Writer’s Advice: “No one cares about my lore” part 1
This will be a two parter. This first post addresses the basics of accessibility, the second post will be writing tips. I will edit in a link to part 2 when I post it in the next few days.
Edit: Part 2 is available here
Why people are not engaging with your lore
Previously, we discussed whether or not you should post your lore. So okay, you went and posted your lore. But it got zero notes! None of your lore posts get notes! Clearly, no one cares and you should just stop posting, right?
WRONG. You don’t need to stop posting, you just need to take a critical look at the accessibility of your lore.
I cannot count the number of times where I’ve been browsing the FR tag and see a lore post that looks kind of interesting, but when I start reading it, it’s clearly in the middle of an arc. But where is the rest of the arc? I don’t know!
The thing is, most readers won’t know. And most won’t be bothered to go looking for it. We live in an era where time is money. Someone isn’t going to take three minutes out of their busy day to hunt down the lore that you didn’t bother to make accessible. They’re just going to keep scrolling. So, how do you make it accessible?
“But I do tag my lore!” You may be saying. “I make sure every post is tagged #Larry’s Lore so that people can click on it and see more!”
But is that really accessible? Think about how Tumblr’s tagging system works. If I click on the tag on desktop, I’ll go to your blog, where I will see all your lore... in reverse chronological order. At least with desktop, though, I can click the next page button until I get to the end and read backwards. But again, I’m a busy guy, so I probably won’t.
It gets even worse when someone is on mobile. I click your tag, and not only am I taken to your blog where your lore is in reverse chronological order, there is no pagination! I can’t even skip to the end! And since mobile blogs don’t show read mores, I may have to do a LOT of scrolling to get to the first post. For some of us using older phones, that can cause the app to crash.
You can still use tags, though! You just have to be smart about it.
First, don’t rely on tags in the tags themselves. Tag your lore, yes, but also include a link to the tag on your blog.
Second, use the chronological tag feature! What’s that, you may ask, because very few people know about the feature? It’s an easy way to look through a tag in chronological order. All you have to do is add one thing to the end of the url. It should look like this:
[yourblogurl].tumblr.com/tagged/my-lore/chrono
Again though, make sure you link it IN YOUR LORE POST so that mobile users can make use of it!
Tagging is good, but - at least in my opinion - chapter links are better. This way, if I just missed your last chapter, I can easily navigate back to it. I’ll use my main FR blog as an example:
At the beginning of each lore post, I have three links: a link to the previous chapter, a link to a table of contents, and a link to the next chapter. Obviously, the ‘next’ link gets edited in after I make the next lore post. This easily allows people to move from one lore post to the next, making for easy flow as they read, like turning pages in a book, instead of tons of scrolling up and down a tag search.
Clicking on the ‘list’ link will bring readers to a table of contents, like so:
This is a page I created on my blog, which appears in the links on the top of the theme, so people can access it easily. However, a normal blog post that you go back and edit will also work. On this page, people can pick which chapter they read, which is especially helpful if someone wants to re-read a certain chapter, either to get caught up or because they just liked it!
Now, these tips alone will not bring people running to your lore. We’ll cover how to get people hooked in the next post. But these DO make it so that people have more reader-friendly entry points into your lore, which is CRITICAL when you are posting serially on a site that doesn’t keep all your posts together (like FF.net or AO3).
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
andulkaphoto
