The Top 5 Worst Ways to Advertise your Fanfic

In some ways, the life of a fanfiction author is easy these days. The internet makes it quite simple to share your creations, and it’s just as simple for others to respond to your stuff with their feedback. Many sites even let us know the page view count, so we know just how many people were interested enough to click on the story’s title. Sharing is, in a nutshell, very easy.

The downside of this, of course, is that there are a lot of fanfics out there. Some of them are very polished, some of them not all that much so. Some of them are incredibly popular, some are practically void of all attention. Every writer wants to get at least some attention, and it can be quite difficult to distinguish yourself from the mass. So, you do what real world authors have to do to get attention. You have to advertise.

There’s many ways to go about advertising your creations – this applies to fanfics as well as art, let’s plays, fan music, AMV’s, what have you. Some of them are good and effective. Some of them aren’t.

Here are a few that pop up every now and then, but should never be used by anyone.

 

#5 Massive banner in your signature


Now this is what one calls a work of art!

To get one thing straight right off the bat, your signature is the best place to advertise anything of yours. It follows you wherever you post, letting people find your stuff more easily. It is, essentially, the perfect space for a stylish banner advertising your main fic, or main fics, if you have several.

However – and this is a big however – moderation is always necessary when it comes to signatures. You might think that a bigger banner will grab people’s attention better. In a way, this is true, but large banners are likely to start attracting the wrong kind of attention. If your banner is massive, it can be a little obnoxious, especially if you post a lot and people keep having to scroll over the 300x500px banner of a drawing of your main character. This effect becomes twice as bad if the banner is animated in some way. For instance, if it flashes, or sparkles, or has some kind of choppy animation on it, it’s going to start really rubbing people the wrong way. Yeah, it captures their attention. It also usually annoys them for that specific purpose.

And then you have the ultimate advertising trope, used by copious amounts of companies all over the world: bright colors. People are more likely to look at something if it’s bright red or yellow, because it will catch their eye. This may work for sale fliers and traffic signs, but in a signature it has “annoying” written all over it. See this brightly colored, massive banner a couple of times in a row in a thread, and you already want nothing to do with the person whose signature that is.

#4 Mentioning your fic in every review you write


You write fics! Please read my fic! 10/10, would review again.

You may have heard that being active is a good way to get attention. It will give visibility to your elegantly constructed signature, authority to your name, and in general just make you more well-known and well-respected. This is especially so if you review others’ work, because good reviews will make people think you are helpful and nice and will probably make them more likely to return the favor.

But then there is the question of how to point them to your work, especially if you have several fics in circulation and want feedback on a specific one. You could come up with the idea to mention your fic in the review, just to sort of gently nudge the other writer in its direction.

Yeah, don’t do that. It never works like you’d want it to. Or, well, how would you like to receive a review along the lines of “I think you should reconsider how you handled issue X. You can check my fic, The Ponyta Chronicles, to see how I dealt with it”? Or maybe “wow, I really like your main character! She reminds me a lot of my main character, Charly, from my fic The Ponyta Chronicles. You should check it out”? Or something like “I usually write fights like this but it’s interesting to see it done another way, you should check out my fic to see what I’m talking about”? It’s unrelated, and it doesn’t make you want to read the fic mentioned. It makes you want to roll your eyes and move on to the reviews written by actual readers – the people who read your story for your story, not to compare it to theirs.

In general, it comes off as sort of pretentious. You have to be a really famous and respected author to pull it off, and if you are a really famous and respected author, it’s likely you’re not going to try to pull this except in some very special cases.

#3 Thinly veiled advertisement threads


To be fair, that Sandslash really is a jerk.

So, if hidden advertisements in your reviews are out of the question, how about posting new threads? You could ask everyone how they deal with some kind of issue in their writing, and introduce your own solution as you ask. Perfect. This way, no-one will be put off, right? And right you are, people seem to be a bit more interested in your writing now. Your views have gone up, but there’s no new reviews yet. Time to turn the thread-posting to eleven, right?

Wrong! This sort of thing might work once or twice, but after that it’s just going to start pissing people off. Especially if you abandon each thread after making it, or always respond with examples of your own work, no matter what anyone else posts. No-one is going to think it’s a genuine conversation thread after that. They are going to know it’s self-promotion, and after a while, it’s going to start to annoy people.

They will be put off by you and your fic. They will want nothing to do with your character Charly or her three-legged Ponyta with a tragic past of abuse and woe. People who might have been interested in the story are now completely uninterested in even trying it. So, effectively, you have done the opposite of advertising.

And that’s never a good way to get reviews.

#2 Messages to random people

I just met you and I’m not crazy, but here’s my fic so read it maybe!

It’s been a week since you posted your first chapter. Your thread is getting buried under other threads, pushed down from the first page and then even the second page. You can’t double post, because for some reason the rules demand you need a new chapter to do so, and all your other methods of advertising have been fruitless. There’s hardly any reviews. And you’re desperate.

