So You Want to Publish your Work on AO3: A Tutorial by Solovei.What I thought I'd do is go through the big long "New Work" form step by step, which will hopefully help people! As always, you can PM me or post here if there is something you don't understand, I'm happy to explain!
A really good resource is
Fanlore which is run by the same folks that made AO3! It has a lot of definitions for the weird words you find sometimes in fanfiction, like
Schmoop or
Podfic.
There are 5 big sections to this form:
Tags, Preface, Associations, Privacy, and Work Text. Some of the fields are required: these are colored in red and usually have an asterisk (*) beside them; some are not - it is up to you if you want to include them. For the Archive Warnings and Rating fields, there are no clear guidelines on which one to pick and it's usually up to your own judgment of your story and it's content.
Rating: Think of this section like the ratings a movie gets to indicate what age group it's acceptable for. This is another one of those times where you have decide for yourself how explicit you think your story is. What I think is suitable for Teen and Up you might think is actually Mature, and someone else might think is ok for General Audiences. AO3 uses four rating categories - "Not Rated" could technically mean anything; some people don't like to rate their fanfics or want to avoid spoilers.
"General Audiences" - everyone, from children to adults, can read this story
"Teen and Up Audiences" - this story is suitable for people aged 13 and older; there might be some steamier content than you'd see in the previous rating, or more gruesome things happening
"Mature" and "Explicit" - These two kind of go hand in hand; both are intended to describe stories with adult themes like sex or violence, but Explicit refers to things that are graphically described, usually in a lot of detail.
Archive Warnings: These are a system designed to let users filter out content that may be disturbing to them. Along with the Rating, they describe the general content of the work. For most of them, you have to use your own judgment to figure out what "counts" or crosses the boundary beyond which you have to warn people. In general, these apply if there is actual, graphic depiction of these things, as opposed to just references or implication. So, a scene where someone is being tortured would probably qualify better than a character saying that they were tortured in the past. I'll go through the options one by one anyway though. Note that this is a required field, so you have to pick one (or more) of them.
Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings - This means that you have chosen not to disclose or warn about the stuff on this list. It doesn't mean that the work doesn't CONTAIN those elements (see "No Archive Warnings Apply" below), just that you aren't telling us.
Graphic Depictions Of Violence - It's up to you what you count as "graphic", but generally this means any sort of gory/gruesome scenes that are explicitly described rather than just hinted at.
Major Character Death - If a major (this is again, up to you) character dies during the story. This usually doesn't apply to stories where the character is already dead in canon, but you may want to put a spoiler warning into your tags if that's the case.
No Archive Warnings Apply - This is the option you pick if your story does NOT contain any of the other things on the list. So, no violence/death/etc.
Rape/Non-Con - Non-Con stands for Non-Consensual.
Underage - This refers to sexual activity involving humans under the age of consent. It doesn't tend to apply to undead vampires or aliens who don't age, though. I realize that this age varies in different countries, so use your best judgement here.
Fandoms: this is the fandom your work is based off of. If you're writing a crossover, you should list all the other fandoms also.
Category: This part seems to confuse a lot of people, so I'll go over it in more detail. As A LOT of fanfiction features relationships, readers want to be able to search for just the kinds of pairings they want. This is what "category" means here - what kind of relationships are in your work. Keep in mind that it's not a required field so you can leave it blank if you want. You can also select several options. Most of these are self-explanatory. If your fanfic isn't really about relationships at all, or there are relationships that are in the background, you can pick "Gen" for General. The Multi category is for pairings with more than 2 characters - threesomes, fivesomes, what have you. And Other is, well... other. Maybe your characters' gender doesn't fit into M or F. Or they are genderless aliens, or it's about cats and you feel weird assigning them into gender-based categories.
Here we need to talk about tags, because they are
so important. They are the backbone of the archive; they make it so people can find your story. Tags that show up in the drop-down list when you type in any of those fields are called "Canonicals" - meaning they are widely used by lots of people. You don't have to only pick those tags, but if you're not sure how to phrase something, picking a canonical could be a good idea.There are four kinds of tags: Fandom, Character, Relationship, and "Additional Tags" which is basically a catch-all term for everything that isn't the previous three. We've already covered fandom tags, so now let's move onto the other three.
Relationships: Generally, relationships are formatted like this:
Character A / Character B
Character A & Character B
Keep in mind that a "/" indicates a romantic/sexual relationship, whereas a "&" indicates a friendship/platonic relationship. You can add the characters in any order that you like. Aside from just listin the characters names, you can add some modifiers if you want:
John/Jane eventually, implied John/Bill, very very minor hints of Jane/Bill
Characters: These are the characters that show up in your fanfic. They may or may not auto-complete as you type their names. Usually, Ao3 likes using the character's full name if possible. It's perfectly acceptable to write modifications to those names that reflect the role the character plays:
John Smith, and John appears for a little bit, Background John Smith, Mentions of John Smith
are all perfectly acceptable tags.
