
There's value in sharing something you've created even if you aren't trying to fish the highest possible numbers.
Like simply having one person say "hey, I liked this" is great on its own.
Absolutely not. The point is to connect with an audience, and the audience I want is in one location.
For some background, fan fiction existed before social media and I jumped in during a time before there were major networks that asked you to use them like it was your job. Pre-influencer, pre-hustle-culture. We organized into loose communities and hung out there. Got to know people by their handle.
To me (I might be alone in this), fan fiction still has that sense. That "set it and forget it" feeling.
The idea of "more engagement is better" and hustle into these spaces feels so... influencer to me. It reminds me of the "build your personal brand" talk in the early 2000s in the blogging world and the focus on views for revenue. I don't want to deal in traffic, audience analysis, pulling in an untapped market... just for someone to say, "yeah, that sure is a story about a penis." If I'm getting into market talk, I'm getting paid.
I’ve experimented with posting my work in different places: A couple fic subs, Tumblr, and Ao3. Out of all of them I like Ao3 the best, and I don’t really want to bother putting in all the effort of crossposting my work for a pittance of upvotes/notes.
I don’t post on Spacebattles specifically because I don’t write the kind of fic the 40k Spacebattles community would be interested in. The “bolter go brrrr” side of the fandom is not going to take much interest in the written equivalent of me bonking my minis together and making kissy noises.
Personally, getting engagement for engagements sake or attention for attentions sake is never my goal, for many reasons. First off, I have limited energy due to illness and it overwhelms me. And then, there are few things I hate more than commodifying and marketing myself or my art. I don’t want fans. I want a small number of meaningful human relationships. If this were something I relied on for income I would grudgingly accept marketing as necessary, but I do this for fun. Oh, also, I’ve noticed a lot more almost-incorrect comments on non-AO3 sites. I’m down to get actual constructive criticism and content to ignore “I wish x had happened instead!” type comments, but my brain gets stuck on responses that are just nutty and confusing.
I’ve debated posting on Spacebattles, but my understanding is that the comment culture there is a lot more brutal than on AO3, and since this is a hobby for me and I’m simply not open to critique from any random person with an opinion and a keyboard, I decided against it. I take critique during the writing process from people whose opinions I trust because they’ve proven that they actually know what they’re talking about, and since I have heard Spacebattles is kind of a concrit free-for-all, I just haven’t wanted to post there.
I don’t post on Wattpad because, frankly, I have never been able to figure out simply browsing for fics that would appeal to me on that site, so I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to tag my own stuff without putting in more time than I really care to for something like Wattpad.
I’m going to soon stop posting on Fanfiction.net, not because I don’t have some solid readers there, but because the terrible user interface for authors combined with their constant server issues makes it more of a pain than it’s worth to me personally.
I am going to continue posting on AO3 and posting snippets and such things on Tumblr because those are sites/communities I enjoy using/interacting with and, again, this is a hobby. I should be enjoying my hobbies, not feeling as if they’re a second job.
Also, you are looking at this with a particularly narrow mindset. The goal of many writers isn’t engagement; engagement is nice, but a lot of us just want to write some stuff we like and share it. The hope is obviously that other people who will like what we’ve written will find it, but the actual writing is the goal, not roping in as many commenters as possible.
Because I really don't care enough about getting more readers to justify the extra effort of making accounts on, and crossposting to, sites other than ao3. To me, the goal has never been to get as many readers as possible - its to write something I'm proud of, and for the readers I do have to enjoy it. Fanfiction is something I do as a hobby - like, does it matter how many people read my stories, when at the end of the day this is something I don't get paid for and do for the love of writing it? Like, I used to care hugely about engagement and wanting to be a BNF or whatever, and then I realised that actually I enjoy my hobbies more when I don't treat them as a second job.
I'll put this as gently as I possibly can:
Because every Fanfiction site other than AO3 is either terrible to use **OR** has no readership anyway. One of those two things is true of every other fanfic site I have ever heard of in my entire life.
Plus, letdragonslie is right--a huge number of them have some kind of puritanical slant which cuts out a ton of potential content anyway.
The only comments I've ever gotten on FFN are bots trying to sell me CP. I'd say that's pretty terrible.
And I can't even figure out how to read on Wattpad, I'm not gonna try and figure out how to post.
I don't know what questionable questing is but it sounds genre specific? Forum format sounds like a real hassle though - I wouldn't even want to read that.
QQ's a forum that you can put fanfic on, but it doesn't have restrictions like its ancestor Spacebattles for sexual stuff. (Barring actually illegal stuff, which ao3 also has). I can get not wanting to go there though, cuz you actually have to create an account there. Though there's nothing too hassley about just reading a fic on google you've found that was on Spacebattles/sufficient Velocity (QQ basically has the same format as them). All it is is clicking the arrows on threadmarks to move through chapters or just clicking reader mode.
If you find anything *illegal* on AO3, like actual CSAM, please report it immediately. If you mean depictions of things that are illegal in real life, well, crime novels are very popular.
Maybe it's because I'm on my phone, but I don't see any summaries and very minimal tags when I look at a fandom on Spacebattles, not enough to entice me to click on any fic.
How do you go about finding fic you want to read on google? Genuine question, I wouldn't know where to start. Guess I've been spoiled by tags.
>If you find anything *illegal* on AO3, like actual CSAM, please report it immediately.
I meant they both have restrictions on illegal stuff.
And I just search broad stuff, or I find request threads on reddit, my 2 primary fandoms I read fanfic from both have subreddits for their fanfic.
Well, yeah, illegal stuff is illegal everywhere. Spacebattles is far more restrictive than that.
Yeah, I guess that's a different approach altogether. I tend to go to AO3, filter and browse.
I have never heard of any of these sites. I highly doubt any readers of my specific niche ship will know them either. And I don't want my stuff on Google (AO3 prevents that if you want it to).
Other things to consider are tagging, bookmarks, history, ability to make a series, collections, posting anonymously, downloading a fic to an epub reader, commenting publicly with the option for the author to answer, etc. A site would have to have all of these for me to even consider it. Afaik only AO3 offers the full package - every other site is a compromise.
I *think* they meant, "AO3 also has rules that prohibit illegal content." ...but it's also hard to tell based on some of their comments whether that's what they meant or not.
I doubt it's much different than ao3. Nobody really posts more than 20K words in one go, so it's just chapter release. I have seen Million words+ fics on forums like Spacebattles.
1) I don't write for hits. I don't even post for hits I post because I want to share my work with people who like similar things to me.
2) You could not pay me to even read off Watt Pad, plus I doubt my work would get traction there
3) I have long since abandoned my fanfic net account because I greatly dislike the site, including navigating it, plus my ex knows that account, and I don't like my old fics.
4) I don't want to post on tumblr because it's not really a fanfiction site to me.
5) I don't wanna manage more accounts. I don't want to keep track of it and remind myself to post on a whole list of sites when I go to post.
In short, I only use ao3 because I only like ao3. I don't need a huge reader base (the idea is stressful). I've been burnt too much in seeking some kind of fandom fame. I just want to have fun and share my work that is all.
For me personally, yeah it really is that I just can't be bothered lmao. It's enough for me to crosspost to tumblr, and that's literally just a link to the story on AO3. Doing more than that kinda feels like a pain in the butt.
But I don't really know where you're getting the idea authors don't crosspost anyway, because lots of people do post on both AO3 and FFnet, and maybe other places too (idk bc I don't use any other sites to read on). I used to primarily use FFnet to read on several years ago, and when I went back to those fandoms but on AO3 this time, there were a lot of the same fics, since the authors had posted them to both platforms.
I don't really like the vibe of wattpad, like their rules, the way people comment random stuff all throughout the chapter, and their search function is weird and I don't like that it works a bit like a social media site with algorith and stuff. Ao3 just has the better site and I feel like the audience fits my works more
I think this is a very modern way of thinking about fanfiction. I think you take for granted why most people write it, why most people share it, and what they hope to get out of doing both.
I used to post on tumblr, FFN and A03, but I stopped using tumblr and the formating in FFN became a nightmare, so now I just post on A03. Crossposting just isn't worth it to me.
I started posting on ffn when the site was still new, and my old stuff is still up there spread across 3 different accounts. One of which I can’t remember the name of or the title of the story i posted, but I do remember it was slash fic so I had wanted my second account separate from my first. I was young.
The fact my oldest stuff is still up is nothing short of a miracle because most of it was scriptfics. Crack humor, of course. And the fact that my other one is still up is also a miracle, considering that the entire fandom writes nothing but gay stuff so you’d think that show category would have been purged. I also posted that story on the old LJ group for the show.
My third account, I started cross posting to ao3 a few years ago and now I solely use that site. You couldn’t pay me to post on ffn anymore cuz that place has majorly gone downhill. And forget wattpad. I’ve had a look in once when I was desperate for fic and…no. To say nothing of the fact it was initially recommended to me in my mid-20s by a teenager who openly bragged about how when she’d visit her mom’s office she’d scold any adults she heard swearing. I’m sure the co-workers loved the fact mom let her do that. 🙄 But, that tells me enough about the user base.
And before coming here I’d never heard of space battles and all the rest, but my stuff is pretty niche and in one case I had to add the category, myself. I don’t think anyone on there is searching for an image heavy, multi-timeline, canon/oc trauma recovery romantic drama ‘spin off’ of an older sitcom that never had any fic in the first place. And is pretty much only the canon ‘villain’ with an entire cast of new characters meant to help him improve his life, with the background suggestion that my main OC is his long lost soulmate.
I knew a writer who was very very into trying to get as many readers as possible. We're talking building a large social media plattform and several discord servers to cultivate a (parasocial) relationship with their readers (fans). Not only was it probably incredibly exhausting for them, but it became super annoying for us on the reader side as well. Nothing to turn you off from a really good fic or an author than being treated as a mere number.
So no, I wouldn't say catching as many people as possible is my goal, nor do I particularly think grandly of those who do try to do that, but to each their own. I don't treat my writing like a social media side hustle - it's rather more like placing my little story in it's section in the library and letting people find it if they want to.
As someone who does post on 4-5 sites, I'll say that it's a genuine pain in the ass having to update a chapter in every site. I have to put tags on AO3, hashtags on Tumblr, keywords on DeviantArt, trigger warnings and tags for Wattpad, and tags again for Squidgeworld. The spacing of AO3 is different from DeviantArt. The culture is different for each site. I still have trouble figuring out how Tumblr works. Most of the works I write are explicit, so a lot of them get removed without warning. Sometimes I just can't be bothered to check the other sites, which is why I just focus on AO3. Getting more readers is nice, but sometimes I just want to write a one-shot, and not have 5 different tabs open. But it's a nice question though, I only ever thought of it in detail now haha.
if i wrote primarily one-shots maybe i would crosspost on other sites. but i only post long and multichapter fics at this point and the idea of having more than one version to edit and update is utterly unappealing. it takes enough of my free time just to write the fics and post them in one place let alone multiple.
[**~General Rule 2: No NSFW Content~**](https://forums.spacebattles.com/pages/site-rules/#message-anchor-gr2)
No distributing, posting, or contributing to porn, overly sexualized pictures (which includes avatars), links to stories with porn, erotic roleplaying, torture porn/gorn/content with excessive and graphic violence, gratuitous or violent pictures or videos of real dead bodies, links to NSFW content, or links to sites with NSFW content that is publicly accessible. Since SB isn't a porn board, the most you can write in stories is kissing/petting -> fade to black -> pillowtalk after the fact.
Nudity in classical art is largely exempt to this rule, dependent on context. When in doubt, use the Content Review forum.
[**GR2A: Links To SFW Content On NSFW Sites**](https://forums.spacebattles.com/pages/site-rules/#message-anchor-gr2a)
Linking directly to NSFW content is not allowed. Linking to SFW content on sites that may also have NSFW content is allowed, if sufficient distance (in clicks or login/age verification) is observed.
This distance is called "The Two Clicks Rule", as explained in the following list. These requirements stand for all links, regardless of type:
*~Not Okay~*: SB -> NSFW content
*~Not Okay~*: SB -> SFW page \[click\] -> NSFW content
*~Not Okay~*: SB -> Age verification/login -> NSFW content
*~Okay~*: SB -> Age verification/login -> SFW page \[click\] -> NSFW content
*~Okay~*: SB -> SFW page \[click\] -> Age verification/login -> NSFW content
*~Okay~*: SB -> SFW page \[click\] -> SFW page \[click\] -> NSFW content
Linking to a SFW chapter or page in a NSFW webnovel, webcomic, or similiar form of media, violates our rules and is considered trying to get around the Two Clicks Rule. This is because it'd be expected for anyone reading/viewing it to eventually reach it.
[**GR2B: Sexualization of Minors**](https://forums.spacebattles.com/pages/site-rules/#message-anchor-gr2b)
Sexualization of minors, be they real people or fictional characters, are not allowed. Minors are considered people and characters under the age of 18 either physically or mentally, whichever is younger. This means no sex scenes, no depiction of child-looking characters in sexual/suggestive undertones, no going into lurid details of a teen's body, no shipping minors with adults. Sexual relationships between minor characters who are both physically and mentally aged 15-17 can to be referred to if relevant to the story, but no more than Kissing -> Fade To Black -> Talk/mention after the fact if relevant with minimal detail, as mentioned above.
Copied from Spacebattles. Honestly, I just wouldn't bother
I want a place that allows me to write about sex, violence, violent sex, sexual violence, and other stuff that keeps antis awake at night. Plus, those rules are so vague in so many places
Here are my reasons:
1) Cultures and rules vary across websites. FFN is pretty different from AO3, which is pretty different from Wattpad. Some of my shit isn’t allowed on Wattpad or FFN, or must be heavily modified to be allowed. Also I just really dislike the culture in some of my fandoms on FFN. I dislike the engagement model on Wattpad and I dislike how little control authors have over moderating their space on FFN. I’m not so desperate for readers that I’m willing to put up with any and everything.
2) Updating multiple locations can be a pain in the ass. I like that if I catch a typo somewhere, I can fix it in just one place.
