Author Archives: admin

When you brought to light that creators on A03 shouldn’t monetize their works on the archive, it really reminded me that I dodged one hell of a nuke (not a bullet, a nuke that would’ve been a copyright claim) and that I should instead monetize my original work, not my fanmade stuff. However it makes me worried for other creators that make 18+ fan content of franchises who have things like Patreon to do commissions, considering companies like Disney and Nintendo really love cease and desisting people.

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Those creators are– most of them knowingly– putting themselves at risk legally.

When you post fanworks on AO3, if a rights holder like Disney tries to take legal action against you, AO3 and their parent organization the OTW will go to bat for you with their lawyers and legal fund.

When you post fanworks on Patreon or Tumblr, if a rights holder like Disney tries to take legal action against you, Patreon or Tumblr will happily hand over all your information to that company and you are on your own legally.

Thank you! I’m still really new to everything so I’ll give the site another look-around and see what I can find. I guess I’m just worried about spamming? I haven’t stepped into public eye in…a long time. Lots of anxiety there. I know it’s an archive and it’s not more “public” than sitting on a park bench but…still, y’know? 🩷✉️

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I totally get it. It can feel like you’re doing something wrong.

But trust me there is absolutely no danger of spamming or flooding AO3!

The minimum number of words that an individual work on AO3 is allowed to be is 10. Not 100. Ten.

Post works as often as you want, as short as you want!

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First of all, congrats on getting started with fanfic! That’s awesome and we’re excited to see what you create!

Now, so, a lot to parse here, please bear with me.

🔹users on AO3 sometimes put multiple unrelated stories into the same work as chapters.

There are many problems with this.

🔹if a reader wants to leave kudos on multiple stories within your work, they can’t do that.

🔹readers interested in specific stories within your work will have a hard time leafing through the work to find the story they’re looking for.

🔹you cannot provide a summary for each individual story within your work, so fewer people will find them.

🔹if your work has stories that include different characters and tropes in each of them, rather than each story being about the same characters and tropes you will run up against the tag limit and be unable to accurately tag your work.

Here’s what you should do instead

🔹make each story a separate work.

🔹it’s okay if they’re short. many people, ourselves included, put flash fiction and drabbles that are only 100-500 words long as separate works.

🔹this is very common and accepted. It makes it easier to tag, summarize, search and kudos each work.

Here’s how you can connect your related but separate works into a ‘book of short stories’.

🔹use AO3’s collection feature.

🔹use AO3’s series feature.

Do you know if AO3 allows like…collections of works in a single “book”? If it’s an archive, my brain perceives the works on it like books, but if that’s how the site calls them, so I’m sorry if this gets confusing. I wanna start writing fanfic again by dipping my toes in and just writing a bunch of little scenes and stuff, to establish the skills I lost when I got really discouraged and my mental health took a turn. But it feels like a waste to put those stories into their own “books”, I’d rather put them into a collection of short stories in a single book, y’know? I don’t think any of them would get over 1k words, since they’re just little exercises, but I wanted to ask and make sure, since you guys see to know about that kinda thing. (If this was confusing, imagine it like a book of short stories, each one unrelated to the others but connected in how short and sweet they are) 🩷✉️

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First of all, congrats on getting started with fanfic! That’s awesome and we’re excited to see what you create!

Now, so, a lot to parse here, please bear with me.

🔹users on AO3 sometimes put multiple unrelated stories into the same work as chapters.

There are many problems with this.

🔹if a reader wants to leave kudos on multiple stories within your work, they can’t do that.

🔹readers interested in specific stories within your work will have a hard time leafing through the work to find the story they’re looking for.

🔹you cannot provide a summary for each individual story within your work, so fewer people will find them.

🔹if your work has stories that include different characters and tropes in each of them, rather than each story being about the same characters and tropes you will run up against the tag limit and be unable to accurately tag your work.

Here’s what you should do instead

🔹make each story a separate work.

🔹it’s okay if they’re short. many people, ourselves included, put flash fiction and drabbles that are only 100-500 words long as separate works.

🔹this is very common and accepted. It makes it easier to tag, summarize, search and kudos each work.

Here’s how you can connect your related but separate works into a ‘book of short stories’.

🔹use AO3’s collection feature.

🔹use AO3’s series feature.