The AH Tip/How To thread

[NoTalentHack]

Category: Loving Wives

Simple tip: Hoo doggies.

If you're looking for high scores, this isn't your place. If you're looking for lots of comments and possibly followers, it can be.

The category is meant for stories where a spouse, usually a wife, has sex with someone not their spouse. There are stories that do not include this dynamic there, but it's not the "right" place for most of those. However, the flipside of this is that, due to a shift in the readership over time, stories of happy swinging/sharing/swapping and especially cheating are not as well-received there as stories where the infidelitous spouse is caught and drama ensues.

I wrote a whole essay on how to approach the category and why you may or may not want to, but the TL;DR is that there are a bunch of competing camps of readers there, several of which who hate the types of stories the others love. You'll get a ton of criticism, both fair and unfair (along with a bit of unhinged), but a fair bit of it will be on the technical aspects of your writing, which is golden when you're just starting out.

They like mid-length stories there; if it's longer than 10K words or so, break it into chunks. Character development, plotting, and the other basics of storytelling are paramount there, much more than erotic writing. Even stories with no sex can do pretty well if they obey those rules.

 

[Britva415]

Category: EC

Unless views, favorites and comments are strokes you need in order to feel like you're a valid Lit author or got some kind of objective achievement, don't feel like you have to contrive something you didn't really want to write in the first place in order to have an excuse/reason to "escape" Erotic Couplings.

It's OK to want exposure, it's also OK to not care one way or the other and to remain true to your vanilla inspiration.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I agree. If your story flops in EC, don't blame the category.

It's just a reality of the phenomenon. Just as your latest sci-fi has twice as many hits as your latest EC despite the fact that it's only two weeks older. If category didn't matter, those numbers should be much closer. And your group sex story from last July has far more action than you EC story from three months before it.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Unless views, favorites and comments are strokes you need in order to feel like you're a valid Lit author or got some kind of objective achievement, don't feel like you have to contrive something you didn't really want to write in the first place in order to have an excuse/reason to "escape" Erotic Couplings.

I'm only talking about exposure, to reach more people. It has nothing to do with scores nor faves.

 

[Britva415]

use bold font for the title like I did, to make such posts easily distinguishable

Excellent idea! I'd love tosee this become a norm for this sort of thread.

On my computer, the "bold" style is 100% completely indistinguishable from un-bolded text, but I guess I'll apply it anyway for the benefit of those who can see it.

 

[Britva415]

I'm only talking about exposure, to reach more people. It has nothing to do with scores nor faves.

Way to make it about you.

 

[NoTalentHack]

I'm only talking about exposure, to reach more people. It has nothing to do with scores nor faves.

I haven't found this to be true at all. I have exactly one story in Erotic Couplings, Our Wild Hunt, but it has more views than a good chunk of my other non-Loving Wives stories, even if I only compare it with other stories that were part of a contest/event. It beats both stories I have in BDSM, both stories I have in SF/F, one of my two Essays, all my Romance stories, and my sole entries in E/V, Anal, Mind Control, Non-Erotic, and Humor. It's narrowly edged out by the remaining few outside of LW, but in most cases that's because the stories are older than my EC story or are in very popular (view-wise) categories like I/T, NC/R, and Group. Hell, it even beat out a couple of my LW stories, even though they're older than Our Wild Hunt.

EC stories can do just fine, especially if they're tagged well and well-written. Regardless of the volume of stories in that category, there's no reason for a writer to avoid it. The model that you propose, that because a lot of stories go through the category there's no visibility, simply doesn't hold up. We know from comments made by laurel in the past that the main place readers click on stories from is the "New Erotic Stories" page, not the category-specific ones.

If we're supposed to be giving tips, we should be giving them based on evidence, not assumptions, no matter how well-founded we think they may be.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Point taken, but I still don't think that 12k views, 282 votes, 27 favorites and 18 comments is doing all that badly for a 16 day old story. Especially since it was off the new list in about twelve minutes. It still gets a hundred views a day. I think EC is a very viable category. And lets face it, sometimes you just don't a have a square hole for the square peg. EC is the hole that fits all pegs.

It's just a reality of the phenomenon. Just as your latest sci-fi has twice as many hits as your latest EC despite the fact that it's only two weeks older. If category didn't matter, those numbers should be much closer. And your group sex story from last July has far more action than you EC story from three months before it.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Point taken, but I still don't think that 12k views, 282 votes, 27 favorites and 18 comments is doing all that badly for a 16 day old story. Especially since it was off the new list in about twelve minutes. It still gets a hundred views a day. I think EC is a very viable category. And lets face it, sometimes you just don't a have a square hole for the square peg. EC is the hole that fits all pegs.

But I'm talking about exposure, not scores. The stats are irrelevant.