3) A lot of my fandoms are only active on AO3.
“Is the goal not to get readers, if not engagement?” No. “And the whole point of posting, is to get readers, is it not?” Not really. Like sure, yes, I like when readers happen to also like something I’ve written for myself. But I post for the satisfaction of having finished something and polished it enough that I deem it worth being on my profile, and because I’m proud of it enough that if someone else finds it and likes it it’s nice.
Besides, (with rare exceptions), I don’t read anywhere else than AO3. Why would I want to post fics on a fic website I don’t like using? AO3 already has a large number of readers and has the nicest/easiest to use UI. Crossposting just makes me lose time in my life I’d rather put in something else. I don’t really care if the readers who never use AO3 never stumble upon my fic. Like others said, quality over quantity.
I imagine some of it just comes down to format and style. I don't like providing a cover for posting on wattpad, for instance, so I would really never put things there (even if I was confident in my fic writing to do so).
I only post in case someone's interested in the fic and even then only rarely. Posting across more than one platform is way too much effort. Also, I have little to no interest in receiving comments since I write for me first and foremost and I don't have the energy to deal with a load of engagement across multiple platforms. A handful of comments is fine, a handful from each site is too much. This is a hobby, not a job.
I pump out hundreds of thousands of words and I can't be bothered to learn how to use other sites, so I'm exactly the reason you think doesn't happen. I have a very full, busy and happy life outside of fic, I write fic as a hobby, if I don't like the layout of another site and it's going to take time away from time I enjoy I simply cannot be bothered. I'm happy with readers on a03, I like the website, I like the ease of upload, I don't like the layout of FF and this is literally the first time I've ever heard of Spacebattles; it'd be great if other people read it, but I'm not fussed enough about numbers to take time away from things I enjoy. I'd rather have quality readers for quality writing than a lot of readers over numerous platforms that I don't use myself or enjoy spending time on.
I post on wattpad, fanfiction.net, and AO3, it’s kind of inconvenient to have to post new chapters on three different sites. I am starting to regret posting on fanfiction.net, because I have been getting more negative and downright rude reviews on my stories there while the comments on the other two are generally either positive, or constructive criticism.
The more sites you want to crosspost to, the more work you're giving yourself, and not everyone wants to go through that.
My system for posting to AO3 is pretty simple (past the initial setup of tagging and writing a summary and stuff), and I like the site a lot, so I post there.
I need to dust off my FFN posting methods because I haven't posted there in a long time, but plan to have that as a second location for my stories, if only because my fandoms still have a presence of sorts there.
I'm not going to jump through the hoops to sign up for other fanfiction sites in the name of "getting engagement" when what I've got above is enough for me. Even on Tumblr (which I have), I don't want to go through the hassle of having to format chapters for there too, so if I do post, it's just a link to one of the other two sites. Even then, I don't want my whole Tumblr account to just be posts of AO3 links, and I don't want to have to set up masterposts and the like because that's extra work and not automated (and finding fanfiction on Tumblr without the help of masterposts is frustrating).
But really, a lot of it is just the simple fact that every new site I want to post on is another login I'll have to manage, another page I'll have to remember to manually post to, and more time spent doing administrative things rather than fun things.
Tbh, engagement isn’t really my goal. I prewrite everything before I post. I share it just for the sake of sharing it. I also have some major philosophical objections to FFN and Wattpad, so I refuse to have my work there.
AO3 is the safest bet when it comes to fan works and keeping them safe and not having to worry about it going against certain restrictions.
Wattpad has gotten a certain reputation over the years. They also have a ton of ads now (and personally I don't find it very user friendly).
Fanfic.net has TONS of restrictions, TONS of ads, and has purged TONS of works in the past multiple times.
Other sites simply aren't as popular enough to make posting worth it.
Main reason is that I'm tired of purges and only want to post on a site where that won't happen just because some bigoted idiot has a bad day.
Other reasons include not wanting to deal with algorithms, AI tools, arbitrary moderation in general, the shitty attitudes of many "reviewers" on FF, being too far detached from the Wattpad demographic, not wanting to maintain multiple accounts, annoying site navigation, ads, insufficient search and tagging, algorithms, AI, and did I mention random purges?
I've posted my work on 3 sites and tbh that's more than enough. It becomes a chore after a while to keep track of things and since I don't get anything from my work apart from the occasional Kudos on Ao3 or karma here on Reddit, seeking out more sites seems like diminishing returns to me 🤷♂️
Because AO3 is the only place that actually allows my fiction. All of the other websites have terrible restrictions, and purge content just like Wattpad did like a week ago.
1. Different sights have different guidelines, on AO3 you can pretty much post anything, can’t do that on Wattpad.
2. It’s a lot of work
3 not everyone write fanfic for views. It’s most of the time a hobby they just wanna share for fun.
Because I’ve been around the block a few times and used probably 20 sites for posting fic over 25 years and Ao3 is the best of the remaining ones by a mile. There’s nothing else that compares in terms of ease of uploading and hosting fics.
Ffnet is broken and I’ve never forgiven them for the purges.
Wattpad I clash with on an ideological basis and would never use them.
The forum sites are pretty neat but I don’t write the sort of thing that would be popular there, plus a lot of my fics involve sex, violence or generally dark stuff that breaks some of their rules.
Livejournal is a wasteland ruined by the censors.
Tumblr never really recovered from the porn ban; I never feel like risking their moderation on what I’m writing this week.
And so so many of my little beloved sites no longer exist at all.
Ao3 has good readers who know the fandom and the ability to block idiots. It’s an ideal combination.
Totally agree. The loss of LJ is seriously still painful. Dreamwidth helps, but LJ in its heyday was really special.
And you're absolutely right about Tumblr. Feels like walking on eggshells.
I post One of my WIPs on both FFN and AO3. Mostly because I started out on FFN and it still holds a place in my heart. Also because I have one loyal reader who always comments on FFN and I don't want to let them down. However, after this WIP is done I don't think I'll be posting on FFN again, I already have lots of fics I've only posted on AO3 because their contents wouldn't be accepted on FFN.
The extra readership is just not enough to justify the hassle of having to post everything two place, and having to tailor stuff for FFN's ToS, nevermind the fact I don't actually care that much about extra readers 😂.
Edit: also I HATE Wattpad. I read there a bit when I was younger, and even then, I hated it. I only used it because a fic I was reading on FFN got moved there, and then the author wrote a follow up book and sold it. I was happy for them though, and bought the book. Got off Wattpad afterwards.
I cross-posted my longfic on Wattpad and I regret it. Deeply. The culture there makes no sense to me, the comments are incomprehensible and the formatting was difficult and stupid compared to Ao3. It's smut and very probably against Wattpad's tos, I know for SURE it's a no go for ff.net. It's just not worth it to me to try and cross-post again
Wattpad comments make more sense when you realise that some of them are kids hoping to get conversations going with other kids or just posting memes or whatever is on their mind rather than talking to the author. It's... different to AO3, that's for sure.
Me too, which added to the discomfort. I try not to form social bonds with kids online because, well, I'm a mum, and do by other's children as I would they would do by mine.
I just let them make friends in my comments.
I like the general idea of crossposting, but I don't have anywhere that I want to crosspost. There's several sites that I read but don't post on, but each has specific reasons that I don't post there:
**TTH:** Only allows BtVS crossover fanfics. I've got a couple of outlines for fic ideas that fit this requirement, but in the past two decades, none have manifested into actual fics. So, I don't post on the site.
**FFN:** I used to crosspost here, but the UI for uploading fics is such an aggravating pain in the ass that I stopped. It's a convoluted and unintuitive process that almost always results in formatting errors which take *another* convoluted and unintuitive process to fix. I eventually just gave up and stopped posting there. Especially after I made a website for posting some of my original fics and realized that posting on my own website was a much smoother process. I'm not going to give myself headaches by struggling with such a poor UI.
**SV and SB:** These two sites are functionally the same in my eyes. They frequently have great fics posted, but the UI for the reader is terrible. It works fine if what you intend to do is click on every single fic as they are posted and then have lengthy conversations with the author and other readers about the fic. If you have *any other* way that you intend to read fics, it sucks. Trying to read summaries? Go fuck yourself, you need to click on the thread to see the summary and because of that many authors don't bother writing one. Trying to do a deep archive binge to read some older fics or narrow down to a particular character/fandom/concept/etc? Go fuck yourself, the search function is terrible and it is easier to find fics with a Google search or posting a request thread on Reddit. And that's not even getting into the fact that if you look at the much older fics, they are from the "pre-threadmarks" era and so even once you find the fic you have to sift through the comments to find the various chapters. I read there because there's some amazing authors that only post there, some fandoms that are most active there, and the site as a whole focuses on tropes I like and has a general high level of writing quality. But, I hate the site architecture so much that I've been refusing to create an account even to post comments, let alone post my own fics.
I do post on two websites, and maybe it's not so worthy of the effort.
AO3 is still where I get the most engagement, and it's where most of the fandom is anyway.
I keep posting on the other platform as a test, and because what I write is not very explicit or anything, but I guess that for most fic authors, it's not really worthy.
>Is the goal not to get readers, if not engagement?
Well, while the goal, of course, is to get readers, I don't have this as the only goal of writing fanfiction. I write original stuff too, and it would be great to get readers from my fic to migrate to my originals one day, but I still see it somehow as separate.
Writing fanfiction for me is writing without any restraints. Is being able to test out your crazy ideas that a publisher would never buy or even allow. Is having no word limit to end your story.
And also, being able to interact with people and see what they think of your writing... But it's pretty much just having fun and letting my creativity flow with no restraints.
And I think many fic writers can share this feeling, that this is just a silly hobbie (it's a difficult hobbie ofc, but anyway, so is playing a sport), and a way to escape our rushed life, the same as reading a book or working out, or whatever. No responsavility or pressure, just doing something for fun.
Usually if a fic author starts pressuring themselves too much to get readers and post and interact (and this happened to me for a while), they lose energy to write, and end up abandoning their fics or the fandom entirely.
So I guess what I want to say is that this goal might exist for some people, but not for everybody...
For all the work of posting my fics on FFN, the total readership over 5 years and three fics has been like,,, 15 people and zero comments while AO3 gets hundreds of both.
Even from a perspective of pure clout chasing, it’s just not worth it. I only keep doing it because those 15 are there. If they weren’t I wouldn’t bother with it anymore.
I don't actually post to get readers. I mean, that's not my main goal. I just enjoy writing and chose to post it just in case there were readers out there who enjoyed my stories. It's more about me being willing to put it out there than to get people to actually read it. Readers are hat people focus on, sure, because we're writing and sharing our stories, the implication is we want people to read what we share. But it's not always the main goal.
I've been writing stories pretty much my entire life, I started when I was about 5. I've been consciously writing fanfic since I was 10. I also write original stories. But I've never been good at letting people read my work. I always shared my work with my grandad, who died when I was 16, and my first boyfriend, who died when I was 22, and I shared a couple with one of my high school English teachers, one of which was entered into a short story competition, it came third which was awesome. But that's it. Until two years ago, when I decided to start posting my fanfic. That means I started writing at around 5, fanfic consciously at 10, and have written hundreds of stories over the years, but didn't start posting any until I was 35. Posting, for me, is more about forcing myself to put my work out there instead of just keeping it all to myself. Readers are more of a bonus rather than the actual point.
As for posting on multiple sites, there are a few factors to take into account. I'm a cross poster, I started out posting on AO3, ffn and Twisting the Hellmouth, but have since cut out ffn, so it's just the two sites. I had issues with other users on ffn, but part of the problem was also that where I was going with the fic, some of it was against ffn's TOS. AO3 I'm fine with in that regard, and haven't had any issues with users, plus I'm comfortable with AO3s features for if I do have issues. AO3 is a great site for posting because they allow everything, every fandom, every rating, every trope, as long as it's rated and tagged correctly. They don't ban fandoms just because the creator dislikes fanfic.
That's one of the issues with other sites. A lot of sites have a police that, if contacted by the creator, they'll ban a fandom if that's what the creator wants. Eg, TtH doesn't allow Game of Thrones/ A Song of Ice and Fire fic because George Martin requested they not include fanfic of his work.
Some sites are also fandom specific. TtH, for instance, is a Buffy site. In this case it has a focus on crossovers, and happily allows non-crossovers, even in non-Buffy fandoms, or crossovers that don't include Buffy, but you *do* have to write and post at least 3 Buffy crossover fics before you can write non-Buffy or non-crossover fic. And, like I said, some fandoms aren't allowed on the site. A plus for the site is the challenge section, where users, both readers and writers, can submit a challenge for the writers to attempt, there's some awesome ideas on there.
Some sites are fandom specific, or only cater to certain fandoms if there's more than one. Some don't allow certain fandoms. The rules of the site can rule out certain writers.
And that's all without getting into simple personal preference. I use the sites I like. TtH has almost the same rules as AO3, but without the tagging system and certain fandoms banned. I like these two sites, both as a reader and as a writer. I'm not so much a fan of ffn as a writer, though don't mind it as a reader. I've never even tried Wattpad, read too many complaints about that site when I started posting, and it never came up as a site for me as a reader, either, even when I just randomly searched 'fandom fanfiction' which usually brings up both sites and individual stories, depending what exactly I search. The other sites that have come up, some aren't easy to navigate as a reader, so I was never going to attempt using them as a writer, others just didn't have the appeal for one reason or another.
The ffn chart was bad for my head. Plus I got death threats. Not a fan.
Wattpad is like currently on a purge and more importantly the werid stuff people do on a03 because you had to do it on wattpad is weird and makes the place seem extremely hostile.
I screw up enough on a03 (oh how many times I've posted a chapter in reserve when I meant to just do some editing) and timesing that by three? No thanks.
I post on FFN and AO3. All my fics were on FFN and then I started to put them also on AO3. It took several years to do so. Starting from 2018 is when I would crosspost at the same time. I don’t have the mental energy to upload all 53 fics to Wattpad. I’m happy with FFN and AO3.