So you go pick out the people who give the best reviews, or the most of them, and you start sending them messages. “Hey, have you read my fic, The Ponyta Chronicles? You should read it and let me know what you think ok? The link is in my sig :)” After all, these are nice, respectable people. They’re probably going to fulfill your wish and read the fic as you have asked. Right?

Well. They might read it. Some people are generally benevolent like that. But keep in mind, these people don’t you know very well, if at all. You’re not likely to endear yourself to them by sending them requests out of the blue, especially if you’ve never reviewed their work. They’re going to get the PM or VM or whatever your preferred method of communication is, look at it for a moment, and be some level of annoyed. I mean, how would you react if a perfect stranger walked up to you and asked you to spend hours of your time to do them a favor without offering anything in return? You’d be weirded out. And you’d probably say no.

#1 Breaking the rules

So, you had a giant banner. It didn’t work. Why not make it even bigger? Sure, there might be rules about banner size or the amount of banners you’re allowed to have in your signature, but screw that. You need attention. So, you make a banner twice the size your old one. You make two banners twice the size your old one. You add in sound that can’t be turned off. You add in five animated arrow-gifs to point at the banners. Now, someone has to notice it. Right?

Your self-promotion reviews didn’t work, either. Why not chuck out the pretence and just post everywhere promoting your fic? It doesn’t matter what the thread is about. It doesn’t matter if your post fits in at all. You need those pageviews, so you can just post links to your fic anywhere. Someone is bound to click on those. Right?

Your meager and respectful messages to other writers didn’t get you the attention you wanted. Screw being polite. Why not just send as many messages to as many people as you can? That way, there’s got to be someone who’s interested. And if they’re not interested the first time, try again. And again. And again. Eventually they’ll click on your link. Right?

Or maybe you could go post on other boards with your link? That’ll get you a bigger audience. Posting the actual fic there would take too long, and then you’d just have lots of untouched threads. It makes more sense to just post links. Lots of them. Lots and lots of links. Links everywhere-

Congratulations, you’ve officially lapsed into the realm of breaking rules to get attention. It will probably be no surprise when the attention you inevitably gather this way is way, way negative. You’ll be banned from sites. You’ll get warnings and infractions. You’ll make enemies instead of friends, and you’ll officially become known as that one person who exploded all over the forum or even the whole fandom with their drama.

You’ll be famous, alright, so in that sense, your advertisement has worked. But I doubt it’ll make anyone read your fic, much less comment on it.
After all, you don’t post in fics when the author will no longer respond. Like, for instance, if they’ve been banned.

At this point, some of you may be going “okay, I see your point. These are bad ideas. But what is a good way to get attention, then?” The answer to that, of course, is that there is no easy way to get attention. No-one is entitled to pageviews or reviews or loyal readers. Advertising, of course, helps, but ultimately you have to actually go out and earn every single review you get, and every single reader that will start to follow your works because they like what you’re doing. It’s just like in the real world of publishing.

There’s a couple of ways to go about this. You could try being really dang good at storytelling, but that requires years of practice and isn’t likely to happen very fast. And, unfortunately, sometimes even that isn’t enough, because success requires both skills and luck, and if you’re out of luck, then it may never happen to you. The other way of getting that attention is finding a niche and writing for that. For many, this is shipping. You pick up a particular ship, like Lyra/Ethan or Red/Blue or Jessie/James, and you start churning out fics for that ship. People who like the ship will likely become loyal readers. People who don’t like the ship will keep their distance. You get your attention, everyone’s happy. Of course, that sort of writing won’t let you show everyone the epic overhaul of trainer-Pokémon relations and the little three-legged Ponyta that can stop the apocalypse.

If you have that vision, and if you have the need to show it to everyone, you should definitely go for it. Just keep in mind that there are no shortcuts, not even with internet fame. It has to be earned. You’ll need patience, diligence, and hard work. You’ll need to know the rules of your community and follow them. You’ll need to make friends, read others’ work, and keep improving yourself. Essentially, you need to be active within your community. If you’re a cool person with interesting opinions and lots of input on the works of others, people will take more note of you. And when they’re interested in you, they’ll be more interested in what you write. Plus, you know, many people are likely to return the favor if you review their stories. Being a cohesive part of the community makes you more noticeable, and being more noticeable translates into pageviews really fast.

But, above all, it needs to be fun for everyone involved. You should have fun creating, and your readers – or the people who look at your art or let’s play or what have you – should have fun reading. If you guilt, harass, or bully others into looking at your stuff, they won’t have fun with it. They’ll be annoyed. And then you’ve already failed.

Written by An-chan.
Edited by bobandbill, Hoenn, and Slay231.
The fabulous banner was made by bobandbill.