Social Meta (original) (raw)

[ mood | busy ]

Hi, everyone! I hope you all had a safe and happy holiday season.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between fan fiction and advertising. If you choose to write fan fiction and to share it with fandom, one of the first things you learn is how to attract readers. You decide where to promote your story, and what parts of it to highlight that make it attractive to potential readers.

But advertising is not always an innate talent. Some writers excel at self-promotion, while others struggle with it. Writers all have different methods of advertising their stories to readers, to varying levels of success.

  1. As a writer, how much of a role does advertising play in attracting and retaining your target audience?

  2. As a reader, how much of a role does the story’s advertising (summary, pairing, warnings, etc) play in your decision to read it?

  3. How important is truth in advertising for fan fiction? If you feel that a story was incorrectly advertised, how would you react to it? To future stories by the same writer?

  4. If you were to offer advice to a brand new writer about how to best advertise a story, what would you suggest?