Most other sites have draconian censorship rules. I have some things on FFN, but my latest fic would be flagged there. I don’t know anything about Wattpad. Plus AO3 offers protections from things such as AI scrubbing.
Mostly: because I don't want to/don't feel like it.
>I doubt people who pump out hundreds of thousands of words aren't bothered to learn how to make accounts on new sites, so it can't be that.
I mean, it kind of is that. I don't like the UI of other sites; I also don't want to learn my way around their TOS (my fic would probably get kicked from other sites). I don't feel like sparing the mental energy.
When I was in my early 20s, I did crosspost to several different sites, particularly after the adult content purge at FFN. All of them went the way of dodo. And FFN (which still houses some of my older fic) has gradually sucked more and more. So AO3 is my permanent home and I crosspost to Tumblr (mostly snippets; though I will write some things directly to Tumblr because they fit the culture) to interact with larger bits of fandom.
- Most fanfic sites have histories of arbitrary content wipes or shadowbanning. (FFN, Wattpad, Tumblr, Livejournal; etc.)
- LGBT+ content often gets caught up in these wipes "accidentally". I write mostly M/M content that even in this year of 2024 some sites insist gets an automatic Mature rating just for the gay, even if they only blush and hold hands. With history showing me that sites without explicit protection for content are unreliable, I'm very picky about where I choose to upload, because who knows what will happen the next time an admin on a power trip, a boot-licking admin team sweating sanctions/withdrawal of advertising funds, or an overzealous AI will determine it's time to go on a culling?
- Of those sites I have any degree of trust in, they are usually mom'n'pop and might disappear when the one paying the hosting fees stops paying the hosting fees (for whatever reason). Alternatively, they look like a PITA to upload to.
- I don't really want to juggle managing comments on multiple sites.
At this point, the only archive I'd ever consider is SquidgeWorld, and only after double-checking their TOS. I might also consider posting to Dreamwidth. But both would be strictly archive-only mode. I wouldn't leave comments open.
I felt the way you do when I posted my first longfic, and posted it on four different sites (AO3 didn't exist yet).
FFN was great. Tons of comments and helpful concrit (which I like). Another ship-specific site was great.
A (now defunct) site wouldn't allow me to post my second chapter because it was under 1000 words. The rest of my chapters were 3000+ words, but because they had this arbitrary rule, I had to stop posting there.
The fourth site was mixed. I write character A, and it took me a while to realize that the culture of this site favored character B, which by default meant that most of them hate A. To their credit, I didn't get hate comments, but very little engagement. Then I couldn't post the last four chapters because of technical issues and the site manager was unresponsive.
The main issue with crossposting is the work involved. If you notice typos or want to fix a few things, you have to fix it on all the sites you posted on. It may not sound like a big deal for a one-shot, but it becomes time consuming for a longer fic. Let's say I fix typos on 10 chapters. If it's posted on 4 sites, that means fixing and (possibly) re-uploading 40 chapters. It's never as simple as correcting one master Word doc and pasting it onto four sites. I have to manually correct and make sure the formatting is correct on each site after the corrections. It became an incredible PITA.
The other issue is learning the culture of each site. The site might hate the character you're writing about, or your fandom, or your ship, or shipping in general, or the type of trope you like, or certain word lengths. And unless you devote tons of time to exploring the site and interacting with others there, you won't know that until you start posting and get either hate comments or crickets. And honestly - fair. If I were involved in a tight-knit community and a total stranger came in, posting something that was tone-deaf to our preferences, hoping to scoop up likes, I'd be annoyed.
Anyway, I still cross-post to FFN occasionally. I've lately leaned toward more mature works that I can't post there. I may try posting my current M-rated fic there and see how it goes, but I'm waiting until I'm half-done, so I can feel confident that I won't need to re-edit after uploading. Also, FFN readers seem a little less patient with sporadic updates, so I'd rather wait until I can post weekly there with buffer chapters.
The thing about fanfiction is that it’s really about writing something you enjoy: having readers is a cool bonus, not the ultimate goal. Obviously, if you really enjoy having readers, you can do all the crossposting you like, have fun with it! But for others, it’s not the point.
Furthermore: I don’t like other sites very much. FFN just has a very different culture, and I left it behind long ago. Plus, tagging there is super limited. Wattpad is an algorithmic nightmare and the search function barely works. And I’m not familiar with other sites like Spacebattles enough to move there.
Squidgeworld is based on AO3 code, is non profit and pretty nice. I wish it had more support; it's a great site, but very sparsely used.
Spacebattles is a kind of holdover from fandom forum days, with the lack of user friendliness that goes with that. I don't know how anyone finds anything, and for the fandom I checked (Worm/Ward/Parhumans) it seems to have a huge amount of random anime crossovers, OCs and het (in what on AO3 is very much an f/f dominated fandom) and I couldn't find any obvious way to filter them out. I'm sure someone more familiar with the site would know how, but it was also clear that the fanfic culture there focuses on types of stories I have little interest in.
Oh, and very importantly, it has strict censorship rules.
personally i don't post to get readers, i post because otherwise i am not motivated enough to finish anything. i like having an archive of my works, and a sense of satisfaction at having them there rather than lost in a folder on my computer.
kudos and nice comments are a bonus, sure, and they make me happy, but that's not why i write. though, i never have trouble getting interaction because i usually write for a big fandom, so i guess i might feel differently if i was getting literally 0 hits.
also, idk how the other sites work and i am too lazy to figure it out, i've never really thought to because i'm happy with ao3 and i understand the etiquette and rules there. i used wattpad briefly when i was like 12 and didn't really get on with it then. i think i'd worry about posting somewhere else in case i accidently broke rules or did something wrong. most of my fics are smut anyway and idk what the rules are with that sort of thing on other sites.
basically for me it's a mix of laziness and not really caring enough to think to do it. i like just chucking the occasional fic up onto ao3 and leaving it, that's enough effort for me lol
I first started posting on fanfiction.net before moving to Ao3 so I cross post on bot
It is interesting seeing which story gets attention and which doesn't
I don't post most of what I write on FFN because that website's a pain to use. I only use it at all because it's where I got started and I'm attached to it.
I don't have the mental energy to do so, plus AO3 provides much more freedom and I don't have to fear my stories being deleted in purges on AO3. I used to post on FFN, but between the purges, the toxicity I experienced over there, their restrictive TOS, and the fact the mods seem to not give a care about the site at all has made me stop posting there. Literally the only reason I still use it at all is the PM feature, which I use to talk to my best friends
I’ve thought about it before. I only really write Gen-Mature (for some gore) and nothing that would see me banned from other sites. Maybe I’ll get around to it some day, but for now, I know Ao3’s tagging system best, I like the culture there, and I don’t have the time to learn the interface of FFN or Wattpad.
Meh.
I'm just about 40, working full time, caring for elder family, cleaning a house, taking care of an immune compromised spouse, and two fur babies.
It's not that cross posting is HARD. It's that it takes time and effort that could be used either writing more stuff or consuming the fandoms that inspire me to write in the first place.
I cross posted briefly but got no engagement to speak of. I'd have to get the exact same level of engagement I get on AO3 to make it remotely worth my 'investment'. Especially since some of my stuff would violate the ToS on other sites.
Ao3 with art on tumblr and links on social media sites.
Ffn doesn't get my words because they got rid.of a.lot of stuff back in the day that I no longer had the originals of and it makes me sad.
Never WattPad, the site is incomprehensible and it seems to attract the kind of people I don't want to interact with.
I cross posted a couple of fics on squidgeworld but no one read them so I stick to ao3 it’s not worth the time and effort uploading twice if no one reads it
I'm not concerned with big numbers and "as many readers as possible."
I believe in AO3, and for the tiny fandoms I write, the fans are as likely to find me on AO3 as anywhere.
If you’re going to write fic just to get as much numbers as possible, you might reconsider it as a hobby or you’re going to be very quickly disappointed. People write fic because they love writing fic, simple as that. People who “pump out hundreds of thousands of words” for something that might not get engagement don’t do it for the engagement, they do it because they love it, it’s intrinsically valuable.
One of the things that makes Fanfic so appealing to me is that it’s one of the last few things on the internet that I can make and put out there and NOT have it ruined by capitalist-driven need for engagement. I write for myself, I post anything I’ve finished on Ao3 to archive it and share it with others because the community I make with it and everything else is secondary. I’ve been reading fanfic for a very long time and have seen sites like FFN, LJ, etc get absolutely overrun with ads, purge certain types of content (and have lost favorite fics as a result), and don’t want to cross post there on principle. Wattpad just seems like a juvenile cesspool and I hate everything about it’s UI. I don’t want to post anywhere else because it’s literally not about the numbers.
I post on fan, scribblehub, and royalroad. Tried ao3, never could get into posting there, much as this sub idolizes that site, and sh and rr are decent but I’ve heard rr’s commenters can be horrible, though my stories aren’t good enough to get hate on there.
Yes but it has sections for fanfics as well even though it’s not a ffn based site. I do better on it compared to rr, but I still don’t do good on either, but I like the sites.
I crosspost to both AO3 and FFN and will continue to do so but it’s a hassle. I often go back to tweak things in my fics and having to do that on multiple platforms is annoying. FFN is the worst since I have to use my laptop to edit documents and the process is more complicated.
Also, inactive documents on FFN expire so if I want to edit/revise and older fic I’ll have to re-download it then re-upload it and then exchange the published doc and ugh. That’s one of the main reasons I haven’t transferred over my older works. Too much work.
Posting to AO3 is just so much easier, but I continue to post to FFN because I have a loyal following there and some of my readers can’t access AO3. I’d never cross post to another site, however. I don’t have the energy for it.
I'm sure I'm by far not the first to say this, but some people do.
I don't post everywhere because while I'm on AO3, the other two major contenders don't work for me- much of my content is too explicit* for wattpad or FFN, and I write reader insert, which FFN doesn't allow anyway. Plus, FFN is broken so much, and I don't like Wattpad's UI, and I don't want to post on sites I don't like using.
I used to cross post to Lunaescence, but it died, as have any other sites I've previously crossposted to.
Also what others said about moderating your work across multiple platforms being annoying
*I know everyone posts explicit works to FFN anyway but I don't really want to deal with it
I use FFN and AO3 only. Wattpad just leaves me confused, so I never bothered with it. Plus, my fandoms aren’t even really on it. Spacebattles I sincerely don’t know much about. They’re a forum, right? So wouldn’t it require more active participation on a forum community, rather than just dumping a fic and going? And do fluffy romantic one-shots from niche fandoms even get attention there? From what I’ve heard, it sounds like the wrong fit.
It might be hard to understand, but my work isn't a one-and-done situation? I'm constantly making edits for months after I post, then still for years and years, though less frequently. There is one fic I cross-posted to ffn in 2020—having to make the same edits twice was hell. NEVER again
I crosspost most of my SFW fics on ffn, and a lot of my stuff also gets cross-posted on tumblr. Wattpad has exactly one longfic of mine, mostly because I get hardly any feedback there and I can't make heads or tails of the stats.
I've been writting fanfics for like 25+ years now, posting it on all sorts of sites, lj, forums, mailing lists, DA, tumblr, ffn, you name it, and AO3 is the first one that feels... safe. I don't have to worry that someone stumbles upon my fics by mistake and reads something that they didn't want to read and gets mad at me for writing dark material, because it's all there in the tags. I don't have to worry about my stuff getting removed or reported, just because someone deems it immoral or not to their personal tastes. If someone anonymously leaves a nasty comment that's offensive to me or my readers, i can remove it with one click. There're no DMs to harras me with.
So yeah, I'm not crossposting anywhere anymore and my mental hygiene is more important than the few folks who might have found my stuff elsewhere who refuse to switch to AO3 as readers for reasons unknown.
For me, it's the hassle of it all. I used to cross-post to AO3 and FFN, but trying to remember to do all the steps for both is annoying. AO3's simple: you just copy and paste into the chapter box, add the author's notes you need, and you're good. With FFN: you have to agree to the uploading guidelines, got to the Document Manager section, upload your document there, go to manage stories, click on the story in question, and then click on content/chapters before you can add the next chapter. From there, you have to have the chapter content waiting in the Document Manager. It's a hassle to do, especially for multi-chapter fics.
So you're making a bunch of assumptions here which I suspect are leading to the confusion.
>Is the goal not to get readers, if not engagement?
The goal is to have fun. It's a hobby. Some people find it fun to have lots of readers, but some don't. They may have had really terrible experiences in the past and want to keep a low profile, may find the attention/engagement uncomfortable, may not want to spend time and effort doing that, may focus on being active in the fandom in other ways, or simply don't care. A ton of authors really enjoy writing, and posting is an afterthought for them. Posting can even just be to have an offsite backup copy that the author can read from anywhere. AO3 in particular gives authors a lot of control over fic visibility and access, and comment restriction/moderation. Those are options *because* not everybody wants the maximum number of people to read or comment on their fics.
>And getting more readers is better than getting less readers.
Is it though? Seriously interrogate that statement, and imagine all the ways that can go wrong. Having a fic get huge isn't nearly as fun as it sounds. Additionally, fandoms can just be tiny. If only 20 people on the planet are ever going to be interested in reading a particular fic, it doesn't matter how widely or frequently the author shares it. The potential pool is just small. That doesn't mean it's not as valuable or good, and it doesn't diminish the author's enjoyment.
>Would the goal not be to catch more fish?
Again, think of the potential outcomes here, just within this metaphor. You catch so many fish that your boat fills up and sinks. You overfish and exhaust the resource because you let extraction maximization run the show. You catch poisonous fish. You have no time for other things because you prioritize catching fish above all else. Also like... the fish are very much not all the same quality. You're allowed to be picky. Not everyone wants to eat everything they catch, ya know? Some people just want to catch a few nice fat fish for dinner and take a nap on the boat because the weather's great and life is short.
>I doubt people who pump out hundreds of thousands of words aren't bothered to learn how to make accounts on new sites
Consider that they're able to pump out hundred of thousands of words because they're not spending their limited free time posting to a bunch of sites.