 

[Voboy]

We're so good at bickering here.

Too bad; the thread was going well, I thought. Why not agree that "different writers have different experiences in EC" and just... let it go?

 

[lovecraft68]

We're so good at bickering here.

Too bad; the thread was going well, I thought. Why not agree that "different writers have a different experience in EC" and just... let it go?

Hey, I gave it a shot.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I don't have an opinion either way on the EC question, but I don't think it's helpful to new readers to have a resources thread get taken over by that debate. I'd suggest that those who wish to debate that issue (or others raised here) split that off into a separate thread.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Back to the tips:

Dialogue doesn't have to be hard, and it can greatly enhance your story. If you find that you're having trouble, either with writing dialogue that's too stilted and speechifying or just having trouble writing it at all, try this:

Have a conversation with yourself, as if you were the two characters. Close the door if you feel silly about it, and use a recording device if you can’t type fast enough. Don’t try to “craft” the dialogue, just write it the way two people would talk. Use simple words, break grammar rules, etc., all the stuff they tell you not to in school. You can edit it for clarity or over-repetition later, but just get it down.

Infodumping is usually not good.

"Mary had 38C tits, weighted 110 pounds, stood 5'4", and had dark hair" is infodumping. It's not a thing you should never do (very few things are), but it's a big turn-off for some readers, and more subtle methods of description won't generally bother the ones that are okay with infodumping.

Long stretches of undemarcated dialogue can get confusing and/or boring.

"Stage direction," internal thoughts, and various other techniques can break up long swathes of dialogue, making the text more readable. Even better, they can help you define the characters outside their physical characteristics and let you "show, not tell."

Example:

"Hi."

"Hello."

"Is this seat taken?"

"No."

"Do you mind if I sit with you, then?"

"Why?"

"Because I'd like to get to know you."

"Sure. Go ahead."

---

This is fine, but it's not very evocative. If this sort of thing went on for long, especially if the writer started to include longer paragraphs and multi-paragraph stretches of dialogue said by a single character, it could rapidly become overwhelming and/or confusing. A possible rework might be:

"Hi."

The dark-haired young man's voice interrupted Heather's reverie. At her age, she found it rare that someone as fresh-faced as this would want anything from her besides perhaps a signature on a petition.

"Hello," she replied cautiously. He broke into a broad grin when she spoke, and he didn't have a clipboard. She found the former rather charming, while the latter made her suspicious of his intentions.

"Is this seat taken?"

Oh. Of course. "No."

"Do you mind if I sit with you, then?" The man--scarcely more than a boy, really--placed a hand on the chair as if certain she'd answer 'yes.'

Instead, the mother of two asked, "Why?"

His grin turned to a perplexed expression, and the words came out almost like a question. "Because I'd like to get to know you?"

The boy's confusion forced a small smile onto Heather's lips. Was he hitting on her? His gaze swept down to her cleavage for an instant, then he nervously reestablished eye contact. 'Oh my God,' she thought. 'He is!'

"Sure," she replied, oddly taken by his audacity. "Go ahead."

---

For those who might be thinking, "Wow, this is crap," don't @ me. I wrote it as I typed this thing up.

Regardless of the quality of this example, it does give the dialogue a bit more life. It establishes, at least a little, what one of the characters looks like, the disposition of both, a name, and some details that you can either lean into or subvert as the story goes along. Yes, it requires more work, but that work can pay big dividends as you continue the story, turning the characters into people a bit at a time.

Write for yourself, but publish for your readers.

I beat the drum on this one a lot. Write the story that you like, and write it the way you want it. If you plan to never publish, do whatever the hell you want with it. However, if you do plan to publish, take the time to polish it up. Have beta readers take a look at it if you can; the things that are self-evident to you might not be quite so for a reader who hasn't lived with the characters in their heads for weeks or months.

Put it in the right category, even if you don't like that it belongs there. Yes, your fetish story belongs in Fetish, even if you don't like that people think of it as a Fetish. No, your story about a happily married couple doesn't belong in Loving Wives, no matter what the category's called. If you're in doubt, ask. It's a question that comes up a lot, but especially for a new writer, we're happy to help.

Tag it. Tag it, tag it, tag it. Look at the tags that are popular in the category you plan to publish in and use a few of those. Then, find tags that are descriptive of your story and relatively but not extremely common. People use the tag system specifically to find stories that cater to their kinks, and you want people to find your story, right? You get ten tags for each story. Use all of them.

Conversely,

Fuck 'em if they don't like it

You can't please everyone, especially in the categories with third rail topics. Please yourself and please the readers that are picking up what you're putting down. That's not to say that you should ignore any criticism you receive; sometimes it's valid. But occasionally, you'll get a reader that... Woof. They have opinions that they treat as facts, and they want you to hear them, regardless of how irrelevant they are.

