#because... gestures at response

Hi there! First off, thank you so much for this wonderful and lovely message!! It was very nice to wake up to this morning! I haven’t written anything in a long, long time (almost a year, yikes) and it’s very nice to know that people are still out there appreciating the content I’ve posted!

That being said, I’m going to take this opportunity to soapbox a bit, and I genuinely hope you don’t think this is directed specifically at you, because it’s not just you, it’s a lot of people on this site lately.

The best way to give a content creator more recognition is to reblog their works.

Posts like this have been making the rounds on tumblr for literal years, and it still baffles me that people will go onto a content creator’s blog, not reblog any of their posts, and then say that creator deserves more recognition. You are actively denying us more recognition when you refuse to reblog our works. This is true for all content creators - artists, gif makers, cosplayers - but it is especially true for authors, for one simple reason.

If you ‘like’ a fanfic without reblogging it, we literally don’t even know whether or not you actually read the fic.

Giving likes on tumblr is not the same as giving kudos on ao3. To give kudos, you have to view the fic, and get all the way to the bottom to get to the button. If you give kudos on a fic, the author knows you actually read it. When other readers see a fic with 200 kudos, they know that means 200 other people have already read this fic and liked it. 

But liking a post on tumblr does not mean you read it. You can like a post without clicking the read more link, without even scrolling to the bottom of the post if you’re on mobile and have the double-tap to like feature enabled. A whole lot of people like fics to bookmark them for later - I know, I’m one of them. “Oh, that sounds good! I don’t have time/energy to read it right now, but I don’t want to lose it.” So you like the post, and it’s easy to find when you have time. But once I’ve read a fic, I reblog it so that 1) the author knows I’ve read it, and 2) my followers see that I read it and liked it enough to share it. This is how you get creators more recognition!

Very, very frequently, people will come to this page and like all, or a handful, of my fics, and then never interact with those posts or me again. Did any of those people read any of those fics? Did they read some of them, but not others? Did they all get lost in those peoples’ likes, never to actually be read? I have no idea. You could like a post and go back and reread it from your likes 100 times, or you could like the post and then it gets buried and you never actually read it, and the author will never know the difference. That’s why I mentioned - if you see a fic with 200 kudos on ao3, you know 200 people have read and liked that fic. But if you see a fic with 200 notes on tumblr, and only 30 of those notes are reblogs, you only know for sure that 30 people have read that fic. And honestly, probably less, since authors tend to reblog our own works multiple times.

Sometimes, people will reply to fic posts, or send messages (like you have) and those are very, very nice notifications to get! It’s validation, and it lets me know that you personally have actually read the fics you’ve liked. But even more often than people liking all of my fics without reblogging them, I mostly get people who follow this blog without ever interacting with a single one of my posts. 

My fic with the highest note count here on tumblr has 219 notes. 165 likes. 52 reblogs.

Second place has 170. 132 likes. 37 reblogs.

The next one after that has 84. 64 likes and 20 reblogs. It just keeps going down exponentially from there. I think I only have 3 or 4 other fics with more than 20 notes.

And the sad thing is, I do have recognition. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve joined mm discord groups and people have been starstruck to talk to me, like I’m some kind of celebrity. I’m blown away by it every single time, because so few people interact with my fics that I never expect so many people to have read them.

So, just to be clear: YES, comment on fics! YES, send messages to authors you love! YES, like the posts!