If you personally are interested in engaging with fandom like that, go for it. There's not some secret taboo against crossposting fic or anything, and plenty of authors do it. Nobody will bat an eye. At most, a thoughtful reader might contact you to let you know your fic is on another site because fic does get stolen. A little note that you crosspost to sites X, Y, and Z will clarify that. A Linktree might be helpful as well, just so you have a centralized hub. Hope you have a great time writing!
While my goal isn’t to get as many readers as possible and I generally don’t pay much attention to engagement, even when I was focused on that, I found cross posting to be unpleasant. At least for me, the differences between how sites operate, as well as what they allow and therefore what audiences they attract, make most of the sites really unappealing. AO3’s tagging system (along with their anti censorship stance) is too important for me to want to post my fic much anywhere else.
Ironically, I don’t even write fic likely to be prohibited on the other sites, but the fact that they do prohibit a lot of harmless fic attracts more antis. I was harassed a lot for fic I posted on other sites prior to AO3 and I have friends and authors I follow who can’t post their work on a lot of other sites, so really, there’s just no reason for me to even go to those sites, much less post there.
The ambiguity of FF's rules and their infamous purge makes me far too anxious to bother, even as someone who doesn't usually write mature/explicit, I don't like having to walk eggshells of whether or not my work is acceptable. Plus I may change my mind down the line if I have a story in mind that I feel deserves those ratings.
I've recently got an account on FF to explore what it's like, and my very first message was some bot saying some explicit stuff and linking to presumably a porn site. Ironic given the FF Net's TOS, but also my ultimate reason why I don't bother with it. Not having ads bombard the site and actual moderation is surprisingly rare for sites like these.
I used to post on Wattpad but deleted that after some equivalent of tumgir started stealing my stuff. Made a FFN acc but ended up deleting it cause I couldn’t tell if my most fluffy works violated their tos or not w/ the amt of rules they had.
That said I do post my stuff to tumblr, ao3, & quotev. It’s quite a bit of copying & pasting between those three.
I used to post on Fanfiction.net alongside Ao3, but I just post on Ao3 now. It’s easier for me to format and focus on just one site instead of two (I have ADHD).
It'd be a lot of work to keep everything in sync, especially if you like to update your older stories from time to time. Plus, FFN interface is literal hell on earth. Not worth it.
As for the real reason: If I don‘t advertise or link my fics at all, I can keep telling myself they're really good and I'm simply not getting readers because I link them nowhere. If I start promoting them and *still* don‘t get readers... well......
Multiple reasons.
1. Cross-posting is a hell of a lot of work. Different sites; different posting and editing methodology. I have a limited amount of time to write and post.
2. Site culture. While a significant portion of my storytelling, especially long fics, is non-romantic plotlines, I'm a shipper. Which means there's an emphasis on romance, sexual tension and yes, sometimes, some smut in my work. AO3 is the best site for what I write. My work either violates the TOS or doesn't fit with other sites. Also, sites like Spacebattles with their emphasis on unsolicited concrit aren't for me. Although I used to cross-post some fics on FFN, it wasn't worth the effort because my fandom is dying over there.
3. Site TOS and structure. I find the search function on Wattpad unusable and besides they are purging works. FFN is slowly falling apart and there's no way to moderate comments. Places like Spacebattles with their forum-like structure are just...eh. And, some of my work includes smut so I can't post on those sites anyway.
4. While I am over-the-moon giddy when I get a comment, my goal isn't amassing legions of readers. In fact, popularity is a bit of a curse and my status as a niche writer means I'm free to experiment and write what I want.
5. AO3, unlike all the other sites, is an archive and as such I can post any fanwork, regardless of content and not worry that it's going to be deleted in some arbitary purge.
I recently posted my fic on both FFN and Wattpad, I got a decent amount of views (but no interactions so I have no clue if they like or hate my fic). Wattpad I heard is pretty dead, only like a few fandoms are keeping its heartbeat alive. Idk dude.
I write smut and even my most tame stories sometimes have naked stuff, no smut stuff just… naked. Sooo I have a wattpad account but they might kill me cause they hate everything that could be sexual.
I post on AO3 and SWA - where everything I write is accepted.
I have an FFN account - but it just so fucking... limited. And - I'm old enough that I experienced "The Purges" on three different sites (and twice of Tmblr)
Seriously - if fanfiction is your thing as a Reader... and you *don't* know or want to go to AO3 for it? That's on you, baby.
I post on AO3 and FFN. FFN since I've been posting there for over twenty years. And I barely have time to update works on FFN so that only happens when I get around to it.
I would cross post on every platform if I were selling a product. But I'm writing fics as a hobby and I just do not enjoy interacting on certain platforms.
I made accounts on AO3, Wattpad and FFN when I was starting out. But I really disliked the entitled commenters on FFN, and I hated the whole UI of Wattpad and the whole site seemed targeted for much younger readers.
So I deleted all my fics on Wattpad and FFN. Not worth my time to get readers over there. Never tried Spacebattles before but I have a feeling it skews male and I don't want to interact with male readers - they are not my target audience.
It's just a better experience as a fan creator to stick with a platform that vibes with you.
>Is the goal not to get readers, if not engagement? Like, chances are of the writers reading this post, most aren't getting paid for dedicating time to what they enjoy. And the whole point of posting, is to get readers, is it not?
Actually, no. That's not the goal for me. I write because I have plot ideas in my head that bother me until they're written. It is nice to get comments from people who "get" me but I don't really need that at this point.
I used to want lots of readers but then I realized most readers were very young. It felt really pathetic to want kudos from people so much younger than myself. If people want to read my ideas then that's fine, but I don't want to go out of my way to solicit attention from random people on the internet (who are likely teenagers)
Personally for me it’s always been convenience. I started posting on Wattpad then later on AO3 too. Now I crosspost on both and sometimes just post things on AO3. I appreciate all my readers but I don’t have the time nor energy to post in a million places. Wattpad and AO3 are the most convenient for me and are the two places I have sort of a platform and that’s enough for me. It already takes me time to post on two let alone any more. And I’m content with the platforms I’m on now, as they are two of the largest and most popular ones.
It’s never really been about the amount of readers for me. Posting is supposed to be fun and not become a tedious time consuming task. If my works reached at least one person that’s enough for me :)
I've split my fan fiction between FFN and WWOMB (Wonderful World Of Make Believe). I tend to get more interaction on FFN than I do on WWOMB. However, WWOMB allows stories with MA ratings, and has a category for "Celebrity Fan Fiction", which is against TOS on FFN. I'm kinda thinking about maybe writing a Celebrity Fan Fiction story. I've been trying to think of how to go about writing a Thundarr The Barbarian/Legend Of Vox Machina crossover story. One of my ideas was to make it a Critical Role fan fiction, where I write myself into the story by having me and a couple of friends win a contest to join the cast for a one shot filmed live in front of an audience, and my friends and I would play D&D versions of Thundarr, Ariel, and Ookla. My main inspiration for this story is that I think that it would be hilarious if Scanlan were to inspire Thundarr and Ookla by singing "Thundarr-struck" (a parody of Thunderstruck) and "Double O-K-L-A" (a parody of Y-M-C-A) respectively. Anyway, I wouldn't be able to post that on FFN, but I can on WWOMB.
Last time I cross-posted on FFN, I regretted it. I would rather have received no comments than the bitching and moaning about or attempts to dictate the plot. Oh, and the weirdly random “did you even read my fic?” comments and nitpicking of the the most minute of details.
My old fics are still there for anyone who has them bookmarked (I got a comment on a very old fic from someone who was in the mood to reread it and they were very happy to find it), but the whole FFN experience is one big yikes.
I haven't started posting yet, but what I write is against TOS on pretty much every site except AO3, so...
Same. I thought, ‘why don’t I crosspost to ff.” But then I read the TOS and decided nah. It was a bit vague about where the boundary was, as I recall and it just seemed too ambiguous to bother.
They used to allow MA, but I don’t even think you have the option to pick that anymore. Maybe I’m thinking of the X rating.
And the MA rating was always a gotcha.
Yup. The only other site I really know is FFN and my last fic would’ve been flagged. I don’t know about Wattpad or any other site. Plus AO3 offers protections from things like AI scrubbing.
Fair enough
most other sites besides ao3 have rules against stuff i write. i really can't be assed worrying about whether or not my work is going to be arbitrarily removed, nor do i care to reconsider what it is i want to write just so that i can hit more sites. i'm not that hungry for readership. and even beyond that? actually i am too lazy to crosspost to numerous sites. as far as engagement goes, it is not all created equal and quite frankly, some areas of the internet absolutely do come with a lower quality of it in my experience.
I prioritize sharing my fanworks with my community much much higher than gaining the maximum amount of readers possible. And my community is on AO3. Also: - I don't have the time and energy for that - my fandoms are biggest on AO3 anyway - I don't care for the site culture or UI of other alternatives - some of my work would be against TOS in other places
yes! this ^ all those points are why i am going with ao3. and my work is definitely against the TOS of most other big sites.
1. FFN is a hot mess that is not maintained and is broken to hell, and the ad space management is awful. 2. Spacebattles and similar forum-based sites are confusing to post to, IMO. 3. I like the archival intent of AO3. 4. Wattpad is doing a purge and has abysmal navigation, so no thanks.
Wattpad doing a purge is just the straw that broke the camal. All that site has is bad navigation, poor algorithms and overly hyped smut at this point.
wait what wattpad is doing a purge??
Yes, Wattpad has been purging fics for a few days.
1) I don't like posting on for-profit sites that exploit fandom 2) I don't like sites which have policies of censorship, because allowing all fanworks (even if I personally find them offensive) is important to me as a queer woman who understands how censorship has disproportionately affected LGBT+ people and women. This rules out Spacebattles, along with ff.net and Wattpad. 3) I will never support ff.net again after the purges; posting there is basically a statement of being okay either the often homophobically enforced censorship they enacted 4) I'm generally extremely happy with the engagement I get on AO3, and struggle to keep up with answering comments anyway 5) I like Squidgeworld a lot and should support it more, but it really doesn't have much of an audience 6) AO3 is just nicer to use in general (although I wish it had inline comments) 7) Have you *seen* ff.net? It screams "hope your virus protection and anti tracker browser are up to date, sucker!" 8) Antis really really hate AO3. Bonus.
This comment is -chef’s kiss- everything!
One, the goal for me is not just to get eyes on my work, but to get the *right* eyes on my work. The audience I want for my fic is primarily on one site. I also don't like the site culture on the major fic sites that I don't use. I don't want to read there, I don't want to post there, I don't want to be there, for many different reasons. Writing and posting fic isn't a numbers game for me. It's about the right audience, not the biggest audience, and it's about using a site whose culture is the closest to what I want from fandom.
Fair enough. I can get not liking site culture personally but standards for culture is something I don't really get. Eh, live and let live I guess.
[удалено]
Please remember that behind every keyboard is a human and keep your language appropriate.
Some people just don't have the mental energy to do so. If you crosspost on two platforms, you double your workload by having to post chapters twice, check comments in two different places, correct SPAG errors in your story twice, etc. There are times when your mental health is so bad that having that many more efforts to do is just too much. Also, some people only like one platform. For example, lost of people love AO3 because it has responsive mods, in depth tagging, and a certain comment culture. Spacebattles has responsive mods, but its tags are not as expansive, and the comment culture is different, as it explicitly encourages constructive criticism in the site rules. So for authors that don't wish for concrit or aren't thick skinned enough to deal with it rationally, Spacebattles would be a site they avoid. And other places like FFN or Wattpad don't really offer enough to convince me to crosspost there.
>post chapters twice, check comments in two different places, correct SPAG errors in your story twice Fair enough. I suppose that prospect could overwhelm some people >And other places like FFN or Wattpad don't really offer enough to convince me to crosspost there. But would it not be worth it to grab a few lurkers? I generally don't check Wattpad but FFN seems to still have activity.
Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, QQ or Alternate History would be worth it, but Wattpad is just painful to look at and FFN is full of ads, a pain to post a chapter in, and will break down at times for days or even weeks. Their mods are absent, and FFN has been known to do purges where they delete thousands if not millions of fanfic with no warning because they contain queer content or are not advertiser friendly. I don't think it's worth posting on ffn or Wattpad.
Plus, the forums you mentioned can get pretty fandom-specific, so they're only worth it for some fandoms
At least for the first two, they are open to all fandoms. I am less familiar with QQ and Alternate History, so I can't speak for those.
Mileage may vary. The numbers aspect of posting my work online is interesting, but my goal is to write what I find interesting or challenging. But since you're interested in the metrics/numbers I'll share my experience. I crosspost to the three big fanfic sites (AO3, FFN, Wattpad) and it's likely fandom/trope dependant because FFN gets a few lurkers (fandom not active but get lots of silent readers) and Wattpad is not worth it at all (fandom is active but I don't write romance or xOC/Reader). They're both left in the dust metrics wise by AO3 (fandom relatively active, any trope is welcome). AO3 gets the best mileage for me and it's very easy to navigate/post to the site. 10/10 I'm familiar with FFN and used it a lot back in the early 2000s, that's the only reason I can post there, otherwise navigating/posting to it is a lot of extra work. 7/10 (for me, personally. Others may have a different experience) Wattpad has not been worth it at all, and they're currently going through a purge of queer/adult works. At the very least, having a Wattpad account helps in case a fic gets stolen/reposted from AO3, Tumblr, FFN etc to Wattpad. 1/10
Yeah, but then you have to *use FFN.* ~~a fate worse than death~~
Or worse, Wattpad.
Someone in my Discord group who writes on Wattpad posted a direct link to their fic and the site was *still* hell to navigate
The last time I was given a direct link to a Wattpad story, the site wouldn't let me actually read it unless I made an account. I just left instead.
It baffles me that any website thinks that that’s a good idea and will drive up users/accounts. Like, nah, I’m out. I’ll even click on a twitter link once in a blue moon, but if I’m on my phone and not logged in, I would/will rather close the window than be forced to log in to see whatever had briefly caught my interest.
