First, write your story. Sounds easy,
doesn’t it? *snorks*
Have it divided into chapters of
however long you like. I usually shoot for 2-3,000 words. It depends, for me,
how much info I have in each chapter. Some are wordy but nothing much happens
and some just have good places to break them. I usually write the whole story
before I start posting, but it’s up to you. Others prefer 10-15k words in a
chapter, but as I post often, I can get away with shorter ones.
Make sure you have put all legal
disclaimers, ratings, warnings about content or trigger themes, etc. in your
story. Think about and write your summary before you start loading it.
1.
First you have to upload your saved document.
Open the ‘publish’ tab in ff.
Click on ‘doc manager’. It shows a
box with a lot of slots. Scroll down to see more info about the types of documents
you can load. There is a box marked ‘upload’.
Name your document and click ‘locate
file on your computer’. Find the file and select it. Press 'submit document'. Wait a few
seconds.
It will appear in one of the slots.
You can edit it here. It’s a good idea to check to make sure it uploaded
without problems. A dot in the middle of a word, for example, Mr. J.Jenks will
read as a web address and ff will delete it. Add spaces after the dot if you
want to put in a net address and it will miss it.
Save
the changes.
2.
Accept guidelines.
Open the publish tab, go to the ‘new
story’ tab. You will have to read and accept the guidelines.
The warning looks like this:
The site insists that you accept the
guidelines each time you start a new story. It will stay in force for seven
days. So, if you start another story within that time period, you will not have
to accept the guidelines again.
Please abide by the wishes of authors
who have actually requested that fanfic NOT be written for their stories. They
are listed on the same page. Click 'yes'.
3.
New story
Click ‘new story’ again. Follow the
prompts to name your new story, write a summary, pick the genre, main
characters, language etc. There are thousands of categories and crossovers if
it combines two genres. i.e. Harry potter and Twilight or whatever. You can
save your favourite categories.
Do NOT write in your summary that you
suck at summaries. If you, as the author, can’t write a decent summary, why the
hell should anyone else bother to read it? It just shows that you can’t write
and they will assume that your story will be rubbish too. I know they are
tricky to write, but you know your story better than anyone, so sell it. Don’t give away the whole story
in the summary either. Try to write it like a movie tag line.
The story example I am using in the
pics is a one shot challenge about Charlie and Sue’s history called Heroes and
Villains. My summary was this:
A writing challenge from JBNP. Did
you ever wonder how in the world Charlie suddenly ended up with Sue Clearwater? What happened in the past to make Charlie the
man he became? Did those actions influence his friends as well?
People skim through the summaries
looking for things to read so make sure it sounds interesting and not lame.
If it was a one shot don’t forget to
select the ‘complete’ button.
Load the first chapter where prompted
and you’re away.
Fanfic will send an email to all the
people who have you on their author alert list that you have loaded a new story.
4.
Loading other chapters.
Load the new chapter into the doc manager
in the usual way, check it, edit it, and save the changes.
Then go to the ‘manage stories’ tab.
You will see a page that lists all your stories and summaries. Select the one
you are adding a chapter to, click the title and the summary page opens.
Click ‘content/chapters’. You can
edit and name your chapters in here if you wish to do so.
Click ‘post new chapter’. Select the
next chapter from the drop down menu at the right hand side. It will default to
number consecutively. Don’t forget to save changes.
Again, a message will be sent out
that you have uploaded to anyone who has you on an alert.
When your story is complete, don’t
forget to change the story status to ‘complete’ and save changes.
5.
Pictures.
I haven’t dealt with the image loader
function. You can now add an image to your story after you click a box to say that you own the image or have the permission of the image owner to use it. I do not understand why
fanfic has done this. I get that images are cool and add something, but it’s
fanfic; we don’t own the worlds we are writing about. We sure as heck don’t own
the images. But in any case, the images are loaded through an image manager,
similar to the document manager.
Oddly, fanfic has chosen a 6/9 width
to height ratio, or basically the opposite to every other banner maker out
there. I assume that has something to do with the mobile site version.
Write often, write well.
