With October and all its fanfic prompt lists just around the corner, I, as a fan of oneshots, want to beg anyone posting to AO3 to please post your works individually and not cram the whole month into one big multichapter work.
Anthologies of short fics on AO3 cause huge obnoxious hurdles for anyone wanting to find or avoid works like yours, and also muck up the numbers for anyone doing a stats dive.
Anything real that someone might try to accomplish with an anthology can be better accomplished with a series or with tags.
Teal deer: I want to read your promptober fics. Post them as fics and not as fake chapters so I can find them and read them.
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Here's the nitty gritty.
Anthologized works cannot be filtered for word or chapter counts:
I like to read fic under 5k, so I do this:
Someone else likes longfic, so they do this:
Only people who do NOT want to see oneshots will see your oneshots.
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All tags on anthologies cannot be trusted and must be assumed to be inaccurate:
This is true of literally every tag on an anthology, including fandoms, ships, categories (m/m, f/f, etc.), and archive warnings. I want to read Cleric Beast/Hunter vivisection fic. Someone else wants to read Cleric Beast/Hunter fic and is squicked out by vivisection. Your anthology features a Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop date fic and a Sam/Dean vivisection fic, and therefore carries both tags. I find a coffee shop fic I don't care to read, and the other person never finds the Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop date fic of their dreams because they're filtering out vivisection. Mad lib that example with literally any combination of tags and it's the same. Only people who do not want to read the anthologized fics will find them. (PS the tag for Cleric Beast/Hunter doesn't exist, I should get on that)
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Anthologies throw false positives for crossovers:
According to AO3's search filter, a crossover is any work which carries tags for more than one distinct fandom. In our example above, Bloodborne and SPN fics were anthologized together. Neither fic is a crossover, but the anthology will be removed from searches that exclude crossovers, and will spam the search results of anyone looking specifically for Bloodborne or SPN crossovers.
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The ratings on anthologies cannot be trusted:
An anthology must be labeled for the highest rated fic it contains. If you anthologize porn without plot or ultra graphic vivisection in the same work as as tooth rotting fluff, the whole thing will have to be labelled as explicit (or unrated). People looking for explicit work will find the the G rated fluff, people looking for G rated fluff will filter it out because it's erroneously labeled as explicit. Only the people who do not want to read the work will find it. Are we noticing the pattern here?
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To break the pattern a bit:
Individually posted short works belong on the archive.
Archive of Our Own is aptly named, it's an archive. It is designed to house fanworks, all fanworks, no matter how small, and the search function is designed to make those fanworks easy to find and sort. You are not "spamming" by archiving any quantity of correctly labeled archive materials. If someone clicks on a tag and sees a front page full of your works and decides they hate you, they can just filter out your username or change the sort criteria. But chances are they'll go "sweet, twenty new works for the thing I searched for!"
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Anthologies muck up the statistics.
I do a fair bit of searching AO3 to grab numbers rather than to find fics to read. For these numbers to have any meaning, we have to assume that the fics that show up in the searches are correctly labeled.
If I run two searches like this, I can say that these characters have about the same amount of fic. But anecdotally, Elden Ring oneshots are anthologized more often than Silmarillion oneshots. Perhaps there are actually more Ranni fics on AO3 than Turin fics, and they're lumped together and hidden from the site stats while more of the Turin fics are being counted individually.
If I wanted to dig deeper and crunch some numbers, the problem would intensify. What if I wanted to scrape all the metadata and say there were so many millions of words of Ranni fic? If I wanted that to be accurate, I'd have to manually go through nearly one thousand works to exclude the "chapters" (that is, entire fics) that aren't fics with Ranni in them and have been falsely included in the Ranni tag.
And all this assumes that an anthology tagged "Ranni the Witch (Elden Ring)" even has Ranni in it at all. Overtagging is always an issue, but anthologies are often tagged for future fics the author intends to write and include later; not even trace-of-nuts tagging, but literally tagging a fic that does not exist. (I see this with highly specific kink tags on kinktober fill anthologies often enough that it's a personal pet peeve in addition to a data accuracy pet peeve).
From another angle, is the sidebar for the Elden Ring tag that reports 2200 slash fics to 760 femslash fics accurate? Is it safe to assume that slash is anthologized at the same rate as femslash in the Elden Ring fandom? I've seen anthologies with "chapter" counts in the hundreds, how different would the sidebar look if all those fics were accurately labeled?
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But Osterby, what if someone wants to subscribe to my kinktober fills but not my other work?
Put it in a series.
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What if someone doesn't want to see my coffee shop AU fic while scrolling through my profile which is primarily vivisection kink fic?
Thanks for thinking of me! I'll filter out the coffee shop AU tag, or I'll scroll through your vivisection kink series.
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How will people know what order to read my loosely connected oneshots in?
That's what a series is for.
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How will someone find all my works with the same OC/setting/kink/trope/fandom?
Series. Or tags. You can give your own OCs and AU settings their own custom tags.
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How will someone subscribe to my kinktober fills if they're not all in the same work?
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What if someone doesn't want to filter and still hates my works?
Skill issue. On their part. Don't prioritize haters over both your intended audience and over people who want to filter out 99% of your work and still want to read that one Cleric Beast/Hunter coffee shop fic. And also you should block haters, not try grovel to them.
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What if I want to bury a fic between other stuff and make it harder to find?
Try minimal tagging, nonspecific tags, empty or uninformative summary, and archive locking.
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If you've stuck with me this long, I've probably convinced you to at least look into the series function.
To create a new series, just make up the name for it while posting (or editing) a fic. It's a ticky box under "associations", right above the "this work has multiple chapters" ticky.
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And if you need more convincing, a series will allow your readers to leave kudos on each of your fics. Wouldn't it be nice to get 31 kudos from me instead of just one? Pretty please let me kudos each of your shorts as I read through your entire bibliography in one go.