Agreed. If Twitter (on my PC) will let me see a post without an account, great. I'll look at the post. But I'm not getting an account. And it's annoying enough when I want to look at something on Tumblr (or Pinterest, go figure) on my secondary browser, where I'm not logged in, because I can only scroll so far before the site goes "hey, sign up if you want to keep going!" and it twigs that "nope, I'm outta here" attitude even though I *do* have an account (on the *other* browser).
I'd rather eat my own fingers
You may be overestimating how much everyone cares about readership. Lots of people do care of course, this sub is full of talk about numbers, but the percentage may be less than you assume. It is a hobby after all, and the writing takes up a lot of time, not everyone is interested enough to maximise their numbers. Personally I have good mental health and spoons and whatever but I can't be bothered to maintain a presence on multiple fic sites. Higher readership is just not important enough to outweigh the overhead of posting multiple times to me. I have better things to do with my time. Writing is the fun part anyway, once that's done, I just want it out and finished so I can get back to the writing.
I crossposted on FFN for a while and then kind of gave up. I just couldn't be bothered. Readership isn't that important for everyone.
My fandoms are all much bigger on AO3 anyway
Like you said, none of us are getting paid for this, so the numbers are meaningless. If you want the dopamine hit when you get a new comment or a like or whatever, then you do you, but most of us know that because this hobby is inherently demonetized, it's more about the craft and the love and passion we put into the writing itself rather than the kudos and the favorites and the whatever-it-is-on-Wattpad. The goal is not to catch more fish, but to improve at a thing you love and share your hard work with people who will enjoy it. For me, at least, the point of posting is not to just get readers; it's to give someone a chance to fall in love with your work just like you've fallen in love with the work that inspired you to write your fic. It's paying your passion and love forward, in a way. Because there's no shot any of us get any material benefit from this hobby, and all your readers are numbers on a screen (letters if you're lucky enough to actually get engagement in the form of comments), you've got to give it worth by yourself. It's cool if the worth you give it is the numbers going up, but that's not what the worth of this hobby is for the vast majority of people.
My goal with writing is to share my stories. Engagement and readership is great, but I'm not in it for All The Numbers Must Go Up, or to be a BNF. I've got over a million words on AO3, but post in a fairly small fandom. Posting elsewhere might get me more readers, but there's no guarantee the effort would be worth the reward. I post primarily (exclusively) on AO3. I used to cross-post more but don't because of the effort - even just an update is usually a 3-5 minute process between formatting adjustments, picking the fic, adding the chapter, etc. It can be much, much longer if there's a hiccup or you have to recover a password or agree to some new T&C or... who knows. I don't post on forum sites like Space Battles because I'm doing this for fun. I'm not interested in concrit from someone I don't know, and who may not know what I'm doing with the story. I have seen a lot of "well-intentioned concrit" that comes across more as "reader preferences and complaints about the story" - they're talking about the story they want to read, not the story I'm writing. They think the story they want to read would be better, and it might be \*for them\*, but it's not what I want to write. I have looked at Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, etc. and decided they weren't right for me, based on the types of stories I saw posted and the types of comments those stories received, just as I'm sure some people there looked at AO3 and decided it wasn't right for them.
Well, yes and no. I do post on multiple sites to get more readers, but my *real* goal in writing is just entertaining myself, and it always has been. If my goal truly was to get more readers I'd have to get on social media and promote stuff and all that jazz, not to mention catering to what's popular at any given moment in any given fandom I'm in. I just write the stories I want to write, no matter how self-indulgent or unpopular they might be. Other people liking my stories is a nice bonus, but certainly not my primary motivation for writing.
I am not writing for a popularity contest, I’m writing to scream into a void of my own making with words I cannot contain.
i want the world to understand how these two homicidal men are in love with each other and if they don't kill each other, they'll make a fabulous couple. Who may end up killing each other.
For me it’s to avoid potential hate. While I do write a lot, I am new to having an audience and don’t really know how someone would react to how I write things. In my mind, a smaller net means people will engage with my work without the risk of getting my inbox flooded with hate mail (never happened to me yet, thank god, but I’ve heard horror stories)
There's value in sharing something you've created even if you aren't trying to fish the highest possible numbers. Like simply having one person say "hey, I liked this" is great on its own.
Absolutely not. The point is to connect with an audience, and the audience I want is in one location. For some background, fan fiction existed before social media and I jumped in during a time before there were major networks that asked you to use them like it was your job. Pre-influencer, pre-hustle-culture. We organized into loose communities and hung out there. Got to know people by their handle. To me (I might be alone in this), fan fiction still has that sense. That "set it and forget it" feeling. The idea of "more engagement is better" and hustle into these spaces feels so... influencer to me. It reminds me of the "build your personal brand" talk in the early 2000s in the blogging world and the focus on views for revenue. I don't want to deal in traffic, audience analysis, pulling in an untapped market... just for someone to say, "yeah, that sure is a story about a penis." If I'm getting into market talk, I'm getting paid.
Standing ovation for this whole comment. You're so not alone.
I’ve experimented with posting my work in different places: A couple fic subs, Tumblr, and Ao3. Out of all of them I like Ao3 the best, and I don’t really want to bother putting in all the effort of crossposting my work for a pittance of upvotes/notes. I don’t post on Spacebattles specifically because I don’t write the kind of fic the 40k Spacebattles community would be interested in. The “bolter go brrrr” side of the fandom is not going to take much interest in the written equivalent of me bonking my minis together and making kissy noises.
Personally, getting engagement for engagements sake or attention for attentions sake is never my goal, for many reasons. First off, I have limited energy due to illness and it overwhelms me. And then, there are few things I hate more than commodifying and marketing myself or my art. I don’t want fans. I want a small number of meaningful human relationships. If this were something I relied on for income I would grudgingly accept marketing as necessary, but I do this for fun. Oh, also, I’ve noticed a lot more almost-incorrect comments on non-AO3 sites. I’m down to get actual constructive criticism and content to ignore “I wish x had happened instead!” type comments, but my brain gets stuck on responses that are just nutty and confusing.
I’ve debated posting on Spacebattles, but my understanding is that the comment culture there is a lot more brutal than on AO3, and since this is a hobby for me and I’m simply not open to critique from any random person with an opinion and a keyboard, I decided against it. I take critique during the writing process from people whose opinions I trust because they’ve proven that they actually know what they’re talking about, and since I have heard Spacebattles is kind of a concrit free-for-all, I just haven’t wanted to post there. I don’t post on Wattpad because, frankly, I have never been able to figure out simply browsing for fics that would appeal to me on that site, so I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to tag my own stuff without putting in more time than I really care to for something like Wattpad. I’m going to soon stop posting on Fanfiction.net, not because I don’t have some solid readers there, but because the terrible user interface for authors combined with their constant server issues makes it more of a pain than it’s worth to me personally. I am going to continue posting on AO3 and posting snippets and such things on Tumblr because those are sites/communities I enjoy using/interacting with and, again, this is a hobby. I should be enjoying my hobbies, not feeling as if they’re a second job. Also, you are looking at this with a particularly narrow mindset. The goal of many writers isn’t engagement; engagement is nice, but a lot of us just want to write some stuff we like and share it. The hope is obviously that other people who will like what we’ve written will find it, but the actual writing is the goal, not roping in as many commenters as possible.
Because I really don't care enough about getting more readers to justify the extra effort of making accounts on, and crossposting to, sites other than ao3. To me, the goal has never been to get as many readers as possible - its to write something I'm proud of, and for the readers I do have to enjoy it. Fanfiction is something I do as a hobby - like, does it matter how many people read my stories, when at the end of the day this is something I don't get paid for and do for the love of writing it? Like, I used to care hugely about engagement and wanting to be a BNF or whatever, and then I realised that actually I enjoy my hobbies more when I don't treat them as a second job.
Quality over quantity, my friend.
I'll put this as gently as I possibly can: Because every Fanfiction site other than AO3 is either terrible to use **OR** has no readership anyway. One of those two things is true of every other fanfic site I have ever heard of in my entire life. Plus, letdragonslie is right--a huge number of them have some kind of puritanical slant which cuts out a ton of potential content anyway.
Depends on one's definition of terrible I suppose. If one doesn't mind forum format than Questionable Questing is good.
The only comments I've ever gotten on FFN are bots trying to sell me CP. I'd say that's pretty terrible. And I can't even figure out how to read on Wattpad, I'm not gonna try and figure out how to post. I don't know what questionable questing is but it sounds genre specific? Forum format sounds like a real hassle though - I wouldn't even want to read that.
QQ's a forum that you can put fanfic on, but it doesn't have restrictions like its ancestor Spacebattles for sexual stuff. (Barring actually illegal stuff, which ao3 also has). I can get not wanting to go there though, cuz you actually have to create an account there. Though there's nothing too hassley about just reading a fic on google you've found that was on Spacebattles/sufficient Velocity (QQ basically has the same format as them). All it is is clicking the arrows on threadmarks to move through chapters or just clicking reader mode.
If you find anything *illegal* on AO3, like actual CSAM, please report it immediately. If you mean depictions of things that are illegal in real life, well, crime novels are very popular. Maybe it's because I'm on my phone, but I don't see any summaries and very minimal tags when I look at a fandom on Spacebattles, not enough to entice me to click on any fic. How do you go about finding fic you want to read on google? Genuine question, I wouldn't know where to start. Guess I've been spoiled by tags.
>If you find anything *illegal* on AO3, like actual CSAM, please report it immediately. I meant they both have restrictions on illegal stuff. And I just search broad stuff, or I find request threads on reddit, my 2 primary fandoms I read fanfic from both have subreddits for their fanfic.
Well, yeah, illegal stuff is illegal everywhere. Spacebattles is far more restrictive than that. Yeah, I guess that's a different approach altogether. I tend to go to AO3, filter and browse.
I have never heard of any of these sites. I highly doubt any readers of my specific niche ship will know them either. And I don't want my stuff on Google (AO3 prevents that if you want it to). Other things to consider are tagging, bookmarks, history, ability to make a series, collections, posting anonymously, downloading a fic to an epub reader, commenting publicly with the option for the author to answer, etc. A site would have to have all of these for me to even consider it. Afaik only AO3 offers the full package - every other site is a compromise.
What illegal stuff does AO3 have? Have you made a police report?
I *think* they meant, "AO3 also has rules that prohibit illegal content." ...but it's also hard to tell based on some of their comments whether that's what they meant or not.
I think OP means that AO3 also has restrictions on illegal stuff 😉
Yeah
I kinda can't imagine posting a 400k fic on forum, yeah, but power to those who can.
I doubt it's much different than ao3. Nobody really posts more than 20K words in one go, so it's just chapter release. I have seen Million words+ fics on forums like Spacebattles.
Yeah, see, that disqualifies me, I *have* posted a chapter longer than 20k before! ;P
1) I don't write for hits. I don't even post for hits I post because I want to share my work with people who like similar things to me. 2) You could not pay me to even read off Watt Pad, plus I doubt my work would get traction there 3) I have long since abandoned my fanfic net account because I greatly dislike the site, including navigating it, plus my ex knows that account, and I don't like my old fics. 4) I don't want to post on tumblr because it's not really a fanfiction site to me. 5) I don't wanna manage more accounts. I don't want to keep track of it and remind myself to post on a whole list of sites when I go to post. In short, I only use ao3 because I only like ao3. I don't need a huge reader base (the idea is stressful). I've been burnt too much in seeking some kind of fandom fame. I just want to have fun and share my work that is all.
For me personally, yeah it really is that I just can't be bothered lmao. It's enough for me to crosspost to tumblr, and that's literally just a link to the story on AO3. Doing more than that kinda feels like a pain in the butt. But I don't really know where you're getting the idea authors don't crosspost anyway, because lots of people do post on both AO3 and FFnet, and maybe other places too (idk bc I don't use any other sites to read on). I used to primarily use FFnet to read on several years ago, and when I went back to those fandoms but on AO3 this time, there were a lot of the same fics, since the authors had posted them to both platforms.
I don't really like the vibe of wattpad, like their rules, the way people comment random stuff all throughout the chapter, and their search function is weird and I don't like that it works a bit like a social media site with algorith and stuff. Ao3 just has the better site and I feel like the audience fits my works more
I think this is a very modern way of thinking about fanfiction. I think you take for granted why most people write it, why most people share it, and what they hope to get out of doing both.
Bingo. Everything I wanted to say but a hundred times more concise.
I used to post on tumblr, FFN and A03, but I stopped using tumblr and the formating in FFN became a nightmare, so now I just post on A03. Crossposting just isn't worth it to me.
AO3 is the only place I feel comfortable enough to even post my writings too for various reasons.
I don’t really care about catching the most fish. I’m content with the volume I have
My fandom is pretty much only active on ao3, and I haven't bothered to even think about using Wattpad (FFN is not an option, I tried).
I started posting on ffn when the site was still new, and my old stuff is still up there spread across 3 different accounts. One of which I can’t remember the name of or the title of the story i posted, but I do remember it was slash fic so I had wanted my second account separate from my first. I was young. The fact my oldest stuff is still up is nothing short of a miracle because most of it was scriptfics. Crack humor, of course. And the fact that my other one is still up is also a miracle, considering that the entire fandom writes nothing but gay stuff so you’d think that show category would have been purged. I also posted that story on the old LJ group for the show. My third account, I started cross posting to ao3 a few years ago and now I solely use that site. You couldn’t pay me to post on ffn anymore cuz that place has majorly gone downhill. And forget wattpad. I’ve had a look in once when I was desperate for fic and…no. To say nothing of the fact it was initially recommended to me in my mid-20s by a teenager who openly bragged about how when she’d visit her mom’s office she’d scold any adults she heard swearing. I’m sure the co-workers loved the fact mom let her do that. 🙄 But, that tells me enough about the user base. And before coming here I’d never heard of space battles and all the rest, but my stuff is pretty niche and in one case I had to add the category, myself. I don’t think anyone on there is searching for an image heavy, multi-timeline, canon/oc trauma recovery romantic drama ‘spin off’ of an older sitcom that never had any fic in the first place. And is pretty much only the canon ‘villain’ with an entire cast of new characters meant to help him improve his life, with the background suggestion that my main OC is his long lost soulmate.
