there’s a very good encouraging post (cannot currently find it) about how ao3 kudos don’t correspond to writing quality, which is true.
but if you don’t know WHY that is, it sounds like meaningless pat-on-the-back “keep your chin up, champ!” stuff.
kudos on ao3 are a marketing game. i’m gonna use my own ao3 works to make my case bc that’s a lot easier (and Significantly Less Asshole-ish) than analyzing the marketability of other people’s ao3 fic
my two main fandoms over the past 8 years are homestuck and the raven cycle/dreamer trilogy verse.
my most popular homestuck fanfiction is vacation. it’s a johndave fic i wrote when i was 16, and as of writing this post, it has 2,974 kudos.
by comparison, there’s breathe on the ashes. this is an ancestor fic similar in length and chapter count to vacation. it has 268 kudos - an encouraging readership for sure, but less than 1/10th of the engagement of vacation. it has less than 1/20th the amount of hits.
quality-wise, breathe on the ashes is SIGNIFICANTLY better than vacation (though there’s a LOT about it i’d do differently if i wrote it today). i wrote it when i was 19. it has better characterization, more thoughtful character arcs, more compelling plotting, better twists, and a significantly more fulfilling resolution.
so why is vacation so much more popular?
a great deal of it is luck - it was the first (i believe?) mainstream mermaid AU in the homestuck fandom, and it inspired a LOT of fanart that brought readers in. it was written in 2012-2013, at the height of the homestuck fandom’s engagement w/ fanworks
it also combines a popular AU concept with the most popular fandom ship at the time. i have multiple very short, badly written johndave oneshots from 2012 that ALSO have significantly more kudos than breathe on the ashes.
breathe on the ashes, by comparison, is about the homestuck ancestors, who get almost no screen time in canon and have no canon personalities. it’s plot-heavy rather than ship-heavy. it’s dense, and at some times very dark.
much of its readership is tumblr mutuals and people who started following my writing for johndave. but also, a significant part of its readership is people reading for the tagged relationships and the promised adventure story. that’s why it has over 200 kudos instead of, like, 10.
now let’s compare two series i’ve written for the raven cycle/dreamer trilogy fandom: the most self-indulgent vampire AU of all time and unbecoming jordan hennessy.
unbecoming jordan hennessy is my newest series, so it hasn’t had years to gain a readership. but none of the fics have more than 70 hits, which is unusual for my profile. in fact, only the first fic has more than 10 kudos. by comparison, the vampire AU has 73 series bookmarks, 3,500 hits on the first installment, and nearly 450 kudos on the first installment.
that’s because i knew the jordan hennessy series had little potential readership going in and made no effort to mitigate that. it’s an extremely dark dead dove series that has basically every available content warning and then some. it focuses on a dreamer trilogy character (so, already a smaller fandom than the raven cycle) who gets very little fandom attention, and character spinoffs who get even LESS attention. most didn’t even have ao3 tags of their own until i wrote them. it’s all genfic, and it’s all gruesome and gutwrenching and awful.
meanwhile i DID take steps to encourage vampire AU readership, even as i continued writing what i want. the main characters are in a polycule, but poly fic is rarely interacted with in this fandom. so several installments focus chiefly on the main fandom pairing (pynch) with the polyamory as a background. that way there was already a readership when i started exploring adansey, bronan, etc.
i wrote the vampire AU with fan-favorite tropes (i mean…. it’s a vampire AU). i wrote it to be self-indulgent and fun. i wrote it ENTIRELY as a series where I Do What I Want, but i also marketed it in ways that drive reader engagement. i used tags that people often search on ao3. i used popular & humorous title formats. i used short, snappy summaries that told people what to expect from the fic.
both of these series are undeniably good. i’m a good writer. but only one was written With The Consumption Of Others In Mind, and it’s reflected 100% in the stats. in fact, if i didn’t have tumblr mutuals who’d shared jordan hennessy, NO ONE would have read it.
i’m not sore about people not reading jordan hennessy. i wrote it for myself, like most of my writing is for myself, and i published it for maybe 3 or 4 mutuals who care about the content as much as i do. i knew it wasn’t going to be mass devoured by the fandom.
(i have well over a million words of fiction that i’ve written for myself that no one else has ever seen. unbecoming jordan hennessy is the closest public window into what most of that content looks like.)
here’s how to market a fic to get kudos:
pick a large fandom. raven cycle is a pretty big YA fandom, homestuck is a giant internet fandom. if i cared to write for fandoms like the MCU, i could almost definitely surpass vacation’s success
pick the most popular pairing. or a very popular pairing, if there are several in your fandom.
DO NOT write relationship-less genfic. even if the fic itself is pretty genficcy, tag it with a popular relationship. (use & relationship tags if there absolutely is no romance or it’s focused on familial bonding.)
DO NOT go overboard with relationship tags or with general tags. do not write a summary that’s a million words long.
write a popular AU. high school, college, supernatural, coffee shop, office workers, soulmates, whatever.
write a popular relationship trope. fake relationship, enemies to lovers, there was only one bed, and they were roommates etc.
write a popular subgenre. sickfic, slow burn, married shenanigans, plotless fluff, angst with a happy ending, etc.
write a oneshot or keep chapter lengths somewhere from 2,000 to 4,000 words.
does any of that have to do with the writing quality? no.
it has to do with what people are searching for on ao3, what they’re likely to read, and how to reach the largest market possible in your fandom of choice.
so if you’re writing for external validation, use this formula and go forth and enjoy success, friends. and if you’re worried that maybe you’re a bad writer because your fic isn’t being engaged with: stop worrying. marketability and quality are not the same thing, and they never have been.