Additional Tags: Very very important. This is where you put tags that are not Character OR Relatonship tags - things that describe your story and get it found by people who are browsing the archive. Readers like seeing additional tags because it tells them what the story is about before they read it - together with the summary, they're like the synopsis you read on the back of the book that lets you decide if you want to look further. There are a lot of canonical tags already in the archive, and they cover lots of things, for instance:
Genre tags:
Humor,
Romance,
Science Fiction,
Fantasy Story or Plot elements:
Fluff and Angst,
Deviates From Canon,
Slow Build Character tropes or aspects:
Creepy Hannibal,
Cecil is a Dork,
Awesome Frigga Tags about the fanfic itself:
My First Work in This Fandom,
Late Night Writing,
Not Beta Read,
I Can't Believe I Wrote This...and so on and so forth. But, please remember that you are by no means restricted to any of these. Go ahead and write whatever you want! Any tags are good tags; it shows the readers that you've thought about the story and want other people to notice it. Some people will tell you that you should refrain from adding "chatty" tags, but DO NOT LISTEN to them. Add whatever you like and AO3's army of dedicated volunteers (me among them) will take care of the rest. It is perfectly acceptable and will not break the website.
Now, let's move onto the Preface! These are the things that will go
around your fanfic like titles, summaries, and notes. Think of it as the meta-data for your story. The Summary and Notes fields will take some HTML, so you can add links as well as basic formatting (bold, italic, underlined) here.
Work Title: Pretty straight-forward! You can call your story whatever you like
Add co-authors?: Check this box if you wrote your story with someone else. There will be a place to enter their username. They have to also be registered on the site for this to work.
Summary: There are different ways to do a summary. Some people like to do a generic outline of the plot, like:
"A and B decide to go to a park after their big fight with the Evil Overlord and have some cute adventures! Unfortunately, C also tags along."
It's also quite popular to pick out a significant quote from the story to use in place of a summary:
"This is it," B said gravely. "This is how it ends" There was only one ball left, and she HAD to have that stuffed giraffe.
The summary is also a good place to tell your reader if the story has spoilers for a certain part of the source material, if it takes place in a specific time period (like, pre- or post-canon, in the middle of a specific episode, etc), has possible triggers not covered by the tags or the warnings... basically anything you think people need to know about your story BEFORE they click on it.
You can of course combine all of these elements! So in the end your summary might look like this:
"I can't believe they don't have banana ice cream. This is unacceptable!"
A and B go to a theme park and have some CRAZY adventures!
Spoilers for Episode 5! Chapter 4 will be up soon.
Notes: These are "Author Notes" that will go INSIDE the story. That is, people will only see them after they click on the link. Think of them as a header and footer. You can put whatever you want here... a link to your tumblr, credits to people who helped out, a rant about how hard it was to write that one particular scene. Checking "at the beginning" will put the note before the body of the story, and "at the end" will put it after. You can have both!
Let's move onto Associations! These are more meta-level things that let your work be linked to other works in the archive. All of them are optional.
Post to Collections / Challenges: This is common for kinkmemes and other events that many fan communities host. If your work is part of one of those, you can enter the name of it here.
Gift this work to: If your story is a gift/present/written for a friend who is also an AO3 user, you can enter their name here. The fanfic will still be posted on YOUR account, but the headline will read "[Title] by [your username] for [their username]"
This work is a remix, a translation, a podfic, or was inspired by another work: This means that your work was directly inspired or uses content from another
fanfic. For instance, if it's a rewriting of someone else's story from another point of view, you could put that here.
This work is part of a series: A series groups together individual works that are connected by some sort of theme. Readers can go forward and backwards through stories in a series, and a series is given it's own landing page. You can see an example of one
here.
This work has multiple chapters: If your story has only one chapter (regardless of length), leave this unchecked. Chapters are different from series in that they are part of one work and share a set of tags that you define for the work as a whole.
Set a different publication date: This option lets you change the date your story appears to have been posted, but only in the past.
Choose a language: This is the language your story was written in, or at least the majority of it.
Select work skin: This setting affects how your story will look on the site, and can usually be left blank.
We're nearly there! The next section is Privacy. The two options here will affect who can view and comment on your work. While we're here, lets talk about the statistics you can see on your story. AO3 keeps track of three things: hits, kudos, and comments. Hits are how many times people have read your story. Kudos are sort of the equivalent of clicking "Like" on facebook - they're a nice way to let someone know you appreciated the fanfic but maybe don't have anything in particular to say about it. Both guests and registered users can leave kudos, but you can only leave one per work. Comments are, well... comments! Comments are a great way to tell your favorite authors what you loved about their story and encourage them to keep writing!
And look, this big box is where you can finally paste in your story! If it already contains formatting, like bold or italic text, you will want to click the "Rich Text" button first. This will bring up an editor similar to the one you see on the forum, where you can add things like hyperlinks, images, lists, and alignment.
Once you're done, just click on "Preview" to see how the finished work will look, or "Post without preview" if you want to go ahead and submit it -- and you're done! Your fanfic is out there for people to read and admire
But Solo, you say! I already submitted my work before I knew all of these things! What can I do?
You can edit your work and everything about it AT ANY TIME after you publish it. You can do that from the story's page, or from your dashboard. "Edit" will take you back to the same form you filled out when submitting, while "Edit Tags" will give you only the Tags portion of that form (so, Character/Relationships/Ratings/Category/Warnings). It doesn't matter which one you use.