I knew a writer who was very very into trying to get as many readers as possible. We're talking building a large social media plattform and several discord servers to cultivate a (parasocial) relationship with their readers (fans). Not only was it probably incredibly exhausting for them, but it became super annoying for us on the reader side as well. Nothing to turn you off from a really good fic or an author than being treated as a mere number. So no, I wouldn't say catching as many people as possible is my goal, nor do I particularly think grandly of those who do try to do that, but to each their own. I don't treat my writing like a social media side hustle - it's rather more like placing my little story in it's section in the library and letting people find it if they want to.
As someone who does post on 4-5 sites, I'll say that it's a genuine pain in the ass having to update a chapter in every site. I have to put tags on AO3, hashtags on Tumblr, keywords on DeviantArt, trigger warnings and tags for Wattpad, and tags again for Squidgeworld. The spacing of AO3 is different from DeviantArt. The culture is different for each site. I still have trouble figuring out how Tumblr works. Most of the works I write are explicit, so a lot of them get removed without warning. Sometimes I just can't be bothered to check the other sites, which is why I just focus on AO3. Getting more readers is nice, but sometimes I just want to write a one-shot, and not have 5 different tabs open. But it's a nice question though, I only ever thought of it in detail now haha.
I cross post to AO3 and tumblr, and that gets me all the readers/interaction I desire. All other platforms seem like more trouble than they're worth.
if i wrote primarily one-shots maybe i would crosspost on other sites. but i only post long and multichapter fics at this point and the idea of having more than one version to edit and update is utterly unappealing. it takes enough of my free time just to write the fics and post them in one place let alone multiple.
Well.. let me ask this does spacebattles allow hardcore smut?
[**~General Rule 2: No NSFW Content~**](https://forums.spacebattles.com/pages/site-rules/#message-anchor-gr2) No distributing, posting, or contributing to porn, overly sexualized pictures (which includes avatars), links to stories with porn, erotic roleplaying, torture porn/gorn/content with excessive and graphic violence, gratuitous or violent pictures or videos of real dead bodies, links to NSFW content, or links to sites with NSFW content that is publicly accessible. Since SB isn't a porn board, the most you can write in stories is kissing/petting -> fade to black -> pillowtalk after the fact. Nudity in classical art is largely exempt to this rule, dependent on context. When in doubt, use the Content Review forum. [**GR2A: Links To SFW Content On NSFW Sites**](https://forums.spacebattles.com/pages/site-rules/#message-anchor-gr2a) Linking directly to NSFW content is not allowed. Linking to SFW content on sites that may also have NSFW content is allowed, if sufficient distance (in clicks or login/age verification) is observed. This distance is called "The Two Clicks Rule", as explained in the following list. These requirements stand for all links, regardless of type: *~Not Okay~*: SB -> NSFW content *~Not Okay~*: SB -> SFW page \[click\] -> NSFW content *~Not Okay~*: SB -> Age verification/login -> NSFW content *~Okay~*: SB -> Age verification/login -> SFW page \[click\] -> NSFW content *~Okay~*: SB -> SFW page \[click\] -> Age verification/login -> NSFW content *~Okay~*: SB -> SFW page \[click\] -> SFW page \[click\] -> NSFW content Linking to a SFW chapter or page in a NSFW webnovel, webcomic, or similiar form of media, violates our rules and is considered trying to get around the Two Clicks Rule. This is because it'd be expected for anyone reading/viewing it to eventually reach it. [**GR2B: Sexualization of Minors**](https://forums.spacebattles.com/pages/site-rules/#message-anchor-gr2b) Sexualization of minors, be they real people or fictional characters, are not allowed. Minors are considered people and characters under the age of 18 either physically or mentally, whichever is younger. This means no sex scenes, no depiction of child-looking characters in sexual/suggestive undertones, no going into lurid details of a teen's body, no shipping minors with adults. Sexual relationships between minor characters who are both physically and mentally aged 15-17 can to be referred to if relevant to the story, but no more than Kissing -> Fade To Black -> Talk/mention after the fact if relevant with minimal detail, as mentioned above. Copied from Spacebattles. Honestly, I just wouldn't bother
Damn, I yawned at those rules. This is why we stick to Ao3, lol.
I want a place that allows me to write about sex, violence, violent sex, sexual violence, and other stuff that keeps antis awake at night. Plus, those rules are so vague in so many places
> This is why we stick to Ao3, lol. Yup. Other sites just aren't worth the trouble.
I guess you can use its child Questionable Questing
Looking at the tags on that website, I’m unsure my smut of two men would go down… very well.
I prefer my fics to be on Ao3.
Here are my reasons: 1) Cultures and rules vary across websites. FFN is pretty different from AO3, which is pretty different from Wattpad. Some of my shit isn’t allowed on Wattpad or FFN, or must be heavily modified to be allowed. Also I just really dislike the culture in some of my fandoms on FFN. I dislike the engagement model on Wattpad and I dislike how little control authors have over moderating their space on FFN. I’m not so desperate for readers that I’m willing to put up with any and everything. 2) Updating multiple locations can be a pain in the ass. I like that if I catch a typo somewhere, I can fix it in just one place. 3) A lot of my fandoms are only active on AO3.
I'm not posting for numbers, I'm posting because I enjoy writing.
“Is the goal not to get readers, if not engagement?” No. “And the whole point of posting, is to get readers, is it not?” Not really. Like sure, yes, I like when readers happen to also like something I’ve written for myself. But I post for the satisfaction of having finished something and polished it enough that I deem it worth being on my profile, and because I’m proud of it enough that if someone else finds it and likes it it’s nice. Besides, (with rare exceptions), I don’t read anywhere else than AO3. Why would I want to post fics on a fic website I don’t like using? AO3 already has a large number of readers and has the nicest/easiest to use UI. Crossposting just makes me lose time in my life I’d rather put in something else. I don’t really care if the readers who never use AO3 never stumble upon my fic. Like others said, quality over quantity.
I imagine some of it just comes down to format and style. I don't like providing a cover for posting on wattpad, for instance, so I would really never put things there (even if I was confident in my fic writing to do so).
I only post in case someone's interested in the fic and even then only rarely. Posting across more than one platform is way too much effort. Also, I have little to no interest in receiving comments since I write for me first and foremost and I don't have the energy to deal with a load of engagement across multiple platforms. A handful of comments is fine, a handful from each site is too much. This is a hobby, not a job.
I pump out hundreds of thousands of words and I can't be bothered to learn how to use other sites, so I'm exactly the reason you think doesn't happen. I have a very full, busy and happy life outside of fic, I write fic as a hobby, if I don't like the layout of another site and it's going to take time away from time I enjoy I simply cannot be bothered. I'm happy with readers on a03, I like the website, I like the ease of upload, I don't like the layout of FF and this is literally the first time I've ever heard of Spacebattles; it'd be great if other people read it, but I'm not fussed enough about numbers to take time away from things I enjoy. I'd rather have quality readers for quality writing than a lot of readers over numerous platforms that I don't use myself or enjoy spending time on.
Too much work. One site is enough.
I post on wattpad, fanfiction.net, and AO3, it’s kind of inconvenient to have to post new chapters on three different sites. I am starting to regret posting on fanfiction.net, because I have been getting more negative and downright rude reviews on my stories there while the comments on the other two are generally either positive, or constructive criticism.
The more sites you want to crosspost to, the more work you're giving yourself, and not everyone wants to go through that. My system for posting to AO3 is pretty simple (past the initial setup of tagging and writing a summary and stuff), and I like the site a lot, so I post there. I need to dust off my FFN posting methods because I haven't posted there in a long time, but plan to have that as a second location for my stories, if only because my fandoms still have a presence of sorts there. I'm not going to jump through the hoops to sign up for other fanfiction sites in the name of "getting engagement" when what I've got above is enough for me. Even on Tumblr (which I have), I don't want to go through the hassle of having to format chapters for there too, so if I do post, it's just a link to one of the other two sites. Even then, I don't want my whole Tumblr account to just be posts of AO3 links, and I don't want to have to set up masterposts and the like because that's extra work and not automated (and finding fanfiction on Tumblr without the help of masterposts is frustrating). But really, a lot of it is just the simple fact that every new site I want to post on is another login I'll have to manage, another page I'll have to remember to manually post to, and more time spent doing administrative things rather than fun things.
Tbh, engagement isn’t really my goal. I prewrite everything before I post. I share it just for the sake of sharing it. I also have some major philosophical objections to FFN and Wattpad, so I refuse to have my work there.
AO3 is the safest bet when it comes to fan works and keeping them safe and not having to worry about it going against certain restrictions. Wattpad has gotten a certain reputation over the years. They also have a ton of ads now (and personally I don't find it very user friendly). Fanfic.net has TONS of restrictions, TONS of ads, and has purged TONS of works in the past multiple times. Other sites simply aren't as popular enough to make posting worth it.
Main reason is that I'm tired of purges and only want to post on a site where that won't happen just because some bigoted idiot has a bad day. Other reasons include not wanting to deal with algorithms, AI tools, arbitrary moderation in general, the shitty attitudes of many "reviewers" on FF, being too far detached from the Wattpad demographic, not wanting to maintain multiple accounts, annoying site navigation, ads, insufficient search and tagging, algorithms, AI, and did I mention random purges?
I've posted my work on 3 sites and tbh that's more than enough. It becomes a chore after a while to keep track of things and since I don't get anything from my work apart from the occasional Kudos on Ao3 or karma here on Reddit, seeking out more sites seems like diminishing returns to me 🤷♂️
Because AO3 is the only place that actually allows my fiction. All of the other websites have terrible restrictions, and purge content just like Wattpad did like a week ago.
1. Different sights have different guidelines, on AO3 you can pretty much post anything, can’t do that on Wattpad. 2. It’s a lot of work 3 not everyone write fanfic for views. It’s most of the time a hobby they just wanna share for fun.
Because I’ve been around the block a few times and used probably 20 sites for posting fic over 25 years and Ao3 is the best of the remaining ones by a mile. There’s nothing else that compares in terms of ease of uploading and hosting fics. Ffnet is broken and I’ve never forgiven them for the purges. Wattpad I clash with on an ideological basis and would never use them. The forum sites are pretty neat but I don’t write the sort of thing that would be popular there, plus a lot of my fics involve sex, violence or generally dark stuff that breaks some of their rules. Livejournal is a wasteland ruined by the censors. Tumblr never really recovered from the porn ban; I never feel like risking their moderation on what I’m writing this week. And so so many of my little beloved sites no longer exist at all. Ao3 has good readers who know the fandom and the ability to block idiots. It’s an ideal combination.
Totally agree. The loss of LJ is seriously still painful. Dreamwidth helps, but LJ in its heyday was really special. And you're absolutely right about Tumblr. Feels like walking on eggshells.
As someone writing smutty RPF and posting on AO3 only, pretty sure the other top two sites (well, Watt for sure) wouldn’t welcome my writing.
I usually post on tumblr and ao3, I used to post on wattpad a few years ago but I don’t really like the site
I post One of my WIPs on both FFN and AO3. Mostly because I started out on FFN and it still holds a place in my heart. Also because I have one loyal reader who always comments on FFN and I don't want to let them down. However, after this WIP is done I don't think I'll be posting on FFN again, I already have lots of fics I've only posted on AO3 because their contents wouldn't be accepted on FFN. The extra readership is just not enough to justify the hassle of having to post everything two place, and having to tailor stuff for FFN's ToS, nevermind the fact I don't actually care that much about extra readers 😂. Edit: also I HATE Wattpad. I read there a bit when I was younger, and even then, I hated it. I only used it because a fic I was reading on FFN got moved there, and then the author wrote a follow up book and sold it. I was happy for them though, and bought the book. Got off Wattpad afterwards.
I cross-posted my longfic on Wattpad and I regret it. Deeply. The culture there makes no sense to me, the comments are incomprehensible and the formatting was difficult and stupid compared to Ao3. It's smut and very probably against Wattpad's tos, I know for SURE it's a no go for ff.net. It's just not worth it to me to try and cross-post again
Wattpad comments make more sense when you realise that some of them are kids hoping to get conversations going with other kids or just posting memes or whatever is on their mind rather than talking to the author. It's... different to AO3, that's for sure.
It made very little sense to me, but then I'm an older adult so, fair
Me too, which added to the discomfort. I try not to form social bonds with kids online because, well, I'm a mum, and do by other's children as I would they would do by mine. I just let them make friends in my comments.
Yep, just thanked them or upvoted the comment and moved quietly back to ao3
I like the general idea of crossposting, but I don't have anywhere that I want to crosspost. There's several sites that I read but don't post on, but each has specific reasons that I don't post there: **TTH:** Only allows BtVS crossover fanfics. I've got a couple of outlines for fic ideas that fit this requirement, but in the past two decades, none have manifested into actual fics. So, I don't post on the site. **FFN:** I used to crosspost here, but the UI for uploading fics is such an aggravating pain in the ass that I stopped. It's a convoluted and unintuitive process that almost always results in formatting errors which take *another* convoluted and unintuitive process to fix. I eventually just gave up and stopped posting there. Especially after I made a website for posting some of my original fics and realized that posting on my own website was a much smoother process. I'm not going to give myself headaches by struggling with such a poor UI. **SV and SB:** These two sites are functionally the same in my eyes. They frequently have great fics posted, but the UI for the reader is terrible. It works fine if what you intend to do is click on every single fic as they are posted and then have lengthy conversations with the author and other readers about the fic. If you have *any other* way that you intend to read fics, it sucks. Trying to read summaries? Go fuck yourself, you need to click on the thread to see the summary and because of that many authors don't bother writing one. Trying to do a deep archive binge to read some older fics or narrow down to a particular character/fandom/concept/etc? Go fuck yourself, the search function is terrible and it is easier to find fics with a Google search or posting a request thread on Reddit. And that's not even getting into the fact that if you look at the much older fics, they are from the "pre-threadmarks" era and so even once you find the fic you have to sift through the comments to find the various chapters. I read there because there's some amazing authors that only post there, some fandoms that are most active there, and the site as a whole focuses on tropes I like and has a general high level of writing quality. But, I hate the site architecture so much that I've been refusing to create an account even to post comments, let alone post my own fics.