Sometimes, they're like the guy that occasionally shows up in a lot of our comments section who has a pathological hatred for shaved pussies. Like, dude hates them, especially on older women. He's easy to laugh at, though, and we do. However, there are more subtle ones, too.

As an example, I had a commenter who got so mad at the fact that, in a First Time story I wrote, the female main character (FMC) didn't spend a bunch of time marveling at the MMC's junk, and that I didn't include loving descriptions of her spending time playing with it before going down on him. That's arguably fair criticism, but at the same time, it wasn't what I wanted to write in my story. I'm sorry he didn't like that, but... Well, see the title above.

We all get commenters like that, and negative commenters tend to stick in our memories more. Don't let that ruin your fun or make you deviate from what you want to write.

 

[SimonDoom]

Write for yourself, but publish for your readers.

I beat the drum on this one a lot. Write the story that you like,and write it the way you want it. If you plan to never publish, do whatever the hell you want with it. However, if you do plan to publish, take the time to polish it up. Have beta readers take a look at it if you can; the things that are self-evident to you might not be quite so for a reader who hasn't lived with the characters in their heads for weeks or months.

Put it in the right category, even if you don't like that it belongs there. Yes, your fetish story belongs in Fetish, even if you don't like that people think of it as a Fetish. No, your story about a happily married couple doesn't belong in Loving Wives, no matter what the category's called. If you're in doubt, ask. It's a question that comes up a lot, but especially for a new writer, we're happy to help.

Tag it. Tag it, tag it, tag it. Look at the tags that are popular in the category you plan to publish in and use a few of those. Then, find tags that are descriptive of your story and relatively but not extremely common. People use the tag system specifically to find stories that cater to their kinks, and you want people to find your story, right? You get ten tags for each story. Use all of them.

Conversely,

Fuck 'em if they don't like it

You can't please everyone, especially in the categories with third rail topics. Please yourself and please the readers that are picking up what you're putting down. That's not to say that you should ignore any criticism you receive; sometimes it's valid. But occasionally, you'll get a reader that... Woof. They have opinions that they treat as facts, and they want you to hear them, regardless of how irrelevant they are.

I like the way you put this. I've never liked the simplistic either/or dichotomy "write for yourself or write for others." It's more complicated than that. I think one should stick to one's artistic guns, whatever they are, but one should always be mindful that publishing a story is an act of communication with other people, and if you're going to go to the trouble of doing it you should care about how well you are communicating.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I like the way you put this. I've never liked the simplistic either/or dichotomy "write for yourself or write for others." It's more complicated than that. I think one should stick to one's artistic guns, whatever they are, but one should always be mindful that publishing a story is an act of communication with other people, and if you're going to go to the trouble of doing it you should care about how well you are communicating.

I agree. The writer is creating a reading experience after all. Essentially that is the end goal. All else is simply a means to that end. It's a tricky zen thing a grey area between simply pandering to the audience and compromising your authenticity, and writing the story that you feel needs to be told, yet still caring for how the reader experiences it once it is done. Difficult to explain but once you've been there, you know what it means.

 

[SimonDoom]

I agree. The writer is creating a reading experience after all. Essentially that is the end goal. All else is simply a means to that end. It's a tricky zen thing a grey area between simply pandering to the audience and compromising your authenticity, and writing the story that you feel needs to be told, yet still caring for how the reader experiences it once it is done. Difficult to explain but once you've been there, you know what it means.

Yes. I think one can care about what one's readers think without becoming a slave to their needs.

That segues to another piece of advice I have: try to avoid the natural human impulse to focus on negative feedback more than positive feedback. It's human if when we get 9 good comments and one bad one we obsess about the bad one. Don't do that. Train yourself not to do that. Focus on the positive and use feedback as a way to keep improving your craft. The chances are that the one bad comment has nothing useful to offer you, so try to ignore it, or at the least put it in perspective.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Finish your whole story completely, including all editing before you submit any of it.

If you do this, you give yourself every opportunity to make your story as good as it can be.

If you publish chapters as you go, you have only one chance to make your story as good as it can be, and that is to write it perfectly as you go. Patience pays off.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Edit your edits.

First, know the difference between editing and proofing. A lot of new writers think that editing is spelling and grammar checks. It's not. Spelling and grammar and such is generally considered proofing (yes I know there is more to proofing than that in a professional sense, but for lit purposes ...). Editing is actual changes to your story. Editing involves rewording things that sound monotonous, or alternating names and pronouns for names, adding more description where things feel thin, removing excessive description where the pace seems to bog down, making sure that what you feel needs to get across is actually getting across, fixing loose plot ends, making sure that dialogue is natural and easy to follow, vertically integrating ideas introduced later in the process, and a myriad of other things that we could all spend weeks listing.

