jalenay

[jalenay]

I have no outline tho, just vibes

[jalenay]

I agree with a lot of the points Boin made, even if i obviously came to a different conclusion on which route to take.

If anything, I'd like to mention the two costs of self-publishing that they left out: 1) an editor and 2) cover art (although maybe they didn't mention this because if they selfpublished, they could do their own coverart lol).

Both of those were my highest costs to self-publish because they required hiring another person for hours of their time. you could just self edit only and use like sites like canva or whatever for the cover and still self-publish, but that wasn't the sort of book i wanted to put out there so i paid accordingly. I never intended to quit my office job or to really make a profit from my book, which is part of why i took the route that gave me the most freedom even if it came with the most costs. I also wanted to publish by the end of the year and self-publish has a much faster timeline.

I'll also confirm that DSM has sold less than a hundred copies because i hate marketing and am not good at it lol. also had to pay to make my little author website, which i definitely need to re-vamp/put more effort into.

Lots of pros and cons to both sides and neither is correct or wrong. wishing anyone who wants to publish the best of luck!

I know absolutely nothing about the publishing world so forgive me if this is the stupidest question ever, but I was wondering why you're aiming for traditional over self publishing? Is it cause of the marketing publishing firms do, or cause you want TWD to be a physical book (which I assume isn't possible in self publishing without a lot of money), or something else? I'm thinking about the self publishing success of Wool/Silo (and no smut like you said about TWD!) but I know that's probably super rare

it's not a stupid question at all! Self publishing and traditional publishing are two different routes towards a similar goal, they both have advantages and disadvantages and it really depends on the author for what they're going for.

Needlessly detailed breakdown of self pub vs trad pub under the cut:

Self publishing can be very attractive for creators with a small but passionate online following. It allows fans of your work to support you financially and have their own copy (digital or physical) of your book! It also gives the author a higher cut of the sales revenue their book makes. Royalty rates vary based on a bunch of factors (what publisher you use, what paper you print on, how many pages your book is etc) but here's a breakdown by McZell Book Writing (as of 2023):

But there are also some significant disadvantages to self publishing. For starters, ALL the marketing is on you. You don't have the machine of traditional publishing pushing your book. It's not going to be in brick and mortar bookstores, it's not going to have publicists and advertising campaigns, it's only going to reach as many people as you, the individual author, are able to reach. And of those people it reaches, only a small percentage will actually pay money for it.

Statistically, most self published authors sell less than 100 books during the entire lifetime that book is on sale. At least, that's what all the agents and writing forums on the internet tell me -and it's probably correct. And once you've self published, it becomes exponentially harder to sell that book to a trad publisher should you change your mind in the future.

Additionally, though your royalties are markedly less with traditional publishing, you're also likely to have an advance* - a lump sum the publisher gives you in good faith, which your royalties are then deducted from. Let's say a publisher pays you a $50k advance for your first book (that's slightly less than the average for a debut, according to google). Well, that's money that you can use to pay the bills while you write your NEXT book, which you'll hopefully sell to the publisher for even more money. This has an obvious appeal over self publishing, where you have to fight and claw to sell every single copy for that $5 cut. Basically, instead of quitting your job and using that advance to write for a year, with self publishing you'll have to keep your full time job, and take on the second full time job of marketing and selling your book, AND the third job of trying to write your next book. Glamorous, it is not.

(*Important acknowledgement that publishers are capitalist enterprises and there's many reasons they fuck with an author's advance, delay paying out, or simply don't pull their weight on the marketing side of things. There are many instances of publishers failing to pay out an advance for up to TWO YEARS after the book has hit shelves. I've mostly seen this done to women of colour, and I do think that's a factor in this fuckery. Having a trad publisher is not a guarantee that you'll have meaningful financial stability or industry support. Essentially, authors are being fucked on all sides)

Now, with self publishing, you DO have more control over the story! You can prioritize the story you want to tell without worrying about what the market research team in Penguin Randomhouse thinks. I have seen horror stories of authors being told "We like the story, but the queer characters aren't relatable, axe them" by the publisher they're in submission with. Trad publishers are also notoriously fickle, and can change their mind at any point in the process - basically until that book is printed and on the shelves, it doesn't matter how much interest they're showing you. They can and do back out of deals. I saw one absolutely heartbreaking case of an author who had been in submission with a trad publisher for over 8 months and had done 3 rounds of edits that they'd requested and was waiting for the final feedback, when they called her and told her they weren't going to move forward with her book because she didn't have a large enough online following. I cannot IMAGINE the spiral of despair that would send me down. But that's the publishers prerogative - their job is to make money, and that is how they look at the books they receive for consideration.

