wherein Liz thinks about AO3 crossposting

[edenfalling]

I am, very slowly and fitfully, trying to get most of my old fanfiction crossposted to AO3. I am not sure I want to put everything up there -- there are some works that are more in the nature of random finger-twiddling than something I particularly want to share with the entire world -- but aside from the more fragmentary stuff, it would be nice to have my work available in a more public forum (and one with a less demanding feedback mechanism, aka the kudos button).

But I'm not sure how to organize everything.

An awful lot of my older work is tiny 15-minute ficlets, and those can clog up an archive really damn fast. But I don't know that I want to jam them into story collections either, because those gum up search parameters -- they give back positive results for every random character, ship, and tag attached to them, even if that element appears only glancingly in one component "chapter" out of a dozen. Which is annoying to readers.

I suspect I'm going to end up posting everything individually, with a few things organized into series (because goddamn, I love the AO3 series function), but that won't stop me from fretting in the meantime. *sigh* I am especially unsure about my Narnia fanfiction, since most of those stories are part of a single coherent timeline and thus ought to be part of a series, but I do not want the headache of trying to arrange them in chronological order. Maybe I should just post my timeline as a "fic" and put a link to it in the notes for each fic? That might work...

(This ramble is brought to you by the four old HP fics I crossposted tonight. They all contain Petunia Evans Dursley, though one of them is really a Harry fic that happens to include a peripheral Petunia cameo. Slowly my AO3 stats are becoming less wildly unrepresentative of my actual writing history, though Homestuck is still massively over-weighted in comparison to HP, Naruto, and Narnia, to say nothing of Angel Sanctuary.)

Comments

[branchandroot]

I've found that the "notes" or "description" field of a Series makes a good place to put timelines. You can just post in order of publication as you come to them, but have the series notes say "okay, here's my best swing at what order to read these in, internally". And, of course, you can also slap things up however and then go back and re-order the series.

But the little ones, yeah. Unless you can group them by pairing or major character, I usually put those up separately and just try not to flood any one day with them. *wry*

[edenfalling]

The thing is, I already have some of my Narnia fic on AO3, so I'd have to edit and rearrange things no matter what -- whether I decide on publication date order or internal timeline order. And I hate extra work. *whines in a terribly petty fashion* But yeah, it's probably simplest to just do a "if you want to read in internal chronological order" list in the notes field and otherwise arrange stuff by publication date.

The Calormen fics will be double-listed in their own separate series as well, of course, because thematic unity and stuff. :-)

I can easily lump several of my Jadis-and-Cynara backstory in Charn fics together, and maybe a few of my Aravis/Cor ficlets as well, but the rest would be an awkward fit. Or I dunno, I could maybe justify collecting the various three-sentence ficlets into a single "story" as well, though that would mess up the idea of an Aravis/Cor collection... *ponders options*

[krait]

usually put those up separately and just try not to flood any one day with them

I kind-of sort-of ran into this when uploading my old sonnets, and I figured that I could avoid overloading by backdating them so they aren't filling up the 'new works in TPM fandom' results. Might this work for your small ficlets?

[edenfalling]

Backdating keeps old stories off the front page of the fandom(s) in question, but the thing is, if someone has subscribed to you as an author, they get email notifications of everything you post. By which I really do mean everything, backdated or not. If you put stuff up in quick enough succession, some of those emails may contain more than one story or chapter, but you're still going to be dumping what amounts to spam on anyone who likes your current work. :-/

(I backdate my old works for accuracy's sake as much as anything else -- I like to put my writing in context, as it were, and people are slightly less likely to complain about canon inaccuracies if the metadata on a fic makes clear that it was written before the canon details in question were revealed.)

[krait]

Ah - I had forgotten that there might be people subscribed to you in particular. (I have esentially zip on that front as an author, and when I subscribe to things it's generally specific stories or series, so it didn't occur to me.)

That could be tricky!

Though come to think of it, I've had "floods" of notifications before, and Gmail handily compiles them all into a single 'thread' which was pretty handy and kept inbox clutter to a minimum. Too bad you can't ascertain whether your subscribers have a Gmail address! :D

[edenfalling]

I did not know gmail parsed subject lines closely enough to do that kind of sorting, but I can certainly see how it would be useful. Or does it not distinguish between authors and stories, and just says, "This is from AO3, chuck it in the same thread"?

[krait]

I think it's specific -- if they have identical sender + subject, they're considered part of a thread. Thus, all emails from AO3 with "AuthorX posted a new work" get threaded together. (But "AuthorX posted Chapter 3 of Work1" and "AuthorX posted Chapter 4 of Work1" do not.)

Aaaaand that might be oversimplifying -- I think there's a time component involved, too, such that it's not going to thread every single new work from that author together, but if a certain number are sent out within a short time frame they do get put together (possibly by the Archive itself? The message says "AuthorX posted Title1 and 7 more" or something like that, so it sounds like it may be an Archive thing.)

Hmm. Now I want to test this. Who has an account with nothing in it so I can subscribe to it and then have them post a dozen "works"? :D

[edenfalling]

Oh, if they're all grouped together in a single email -- "AuthorX posted Title1 and 3 more" -- that's not gmail, that's AO3. They do have coding to try to minimize email clutter, and that kind of summary message happens if you post several things in very rapid succession.

I couldn't tell you about message threading, since my fandom account is on hotmail. I only use gmail for non-fandom legal name stuff... and in fact, the sole reason I switched to that address instead of my old legal-name hotmail address is because I get automatic gmail access via my phone, but I could only make a sync account for one hotmail address, and I picked the fandom one for obvious reasons. *grin*

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

Ah... the series option! I forgot that! I was posting on the very quiet NFFR site (http://www.narniafanfiction.net/forums/index.php) about the some of the pros and cons of AO3 and ffnet - the mechanics, not the cultures.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, you got caught in the spam filter because of the link -- I have it set fairly wide, IIRC, which means it catches some perfectly innocent comments that I then have to manually declare okay. (I think this is a fair trade for keeping almost all obvious spam off my journal.)

I also like being forced to manually code my italics, since I tend to go overboard on them and the pause and labor involved in typing [em] and so on around each instance definitely makes me rethink a bunch of them. And I LOVE the series function, because ff.net is so impossible in that regard.

I should visit the NFFR site more often. I just don't habitually have it open in a tab, and then I just sort of... forget. :-(