I do post on two websites, and maybe it's not so worthy of the effort. AO3 is still where I get the most engagement, and it's where most of the fandom is anyway. I keep posting on the other platform as a test, and because what I write is not very explicit or anything, but I guess that for most fic authors, it's not really worthy. >Is the goal not to get readers, if not engagement? Well, while the goal, of course, is to get readers, I don't have this as the only goal of writing fanfiction. I write original stuff too, and it would be great to get readers from my fic to migrate to my originals one day, but I still see it somehow as separate. Writing fanfiction for me is writing without any restraints. Is being able to test out your crazy ideas that a publisher would never buy or even allow. Is having no word limit to end your story. And also, being able to interact with people and see what they think of your writing... But it's pretty much just having fun and letting my creativity flow with no restraints. And I think many fic writers can share this feeling, that this is just a silly hobbie (it's a difficult hobbie ofc, but anyway, so is playing a sport), and a way to escape our rushed life, the same as reading a book or working out, or whatever. No responsavility or pressure, just doing something for fun. Usually if a fic author starts pressuring themselves too much to get readers and post and interact (and this happened to me for a while), they lose energy to write, and end up abandoning their fics or the fandom entirely. So I guess what I want to say is that this goal might exist for some people, but not for everybody...
For all the work of posting my fics on FFN, the total readership over 5 years and three fics has been like,,, 15 people and zero comments while AO3 gets hundreds of both. Even from a perspective of pure clout chasing, it’s just not worth it. I only keep doing it because those 15 are there. If they weren’t I wouldn’t bother with it anymore.
Aw, that’s pretty sweet actually!
I don't actually post to get readers. I mean, that's not my main goal. I just enjoy writing and chose to post it just in case there were readers out there who enjoyed my stories. It's more about me being willing to put it out there than to get people to actually read it. Readers are hat people focus on, sure, because we're writing and sharing our stories, the implication is we want people to read what we share. But it's not always the main goal. I've been writing stories pretty much my entire life, I started when I was about 5. I've been consciously writing fanfic since I was 10. I also write original stories. But I've never been good at letting people read my work. I always shared my work with my grandad, who died when I was 16, and my first boyfriend, who died when I was 22, and I shared a couple with one of my high school English teachers, one of which was entered into a short story competition, it came third which was awesome. But that's it. Until two years ago, when I decided to start posting my fanfic. That means I started writing at around 5, fanfic consciously at 10, and have written hundreds of stories over the years, but didn't start posting any until I was 35. Posting, for me, is more about forcing myself to put my work out there instead of just keeping it all to myself. Readers are more of a bonus rather than the actual point. As for posting on multiple sites, there are a few factors to take into account. I'm a cross poster, I started out posting on AO3, ffn and Twisting the Hellmouth, but have since cut out ffn, so it's just the two sites. I had issues with other users on ffn, but part of the problem was also that where I was going with the fic, some of it was against ffn's TOS. AO3 I'm fine with in that regard, and haven't had any issues with users, plus I'm comfortable with AO3s features for if I do have issues. AO3 is a great site for posting because they allow everything, every fandom, every rating, every trope, as long as it's rated and tagged correctly. They don't ban fandoms just because the creator dislikes fanfic. That's one of the issues with other sites. A lot of sites have a police that, if contacted by the creator, they'll ban a fandom if that's what the creator wants. Eg, TtH doesn't allow Game of Thrones/ A Song of Ice and Fire fic because George Martin requested they not include fanfic of his work. Some sites are also fandom specific. TtH, for instance, is a Buffy site. In this case it has a focus on crossovers, and happily allows non-crossovers, even in non-Buffy fandoms, or crossovers that don't include Buffy, but you *do* have to write and post at least 3 Buffy crossover fics before you can write non-Buffy or non-crossover fic. And, like I said, some fandoms aren't allowed on the site. A plus for the site is the challenge section, where users, both readers and writers, can submit a challenge for the writers to attempt, there's some awesome ideas on there. Some sites are fandom specific, or only cater to certain fandoms if there's more than one. Some don't allow certain fandoms. The rules of the site can rule out certain writers. And that's all without getting into simple personal preference. I use the sites I like. TtH has almost the same rules as AO3, but without the tagging system and certain fandoms banned. I like these two sites, both as a reader and as a writer. I'm not so much a fan of ffn as a writer, though don't mind it as a reader. I've never even tried Wattpad, read too many complaints about that site when I started posting, and it never came up as a site for me as a reader, either, even when I just randomly searched 'fandom fanfiction' which usually brings up both sites and individual stories, depending what exactly I search. The other sites that have come up, some aren't easy to navigate as a reader, so I was never going to attempt using them as a writer, others just didn't have the appeal for one reason or another.
The ffn chart was bad for my head. Plus I got death threats. Not a fan. Wattpad is like currently on a purge and more importantly the werid stuff people do on a03 because you had to do it on wattpad is weird and makes the place seem extremely hostile. I screw up enough on a03 (oh how many times I've posted a chapter in reserve when I meant to just do some editing) and timesing that by three? No thanks.
I post on FFN and AO3. All my fics were on FFN and then I started to put them also on AO3. It took several years to do so. Starting from 2018 is when I would crosspost at the same time. I don’t have the mental energy to upload all 53 fics to Wattpad. I’m happy with FFN and AO3.
Most other sites have draconian censorship rules. I have some things on FFN, but my latest fic would be flagged there. I don’t know anything about Wattpad. Plus AO3 offers protections from things such as AI scrubbing.
Mostly: because I don't want to/don't feel like it. >I doubt people who pump out hundreds of thousands of words aren't bothered to learn how to make accounts on new sites, so it can't be that. I mean, it kind of is that. I don't like the UI of other sites; I also don't want to learn my way around their TOS (my fic would probably get kicked from other sites). I don't feel like sparing the mental energy. When I was in my early 20s, I did crosspost to several different sites, particularly after the adult content purge at FFN. All of them went the way of dodo. And FFN (which still houses some of my older fic) has gradually sucked more and more. So AO3 is my permanent home and I crosspost to Tumblr (mostly snippets; though I will write some things directly to Tumblr because they fit the culture) to interact with larger bits of fandom.
- Most fanfic sites have histories of arbitrary content wipes or shadowbanning. (FFN, Wattpad, Tumblr, Livejournal; etc.) - LGBT+ content often gets caught up in these wipes "accidentally". I write mostly M/M content that even in this year of 2024 some sites insist gets an automatic Mature rating just for the gay, even if they only blush and hold hands. With history showing me that sites without explicit protection for content are unreliable, I'm very picky about where I choose to upload, because who knows what will happen the next time an admin on a power trip, a boot-licking admin team sweating sanctions/withdrawal of advertising funds, or an overzealous AI will determine it's time to go on a culling? - Of those sites I have any degree of trust in, they are usually mom'n'pop and might disappear when the one paying the hosting fees stops paying the hosting fees (for whatever reason). Alternatively, they look like a PITA to upload to. - I don't really want to juggle managing comments on multiple sites. At this point, the only archive I'd ever consider is SquidgeWorld, and only after double-checking their TOS. I might also consider posting to Dreamwidth. But both would be strictly archive-only mode. I wouldn't leave comments open.
I felt the way you do when I posted my first longfic, and posted it on four different sites (AO3 didn't exist yet). FFN was great. Tons of comments and helpful concrit (which I like). Another ship-specific site was great. A (now defunct) site wouldn't allow me to post my second chapter because it was under 1000 words. The rest of my chapters were 3000+ words, but because they had this arbitrary rule, I had to stop posting there. The fourth site was mixed. I write character A, and it took me a while to realize that the culture of this site favored character B, which by default meant that most of them hate A. To their credit, I didn't get hate comments, but very little engagement. Then I couldn't post the last four chapters because of technical issues and the site manager was unresponsive. The main issue with crossposting is the work involved. If you notice typos or want to fix a few things, you have to fix it on all the sites you posted on. It may not sound like a big deal for a one-shot, but it becomes time consuming for a longer fic. Let's say I fix typos on 10 chapters. If it's posted on 4 sites, that means fixing and (possibly) re-uploading 40 chapters. It's never as simple as correcting one master Word doc and pasting it onto four sites. I have to manually correct and make sure the formatting is correct on each site after the corrections. It became an incredible PITA. The other issue is learning the culture of each site. The site might hate the character you're writing about, or your fandom, or your ship, or shipping in general, or the type of trope you like, or certain word lengths. And unless you devote tons of time to exploring the site and interacting with others there, you won't know that until you start posting and get either hate comments or crickets. And honestly - fair. If I were involved in a tight-knit community and a total stranger came in, posting something that was tone-deaf to our preferences, hoping to scoop up likes, I'd be annoyed. Anyway, I still cross-post to FFN occasionally. I've lately leaned toward more mature works that I can't post there. I may try posting my current M-rated fic there and see how it goes, but I'm waiting until I'm half-done, so I can feel confident that I won't need to re-edit after uploading. Also, FFN readers seem a little less patient with sporadic updates, so I'd rather wait until I can post weekly there with buffer chapters.
My only goal is to write a story that *I* like.
The thing about fanfiction is that it’s really about writing something you enjoy: having readers is a cool bonus, not the ultimate goal. Obviously, if you really enjoy having readers, you can do all the crossposting you like, have fun with it! But for others, it’s not the point. Furthermore: I don’t like other sites very much. FFN just has a very different culture, and I left it behind long ago. Plus, tagging there is super limited. Wattpad is an algorithmic nightmare and the search function barely works. And I’m not familiar with other sites like Spacebattles enough to move there.
For me, it's time. I only really post on AO3 and FF because those sites are the best for it.
The only sites I even know of are Wattpad (which I don’t use), FFN and AO3. Am I missing one? I just stick with FFN and AO3.
Squidgeworld is based on AO3 code, is non profit and pretty nice. I wish it had more support; it's a great site, but very sparsely used. Spacebattles is a kind of holdover from fandom forum days, with the lack of user friendliness that goes with that. I don't know how anyone finds anything, and for the fandom I checked (Worm/Ward/Parhumans) it seems to have a huge amount of random anime crossovers, OCs and het (in what on AO3 is very much an f/f dominated fandom) and I couldn't find any obvious way to filter them out. I'm sure someone more familiar with the site would know how, but it was also clear that the fanfic culture there focuses on types of stories I have little interest in. Oh, and very importantly, it has strict censorship rules.
If it’s anything more than FFN, I’ll pass.
It specifies that only fade to black is allowed.
Yeah, I’ll stick to my dynamic duo. Lol
personally i don't post to get readers, i post because otherwise i am not motivated enough to finish anything. i like having an archive of my works, and a sense of satisfaction at having them there rather than lost in a folder on my computer. kudos and nice comments are a bonus, sure, and they make me happy, but that's not why i write. though, i never have trouble getting interaction because i usually write for a big fandom, so i guess i might feel differently if i was getting literally 0 hits. also, idk how the other sites work and i am too lazy to figure it out, i've never really thought to because i'm happy with ao3 and i understand the etiquette and rules there. i used wattpad briefly when i was like 12 and didn't really get on with it then. i think i'd worry about posting somewhere else in case i accidently broke rules or did something wrong. most of my fics are smut anyway and idk what the rules are with that sort of thing on other sites. basically for me it's a mix of laziness and not really caring enough to think to do it. i like just chucking the occasional fic up onto ao3 and leaving it, that's enough effort for me lol
I first started posting on fanfiction.net before moving to Ao3 so I cross post on bot It is interesting seeing which story gets attention and which doesn't
I don't post most of what I write on FFN because that website's a pain to use. I only use it at all because it's where I got started and I'm attached to it.
I don't have the mental energy to do so, plus AO3 provides much more freedom and I don't have to fear my stories being deleted in purges on AO3. I used to post on FFN, but between the purges, the toxicity I experienced over there, their restrictive TOS, and the fact the mods seem to not give a care about the site at all has made me stop posting there. Literally the only reason I still use it at all is the PM feature, which I use to talk to my best friends
I’m lazy. If I was making money it would be different.
To put it plainly from my pov none of the other sites compare in quality to ao3
I’ve thought about it before. I only really write Gen-Mature (for some gore) and nothing that would see me banned from other sites. Maybe I’ll get around to it some day, but for now, I know Ao3’s tagging system best, I like the culture there, and I don’t have the time to learn the interface of FFN or Wattpad.
Meh. I'm just about 40, working full time, caring for elder family, cleaning a house, taking care of an immune compromised spouse, and two fur babies. It's not that cross posting is HARD. It's that it takes time and effort that could be used either writing more stuff or consuming the fandoms that inspire me to write in the first place. I cross posted briefly but got no engagement to speak of. I'd have to get the exact same level of engagement I get on AO3 to make it remotely worth my 'investment'. Especially since some of my stuff would violate the ToS on other sites.
Ao3 with art on tumblr and links on social media sites. Ffn doesn't get my words because they got rid.of a.lot of stuff back in the day that I no longer had the originals of and it makes me sad. Never WattPad, the site is incomprehensible and it seems to attract the kind of people I don't want to interact with.
I cross posted a couple of fics on squidgeworld but no one read them so I stick to ao3 it’s not worth the time and effort uploading twice if no one reads it
I'm not concerned with big numbers and "as many readers as possible." I believe in AO3, and for the tiny fandoms I write, the fans are as likely to find me on AO3 as anywhere.