However, there are also significant limits to your control with self-publishing. For one, Amazon is practically your ONLY route to self publish, whether you like it or not. Vanity Presses (publishers you have to pay to get your book printed) are scams who prey on naive authors that are blinded by aspiration and don't realise they're being conned. IngramSpark isn't UNattractive as a self-pub option (for starters, it gets you on a global distribution list, so you have SOME chance of getting into a brick and mortar bookstore - though not much). But IngramSpark sell most of their books via Amazon ANYWAY - and what's worse, sometimes they'll "sell" books to Amazon, which will appear to the unsuspecting author as genuine sales. But when Amazon fails to sell those copies on to actual customers, they'll return them to IngramSpark, leaving the poor author to foot the bill for the refund. Amazon is the unavoidable beast in the dungeon here, so swallow whatever ethical objections you have towards them if you want to self publish. Selling on Amazon guarantees your book will never appear in a physical bookstore, because Amazon sells books at a loss as a way to put bookstores out of business. What bookstore is going to buy from their direct competitor, try to sell the book at standard retail price, and make a loss because Amazon has it for 40% cheaper?

There is one other self publishing option: Print and distribute your book independently. This is the hardest of all publishing options, because it requires CAPITAL. To put this into perspective, to print my novel at its current length with the cheapest, shittiest paper, completely ignoring any additional costs such as shipping to the author's home for storage, printing a colour cover, any decorative/hardcover editions, and distribution to customers: It costs $7.28 per copy. Now consider that the average cost of a paperback novel in the US (the largest book market on earth) is $5-$7. So you the author now have to convince people to buy your book for higher than market price so that you can make a miniscule profit per copy - AND you're still working your full time job, AND you're still doing the work of marketing and selling your book, AND you're now the distributor of your book so that's ANOTHER job, AND you want to write your next book.

Etc, etc. All of this to say... Isn't it a bit fucked up? Think about this for a second. We live on a planet that is brimming with art. Books, podcasts, music, theatre, illustrations etc... There is more art on this Earth than anyone could enjoy in a lifetime, and the people making that art want desperately to share it with everyone they can, and yet the only way We The Everyman can interact with it is through the grubby, greedy hands of some of the most morally bankrupt institutions in the world. Amazon and Spotify and whoever the Monopoly Man Of The Day happens to be - they don't make the art, they don't pay the artists any more than a trickle they can get away with, and they rake us for every red cent they can just so we can experience a second of escapism from the cruel reality THEY made the world into.

Anyway. Self publishing is definitely not out of the question for me! It's just not my first option :)

[jalenay]

absolutely love abusing the power that comes with 3rd person limited pov and just ignoring things and being vague sometimes. does the character know all the details? no? then I don't have to either.

[jalenay]

✨Commissions are open✨

🗡️ 7 slots!

✨Forms here!✨

Sketch sheet color will have a 50usd discount for 3 slots! I don't charge extra for 2 characters on those!

All other regular slots will be open as well!

🗡️ToS and Patreon

Now you can get access to everything i make, including spice, on Patreon! If you want commission perks, it's there too >:3c

[jalenay]

Have you ever talked about how to get started as an independent writer, or how you put your foot into the writing scene?

I apologize if you have and i missed it.

I have had a peculiar journey that I think is a little unusual, so take it with a grain of salt.

I had a stint doing traditional publishing (through an agent > publishing house) and... didn't love it. the one thing I will say about that time, though difficult, was that I learned a ton about writing and publishing!

I brought that stuff I learned to self-publishing. I started out by writing a solid backlog of books—Trollkin Lovers #1-4 were all written when I published #1. that way I could "rapid release" them, one book a month or so, to build up my brand and get my name out there.

rapid releasing is a good way to start. I also participated in a lot of free book promos once I had more books out (so I would make the first book in my series free, then encourage people to buy the other books). I recommend getting involved in Romance Bookworms/ Zoebub.