So after you read through and edit (and hopefully you have the luxury of a beta reader who gives you good feedback to influence your edits - get a beta reader, another fabulous tip), read back your edits and edit them. Then finally do your proofing.

I can say from experience that 98% of all the errors in my work after I hit publish happen in my late edits. I do not edit my edits well (or I forget to, the urge to finally hit publish can be very strong!) nor do I proof my final edits well. I often quick scan them. This is bad bad practice.

So avoid my mistakes and edit your edits, edit and proof all of your final edits, do it thoroughly.

 

[AG31]

Finish your whole story completely, including all editing before you submit any of it.

If you do this, you give yourself every opportunity to make your story as good as it can be.

If you publish chapters as you go, you have only one chance to make your story as good as it can be, and that is to write it perfectly as you go. Patience pays off.

Can you edit to Bold your first sentence?

 

[Boobytrap73]

If you cut and paste, proof read it. Again.

I write in MS Word and then cut and paste it into the Lit site. In the process, I've messed things us (don't ask me how--if I knew, I wouldn't do them). I discovered the hard way that it's worth doing one more read over of the whole things AFTER I've pasted it to make sure it's what I meant it to be.

~BT73

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Category: Fetish

This is a somewhat complex category. I say that because here, you will find not only a variety of exotic, strange, interesting fetishes, but also a good chunk of stories that, at first glance, probably belong in a different category. In short, if there is a catch-all category on Lit, this is certainly it.

First, a small guide for these aforementioned stories. There are many fetishes that can overlap with certain other categories such as BDSM, Loving Wives, Lesbian sex, Trans, etc. Since Fetish category is generally welcoming towards all kinks, many authors, in the hope of a better reception than they would receive in the category where the story actually belongs, decide to put their stories here. That is especially true for stories that belong in generally unwelcoming categories such as LW. Such stories usually contain a fetish or two but it's rarely the case that those fetishes are the dominant theme of the story.
It's not always easy to recognize such stories at first glance, but if the author tagged the story properly, then it gets much easier. Tagging is the key to this category and I will expand on it in the next paragraph.

Now, the true fetish stories. There are so many different kinks and fetishes. So many. Many readers like only specific fetishes, while they sometimes strongly dislike some other fetishes that may or may not be related, so if they aren't properly warned about the presence of certain fetishes, they might react badly by leaving a negative comment or by awarding 1* to the story that probably deserved better. So tag your story properly! Especially if your story contains some fetishes that are unlikely to be received well by a majority of readers, such as scat, vore, cuckolding... For such fetishes, it's often advisable to put a warning in the foreword just in case.

Generally speaking, this category is more relaxed than some others, and stories rarely get punished for containing extreme kinks and fetishes. One common trait of the stories in this category is that they are often focused on the kink itself and the sexual content rather than having some elaborate plot and character development. There are definitely stories with good plot, but those are a minority. So if you want to focus on a specific kink or fetish, this is the place to be.
Just don't forget to tag.

 

[WrongFrog]

Not so much a category question as a quantity question. How many things do you think it's okay to submit at once? I might have a bit of a backlog, and be posting multiple chapters to multiple things at once...

 

[Thanatos_X13]

A couple tips I have from my own efforts to get published, and issues I've seen as a reader.

• If you have an 18yo character, especially if they are still in high school, clearly state they are 18 and/or add a disclaimer at the top of your story.
• If you have any kind of fetish or unusual content, add a disclaimer or warning up top. For instance, I enjoy a writer whose works all feature female orgasm denial. An early story of theirs did not mention this and got a lot of negative responses. Their more recent works include a disclaimer and are all pretty highly rated. Don't expect readers to look at tags before reading b/c they're all the way at the bottom (or the last page).

 

[TheLobster]

Don't expect readers to look at tags before reading b/c they're all the way at the bottom (or the last page).

They are actually on the first page, too, but you have to click on an icon that looks like price label to see it (next to 'i', on the sidebar).

Yes, that's Literotica UI for you. I only learned about this recently, too.

 

[lovecraft68]

Not so much a category question as a quantity question. How many things do you think it's okay to submit at once? I might have a bit of a backlog, and be posting multiple chapters to multiple things at once...

Tip regarding posting a chaptered story

Do not submit more than one chapter at once. Let's say for example you submit chapters 1-3 at the same time. Chapter one goes live, two gets rejected for some reason and while you're trying to get it re-submitted three goes live and readers are confused, and at that point may not come back to the series.

Also, there is a current glitch going on where stories get stuck in pending for days on end and Laurel does not see them, and they have to be submitted again or a message sent to her. Like the first case, one could go through, two gets stuck...etc

One chapter at a time is what you want to do, and never submit the next one until the previously submitted one goes live