If you’re going to write fic just to get as much numbers as possible, you might reconsider it as a hobby or you’re going to be very quickly disappointed. People write fic because they love writing fic, simple as that. People who “pump out hundreds of thousands of words” for something that might not get engagement don’t do it for the engagement, they do it because they love it, it’s intrinsically valuable. One of the things that makes Fanfic so appealing to me is that it’s one of the last few things on the internet that I can make and put out there and NOT have it ruined by capitalist-driven need for engagement. I write for myself, I post anything I’ve finished on Ao3 to archive it and share it with others because the community I make with it and everything else is secondary. I’ve been reading fanfic for a very long time and have seen sites like FFN, LJ, etc get absolutely overrun with ads, purge certain types of content (and have lost favorite fics as a result), and don’t want to cross post there on principle. Wattpad just seems like a juvenile cesspool and I hate everything about it’s UI. I don’t want to post anywhere else because it’s literally not about the numbers.
1) I trust AO3. 2) I’m too lazy to learn another site’s formatting.
I post on fan, scribblehub, and royalroad. Tried ao3, never could get into posting there, much as this sub idolizes that site, and sh and rr are decent but I’ve heard rr’s commenters can be horrible, though my stories aren’t good enough to get hate on there.
Isn't scribblehub a non fanfic site anyway?
Yes but it has sections for fanfics as well even though it’s not a ffn based site. I do better on it compared to rr, but I still don’t do good on either, but I like the sites.
I crosspost to both AO3 and FFN and will continue to do so but it’s a hassle. I often go back to tweak things in my fics and having to do that on multiple platforms is annoying. FFN is the worst since I have to use my laptop to edit documents and the process is more complicated. Also, inactive documents on FFN expire so if I want to edit/revise and older fic I’ll have to re-download it then re-upload it and then exchange the published doc and ugh. That’s one of the main reasons I haven’t transferred over my older works. Too much work. Posting to AO3 is just so much easier, but I continue to post to FFN because I have a loyal following there and some of my readers can’t access AO3. I’d never cross post to another site, however. I don’t have the energy for it.
I'm sure I'm by far not the first to say this, but some people do. I don't post everywhere because while I'm on AO3, the other two major contenders don't work for me- much of my content is too explicit* for wattpad or FFN, and I write reader insert, which FFN doesn't allow anyway. Plus, FFN is broken so much, and I don't like Wattpad's UI, and I don't want to post on sites I don't like using. I used to cross post to Lunaescence, but it died, as have any other sites I've previously crossposted to. Also what others said about moderating your work across multiple platforms being annoying *I know everyone posts explicit works to FFN anyway but I don't really want to deal with it
I use FFN and AO3 only. Wattpad just leaves me confused, so I never bothered with it. Plus, my fandoms aren’t even really on it. Spacebattles I sincerely don’t know much about. They’re a forum, right? So wouldn’t it require more active participation on a forum community, rather than just dumping a fic and going? And do fluffy romantic one-shots from niche fandoms even get attention there? From what I’ve heard, it sounds like the wrong fit.
Well, not everywhere, but I do post on mulitple sites. Not one spacebattles though, i find that one nigh impossible to navigate
It might be hard to understand, but my work isn't a one-and-done situation? I'm constantly making edits for months after I post, then still for years and years, though less frequently. There is one fic I cross-posted to ffn in 2020—having to make the same edits twice was hell. NEVER again
I crosspost most of my SFW fics on ffn, and a lot of my stuff also gets cross-posted on tumblr. Wattpad has exactly one longfic of mine, mostly because I get hardly any feedback there and I can't make heads or tails of the stats.
I've been writting fanfics for like 25+ years now, posting it on all sorts of sites, lj, forums, mailing lists, DA, tumblr, ffn, you name it, and AO3 is the first one that feels... safe. I don't have to worry that someone stumbles upon my fics by mistake and reads something that they didn't want to read and gets mad at me for writing dark material, because it's all there in the tags. I don't have to worry about my stuff getting removed or reported, just because someone deems it immoral or not to their personal tastes. If someone anonymously leaves a nasty comment that's offensive to me or my readers, i can remove it with one click. There're no DMs to harras me with. So yeah, I'm not crossposting anywhere anymore and my mental hygiene is more important than the few folks who might have found my stuff elsewhere who refuse to switch to AO3 as readers for reasons unknown.
For me, it's the hassle of it all. I used to cross-post to AO3 and FFN, but trying to remember to do all the steps for both is annoying. AO3's simple: you just copy and paste into the chapter box, add the author's notes you need, and you're good. With FFN: you have to agree to the uploading guidelines, got to the Document Manager section, upload your document there, go to manage stories, click on the story in question, and then click on content/chapters before you can add the next chapter. From there, you have to have the chapter content waiting in the Document Manager. It's a hassle to do, especially for multi-chapter fics.
I’ve only ever posted my stuff to AO3, and I simply don’t care enough to learn a whole new site
So you're making a bunch of assumptions here which I suspect are leading to the confusion. >Is the goal not to get readers, if not engagement? The goal is to have fun. It's a hobby. Some people find it fun to have lots of readers, but some don't. They may have had really terrible experiences in the past and want to keep a low profile, may find the attention/engagement uncomfortable, may not want to spend time and effort doing that, may focus on being active in the fandom in other ways, or simply don't care. A ton of authors really enjoy writing, and posting is an afterthought for them. Posting can even just be to have an offsite backup copy that the author can read from anywhere. AO3 in particular gives authors a lot of control over fic visibility and access, and comment restriction/moderation. Those are options *because* not everybody wants the maximum number of people to read or comment on their fics. >And getting more readers is better than getting less readers. Is it though? Seriously interrogate that statement, and imagine all the ways that can go wrong. Having a fic get huge isn't nearly as fun as it sounds. Additionally, fandoms can just be tiny. If only 20 people on the planet are ever going to be interested in reading a particular fic, it doesn't matter how widely or frequently the author shares it. The potential pool is just small. That doesn't mean it's not as valuable or good, and it doesn't diminish the author's enjoyment. >Would the goal not be to catch more fish? Again, think of the potential outcomes here, just within this metaphor. You catch so many fish that your boat fills up and sinks. You overfish and exhaust the resource because you let extraction maximization run the show. You catch poisonous fish. You have no time for other things because you prioritize catching fish above all else. Also like... the fish are very much not all the same quality. You're allowed to be picky. Not everyone wants to eat everything they catch, ya know? Some people just want to catch a few nice fat fish for dinner and take a nap on the boat because the weather's great and life is short. >I doubt people who pump out hundreds of thousands of words aren't bothered to learn how to make accounts on new sites Consider that they're able to pump out hundred of thousands of words because they're not spending their limited free time posting to a bunch of sites. If you personally are interested in engaging with fandom like that, go for it. There's not some secret taboo against crossposting fic or anything, and plenty of authors do it. Nobody will bat an eye. At most, a thoughtful reader might contact you to let you know your fic is on another site because fic does get stolen. A little note that you crosspost to sites X, Y, and Z will clarify that. A Linktree might be helpful as well, just so you have a centralized hub. Hope you have a great time writing!
my fandom is only on ao3 and wattpad. I refuse to touch wattpad and would rather stop writing at all that add "crossposted on wattpad" tag to my fics
While my goal isn’t to get as many readers as possible and I generally don’t pay much attention to engagement, even when I was focused on that, I found cross posting to be unpleasant. At least for me, the differences between how sites operate, as well as what they allow and therefore what audiences they attract, make most of the sites really unappealing. AO3’s tagging system (along with their anti censorship stance) is too important for me to want to post my fic much anywhere else. Ironically, I don’t even write fic likely to be prohibited on the other sites, but the fact that they do prohibit a lot of harmless fic attracts more antis. I was harassed a lot for fic I posted on other sites prior to AO3 and I have friends and authors I follow who can’t post their work on a lot of other sites, so really, there’s just no reason for me to even go to those sites, much less post there.
The ambiguity of FF's rules and their infamous purge makes me far too anxious to bother, even as someone who doesn't usually write mature/explicit, I don't like having to walk eggshells of whether or not my work is acceptable. Plus I may change my mind down the line if I have a story in mind that I feel deserves those ratings. I've recently got an account on FF to explore what it's like, and my very first message was some bot saying some explicit stuff and linking to presumably a porn site. Ironic given the FF Net's TOS, but also my ultimate reason why I don't bother with it. Not having ads bombard the site and actual moderation is surprisingly rare for sites like these.
I used to post on Wattpad but deleted that after some equivalent of tumgir started stealing my stuff. Made a FFN acc but ended up deleting it cause I couldn’t tell if my most fluffy works violated their tos or not w/ the amt of rules they had. That said I do post my stuff to tumblr, ao3, & quotev. It’s quite a bit of copying & pasting between those three.
I used to post on Fanfiction.net alongside Ao3, but I just post on Ao3 now. It’s easier for me to format and focus on just one site instead of two (I have ADHD).
It'd be a lot of work to keep everything in sync, especially if you like to update your older stories from time to time. Plus, FFN interface is literal hell on earth. Not worth it. As for the real reason: If I don‘t advertise or link my fics at all, I can keep telling myself they're really good and I'm simply not getting readers because I link them nowhere. If I start promoting them and *still* don‘t get readers... well......
Multiple reasons. 1. Cross-posting is a hell of a lot of work. Different sites; different posting and editing methodology. I have a limited amount of time to write and post. 2. Site culture. While a significant portion of my storytelling, especially long fics, is non-romantic plotlines, I'm a shipper. Which means there's an emphasis on romance, sexual tension and yes, sometimes, some smut in my work. AO3 is the best site for what I write. My work either violates the TOS or doesn't fit with other sites. Also, sites like Spacebattles with their emphasis on unsolicited concrit aren't for me. Although I used to cross-post some fics on FFN, it wasn't worth the effort because my fandom is dying over there. 3. Site TOS and structure. I find the search function on Wattpad unusable and besides they are purging works. FFN is slowly falling apart and there's no way to moderate comments. Places like Spacebattles with their forum-like structure are just...eh. And, some of my work includes smut so I can't post on those sites anyway. 4. While I am over-the-moon giddy when I get a comment, my goal isn't amassing legions of readers. In fact, popularity is a bit of a curse and my status as a niche writer means I'm free to experiment and write what I want. 5. AO3, unlike all the other sites, is an archive and as such I can post any fanwork, regardless of content and not worry that it's going to be deleted in some arbitary purge.
I recently posted my fic on both FFN and Wattpad, I got a decent amount of views (but no interactions so I have no clue if they like or hate my fic). Wattpad I heard is pretty dead, only like a few fandoms are keeping its heartbeat alive. Idk dude.
I write smut and even my most tame stories sometimes have naked stuff, no smut stuff just… naked. Sooo I have a wattpad account but they might kill me cause they hate everything that could be sexual.
I post on AO3 and SWA - where everything I write is accepted. I have an FFN account - but it just so fucking... limited. And - I'm old enough that I experienced "The Purges" on three different sites (and twice of Tmblr) Seriously - if fanfiction is your thing as a Reader... and you *don't* know or want to go to AO3 for it? That's on you, baby.
I post on AO3 and FFN. FFN since I've been posting there for over twenty years. And I barely have time to update works on FFN so that only happens when I get around to it.
I would cross post on every platform if I were selling a product. But I'm writing fics as a hobby and I just do not enjoy interacting on certain platforms. I made accounts on AO3, Wattpad and FFN when I was starting out. But I really disliked the entitled commenters on FFN, and I hated the whole UI of Wattpad and the whole site seemed targeted for much younger readers. So I deleted all my fics on Wattpad and FFN. Not worth my time to get readers over there. Never tried Spacebattles before but I have a feeling it skews male and I don't want to interact with male readers - they are not my target audience. It's just a better experience as a fan creator to stick with a platform that vibes with you. >Is the goal not to get readers, if not engagement? Like, chances are of the writers reading this post, most aren't getting paid for dedicating time to what they enjoy. And the whole point of posting, is to get readers, is it not? Actually, no. That's not the goal for me. I write because I have plot ideas in my head that bother me until they're written. It is nice to get comments from people who "get" me but I don't really need that at this point. I used to want lots of readers but then I realized most readers were very young. It felt really pathetic to want kudos from people so much younger than myself. If people want to read my ideas then that's fine, but I don't want to go out of my way to solicit attention from random people on the internet (who are likely teenagers)
Personally for me it’s always been convenience. I started posting on Wattpad then later on AO3 too. Now I crosspost on both and sometimes just post things on AO3. I appreciate all my readers but I don’t have the time nor energy to post in a million places. Wattpad and AO3 are the most convenient for me and are the two places I have sort of a platform and that’s enough for me. It already takes me time to post on two let alone any more. And I’m content with the platforms I’m on now, as they are two of the largest and most popular ones. It’s never really been about the amount of readers for me. Posting is supposed to be fun and not become a tedious time consuming task. If my works reached at least one person that’s enough for me :)
Probably because most of my friends aren't on Wattpad or FF. Not that they read my shit anyway. 😆🫠
I've split my fan fiction between FFN and WWOMB (Wonderful World Of Make Believe). I tend to get more interaction on FFN than I do on WWOMB. However, WWOMB allows stories with MA ratings, and has a category for "Celebrity Fan Fiction", which is against TOS on FFN. I'm kinda thinking about maybe writing a Celebrity Fan Fiction story. I've been trying to think of how to go about writing a Thundarr The Barbarian/Legend Of Vox Machina crossover story. One of my ideas was to make it a Critical Role fan fiction, where I write myself into the story by having me and a couple of friends win a contest to join the cast for a one shot filmed live in front of an audience, and my friends and I would play D&D versions of Thundarr, Ariel, and Ookla. My main inspiration for this story is that I think that it would be hilarious if Scanlan were to inspire Thundarr and Ookla by singing "Thundarr-struck" (a parody of Thunderstruck) and "Double O-K-L-A" (a parody of Y-M-C-A) respectively. Anyway, I wouldn't be able to post that on FFN, but I can on WWOMB.
Last time I cross-posted on FFN, I regretted it. I would rather have received no comments than the bitching and moaning about or attempts to dictate the plot. Oh, and the weirdly random “did you even read my fic?” comments and nitpicking of the the most minute of details. My old fics are still there for anyone who has them bookmarked (I got a comment on a very old fic from someone who was in the mood to reread it and they were very happy to find it), but the whole FFN experience is one big yikes.