I also write lots of "reader magnets," aka free books that are short and loosely tie into my series. my current reader magnet is Melting the Troll's Heart (yet another one of my novellas you can get for free!) when you download it, it puts you on my newsletter, which is my #1 best marketing tool. make sure you have a newsletter!

also, if I can make one recommendation: don't publish your first book. if you DO, make sure to use editors, critique partners, etc. so that it's not too amateur. you want your first release to be as strong as possible, and have a good cover!

[jalenay]

Leonid Pasternak  (Ukrainian, 1862–1945) - The Torments of Creative Work

[jalenay]

Just finished my first beta reading commission! :D

FYI, when you commission me, you get a full annotated copy of your manuscript PLUS a multi-page breakdown of my final thoughts and suggestions.

Sound like something your story might need? Commission me here :)

[jalenay]

[jalenay]

Open for Beta Reader/Editorial Work

Hi everyone! As a lot of have probably gathered by now, I was recently laid off from my job as in editor from a Hachette Book Group imprint. While this is a real turn of events, I'm taking this time to fully open up my roster for any and all editorial work

I've been in trade publishing for four years, and have a BA in Editing and Publishing. At my previous jobs I did developmental, substantive, and copy editing, as well as proofreading and copy writing. Preferred genres are fiction, graphic novel/comic, creative non-fiction, gift titles, children's literature, and poetry (fan-fiction included, of course).

Rates

$10/10,000 words...........Down and dirty proofread (a quick pass looking for grammar and spelling mistakes).

$20/10,000 words...........Full proofread (a full comb through of the document).

$40............ Pitch review. Looking to pitch your manuscript to publisher? Have your selected pages and pitch document reviewed and given feedback by someone who has been on the inside!

$25/10,000 words..........Developmental pass. A look at the big things like plot, characterization, and flow.

$50/10,000 words......... The works. One round each of developmental, substantive, and proofreading.

*for graphic novels/comics/visual arts, rates go by page.

Please consider spreading this around so that I can get better reach, thank you!

[jalenay]

I hate I when I get an idea for a novel. Like oh no here starts the slow sad slip n’ slide to dissapointment again.

[jalenay]

[jalenay]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

[jalenay]

Hi! Firstly, thank you for creating this blog and helping all of us out! Secondly, and sorry if this is such a silly question, but how do you write an engaging summary?

I find my own fic summaries are so… lackluster… and not even I’m interested in reading it — so how I can I expect others to be? Even if I like my story, when I write the summary in the start of my fic/in my masterlist, I’m like “Wow… this is not even remotely interesting! 😭”

So yeah, I was wondering if you had any tips/advice for that? 😭 Totally fine if not, I just figured I’d ask. Thanks and have a great day/night! 😘

HOW TO WRITE AN ENGAGING FIC SUMMARY THAT WILL DRAW IN AUDIENCES

Summaries are the bane of many writers’ existences, including my own. It’s already hard enough to get the words down on paper for the actual story, and now people want you to convince them to read it with something more than “I WORKED REALLY HARD ON IT PLEASE IT’S GOOD I PROMISE!!!!”

Squishing a ton of context into a small blurb seems impossible, but I promise it can be done!

Obviously everyone goes about things differently, and a lot of these tips may not work for everyone, but nevertheless, here are some tricks on how to write an engaging summary!

Here’s a simple template I like to use, which will be the focus of this post:

Hook (Draw the reader in!)

Context (What are the core elements of your story?)

Cliffhanger (Introduce a question/scenario that the reader will want to click to know more about!)

1. Start With a Hook

Just like with the first sentence of a story, the first sentence of your summary should immediately spark the reader’s interest.

A bold statement! A good (short) quote from your fic! A shocking discovery! A cool word definition/the definition of your title!

I always like to put the hook of the story on its own line/paragraph, just to emphasize it.

Examples of a hook (Note, these are rushed and off the top of my head. Just meant to give a general idea, not be literary masterpieces): - "It all started when Character A puked on their Uber driver." - "War was inevitable." - "Character A would be dead by sunrise. That’s what Character B vowed." - "By the time they got to the city, it was too late."

Your hook is probably the most important part of your summary; someone will know within milliseconds whether or not they will continue reading.

Once you’re past that initial hump, it’ll be easier to convince a potential reader to skim the rest of the summary. Giving something that jumps out at them will set your story apart from others and ensure it gets that click you deserve!

