Fuck this tumblr shit.

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

gosh I enjoy this website

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

so here's the thing, I thought that what this person was asking me was why aren't my popslash stories online?

and I was so profoundly excited to come here and explain all about how I didn't respond for a few months because I was working on my ego death (accelerated by looking in the mirror and reminding myself, "you write hockey rpf.") and so here I was, ready to just Get Over Myself already, the stories are uploaded, and I was SO enlightened and had found love in my heart for all my past selves even though they were very embarrassing, maybe even because they were embarrassing, and then when I re-read this ask it actually wasn't about that at all (more ego death, since no one was really asking to see those stories at all, but I rose above it) and now I'm here because the ask was actually:

hey, look, if you have a moment, what happens in this unfinished untitled turn-of-the-century popslash AU that is based in its entirety on this picture?

and then I responded but tumblr disappeared my post and the ask but I have now come too far and must continue.

Okay, so of course, The Revolution happens and they overthrow the unjust dictatorship they've spent their lives fighting against and install a fair and democratic government and usher in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity.

my world's on fire, how 'bout yours?

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.

--

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.

--

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)

--

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.

--

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?

--

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!"

--

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?

--

But Osterby, what if someone wants to subscribe to my kinktober fills but not my other work?

Put it in a series.

--

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.

--

How will people know what order to read my loosely connected oneshots in?

That's what a series is for.

--

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.

--

How will someone subscribe to my kinktober fills if they're not all in the same work?

--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

--

The Vessel switches off their location-transmission devices, thereby making themselves a HAZARD TO MARITIME NAVIGATION, in order to ENGAGE IN ILLEGAL ACTS.

The Vessel is FRAUDULENTLY DISPLAYING a national flag that is NOT OF THEIR REGISTERED PORT OF ORIGIN.

The Vessel is otherwise engaged in ACTS THAT VIOLATE SOLEMN MARITIME LAW, and may face fines and prosecution in admiralty court for their offense in their port of origin or nation in which the offense was registered.

And I have a TERRIBLE feeling that since it includes queer stuff and a poly romance, it won't be palatable to mainstream publishers, though I am poking around for indie houses that might be open to that. I am absolutely unwilling to cut either the queer or poly stuff, I'm not doing a love triangle.

Amazon

Draft2Digital

Unfortunately, if what you want is to maximize both sale volume and revenue -- which is a very normal goal, I'm not taking a swipe at that or anything -- Amazon is probably the way to go. I write for fun and have a large readership already so I didn't necessarily need Amazon, and when I was on Amazon it forced me to price my books higher than I was comfortable with, which is why I backed out.

As an alternative to Draft2Digital, I use Lulu.com. The mechanism -- how you upload your book and what information you include -- is functionally the same, but Lulu doesn't charge a setup fee, allows you to edit your text multiple times without fees, and is slightly less expensive per-page. So if you don't want to deal directly with Amazon, Lulu is superior to Draft2Digital in my opinion.

Lulu will allow you to sell through other platforms such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc, but it's opt-in, it won't do it automatically, and if you do that it makes you price the books so that those platforms aren't taking a "loss" by their standards. So a book I publish on Lulu might cost $10 to print (that's Lulu's cut) and I can sell it for whatever I like above that on Lulu -- say I sell it for $20, I get $10 per book. But the same book would "cost" Amazon $21 since Amazon takes a much larger cut, and Lulu's retail price dictates Amazon's. So in order for Amazon to sell my book, I have to price the book above $21. If I price it at $22 and someone buys it from Lulu, I get $12, whereas if someone buys it on Amazon, I get $1. Lulu will never be more expensive than Amazon but Lulu will always take Amazon's cost into account if you hook them up together. (I just pulled numbers out of the air for that example, but for a real-life one, when I took one of my recent 6x9, 90K-word paperbacks off Amazon, I was able to drop the price from something like $18 to $12.)

Selling directly through Lulu without involving Amazon is thus absolutely the most profitable way to go except that you don't get Amazon's reach or universality. Buying from Lulu, people have to know it exists, navigate the site, and trust that it's legitimate. Buying from Amazon, someone might just...find your book, and people will go to Amazon just to browse, which they will not do on Lulu, especially since as a self-publishing site, Lulu is full of garbage bad books. So if you're publishing outside of Amazon you will have to do a lot more publicity and you will never have the same sales volume.

I will also say that when Lulu published my work to Amazon, something got truly fucked up -- I'm not sure who did it, but either Lulu or Amazon assigned someone else's book to my author name and fixing it was really hard because I wasn't the one who set it up, Lulu was. I couldn't just go in and remove the book, I had to talk to Amazon and then Lulu and then have Amazon and Lulu talk to each other. I think my author page on Amazon might still list a book by Kathleen Starbuck as one of mine. There's also some weird shit around adult content -- I believe to sell on Amazon through Lulu, you have to jump through some hoops if there's adult content by Amazon's standards, which I know includes erotica but may also extend to queer/poly non-erotic content.

So yeah, I think depending on your goals, Lulu is worth exploring, but if you want to make life easy on yourself probably the best thing to do is just hold your nose and go with Amazon. However, if you're interested in Lulu I'm happy to answer questions.