2. Give Some Context

For shorter one-shots, sometimes a single hook is enough! But if your fic is longer, with a bit more moving parts, you might want to choose a few highlights. Get the essence of your story on paper.

This can be super hard, so don’t feel discouraged if you feel like you’re not getting it. I’d suggest keeping your context to about 1-3 sentences depending on the length of your story, so make sure they count.

Buzzwords are a key factor in getting the main points across. Use ones that relate to your main plot to your advantage! 

For example, if I were to make a short summary of Game of Thrones for someone who has never watched it before, I would definitely include some of these buzzwords: - Dragons - Conquest - Succession - Revenge - Slaughter - Betrayal

Using powerful words (i.e. slaughtered instead of killed) can help draw in your audience!

I can't dictate exactly how you should write your context, since every fic is different and shouldn't be brought under an umbrella of the same rules, so it might help to find inspiration from other people’s summaries.

3. Pose a Question the Reader Will Want the Answer To

The biggest point of a summary is the “so what?” factor. You have all of these tags, but how does the fic make use of them?

A summary shouldn’t be giving all of the answers, but it should still leave crumbs for the reader’s imagination! This doesn’t mean that you literally need to put a question in the summary, but rather pose an unresolved scenario/problem that the reader will want to click to know the solution to.

Here are some example sentence templates that pose an indirect question, often put at the end of a summary to spark interest (Note, these are rushed and off the top of my head. Just meant to give a general idea, not be literary masterpieces): - "Everything changes the moment Character A makes a choice they can't take back." (What is that choice? How does it affect the other characters?) - "As the truth comes to light, nothing will ever be the same." (What is the truth? How does it change things?) - "A dangerous game begins, and only one can emerge unscathed." (Who will be that person?) - “It’s the first time they meet, but it won’t be the last” (What will be these next instances? How do their worlds collide?)

4. Some General Advice

If you don't think the above format works well with your fic, here's just some general advice that can help you out!

DON'T MAKE IT TOO LONG

The biggest mistake I see writers making when posting their work is having a giant four-paragraph summary for their story that takes up half of the feed.

Unfortunately, in an age of fast swiping and instant gratification, a reader may skip over a super long summary simply because they don’t feel like reading all of it.

(The reason why long summaries work for books is because people are more patient when they intend on paying to read something; they’ll take more time considering investments than they would with a free read, since they want to make sure it's worth their money. It’s not fair, but that’s kind of how it goes.)

In my opinion, a fic summary should be no more than one short paragraph, two or three sentences max for a one-shot and maybe five sentences for a long fic.

This isn't exact. It really depends on the length and complexity of the sentence, because no matter the how many you use, if there are enough words to make folks comprehend it as a big block of text, then they’re going to be more likely to skip it.

People looking for long fics will be more patient (since they’re making an investment with their time, rather than money) but if you want to appeal to a wider audience that may be casually browsing and stumble across your fic, definitely consider a more brief route.

PROOFREADING MATTERS!

Because summaries are often an afterthought, many writers don’t put as much effort into it as they would the rest of their story.

I wouldn’t recommend this; people are basing their ENTIRE initial opinion of your fic on this small blurb.

If you rush it and make spelling or grammar errors, people will assume that the rest of your fic is also riddled with errors and scroll past!

Make sure to proofread!

Hope this helped, and happy writing!

[jalenay]

HEY

A really good designer has a crazy amount of REALLY GOOD FONTS available for free.

The most they're asking for is a follow and it's worth it for ALL of these.

ORIGINAL POST: https://twitter.com/yuta_ptv/status/1818558025185013903

ACCOUNT: https://twitter.com/yuta_ptv

LINK TO FONTS: https://yutaone.booth.pm/items/2890872

[jalenay]

Please, if you are a self-publishing author an indie author, learn the basics of book formatting.

Please.

The standards are in place for a reason. Margins are the size they are so that your thumb can rest comfortably on the sides of the book without blocking any text, and so you can read the text along the middle without tilting the book back and forth to see around the bend. Bleeds are so your margins don't get cut down too much when the text block is trimmed, you need them even if you don't have images in your book. Spaces between paragraphs are an internet convention and do not belong in books unless you are indicating a scene break.

Please. These rules aren't there to be mean. They are there for FUNCTIONALITY.

[jalenay]

woop there it is

[jalenay]

bingo