Drabbles and posting to AO3: how should we do it?

[snowgall]

slythindor100's Last Drabble Writer Standing competition is nearly over, and all this voting on drabbles has made me think Deep Thoughts (TM) about the ideal way to post such things to AO3 (because I think it's great when authors post their works to AO3, and I hope all the LDWS authors will do so after the competition ends!)

There seem to be three schools of thought when it comes to posting LDWS drabbles to AO3, and each has their merits and drawbacks:

1. All drabbles together in one chapter of one story

Examples:
unbroken_halo's 2013 drabbles
shadowofrazia's 2014 drabbles

pros:
--simplest format for short fics
--doesn't clutter up add as many fics to an author's list of works on AO3

cons:
--all the drabbles have the same URL (harder for linking/reccing)
--someone searching for your work by title at AO3 may not find it. "LDWS drabbles" is not a very memorable title
--readers can only leave kudos once and comments in one place
--ratings and tags can only be added to the work as a whole, and what works for for one drabble will not necessarily be applicable to all, and may be unnecessarily confusing (thanks to torino10154 for pointing this out)

2. All the drabbles in one story, but with each drabble in a separate chapter

Examples:
megyal's 2010 drabbles
leela_cat's 2011 drabbles

pros:
--each drabble has a unique URL for reccing etc.
--doesn't clutter up add as many fics to an author's list of works on AO3
--readers can leave comments on each chapter separately

cons:
--someone searching for your work by title at AO3 may not find it. "LDWS drabbles" is not a very memorable title
--you can only leave kudos on the whole story, not each drabble
--ratings and tags can only be added to the work as a whole, and what works for for one drabble will not necessarily be applicable to all, and may be unnecessarily confusing (thanks to torino10154 for pointing this out)

3. Each drabble in a separate story, but connected in a series

Examples:
uniquepov's 2011 drabbles
teprometo's 2011 drabbles
lamerezouille's 2012 drabbles
kedavranox's 2013 drabbles
icmezzo's 2014 drabbles

pros:
--each drabble has a unique URL for reccing etc.
--each drabble can be titled in a memorable way for easy searching/finding
--each drabble can get its own rating and applicable tags
--readers can leave separate kudos on each drabble

cons:
--a lot of story entries which will clutter up add more fics to an author's list of works

This is the sort of thing I spend way too much time thinking about!

Clearly the third option is the most popular one, and there are good reasons why that would be. However, I can see a strong argument for using the second format instead, as it will lead to far less clutter a more compact listing of fics in your list of works, especially considering that you might not consider drabbles to be of equal importance to novel-length fics.

But of course, it's up to each author to do what they think best. I'm curious if anyone else cares about these things, and what your preferred method would be!

(thanks to capitu for brainstorming some of the pros and cons with me!)

Comments

[snowgall]

There are lots of things that tags can help you do at AO3, but only when the authors remember to *use* the tags, and even then some of the limitations that AO3 has can cause problems.

I'm thinking in particular of the issue of side pairings. Some authors tag, say, "Ron/Hermione" as a pairing in a Drarry story because they're paired up in the background of the story. And if AO3 handled this correctly, I'd be all for it, because I'm usually in the camp that says "more tags are better; tag as much as possible". However, AO3 (at this time) makes no sorting distinction between main and side pairings. So if I am searching for Romione fics, I'd get a whole bunch of non-Romione stories popping up as well, because of being tagged as a side pairing. So even though the filters are there, they are not always as usable as they should be!

Of course, this isn't really relevant to the question of drabbles anymore, but it's the sort of thing I think about :)

And I wanted to add again that I wasn't trying to be insulting. I'm really sorry about that. Maybe this will explain my motivation better: eidheann_writes said in a comment above that she might have done things differently for one of her sets of stories if she had thought about some of these issues earlier. So that was sort of the point of this - to help people think about what *they* want to do by laying out the pros and cons as I understood them. I am not trying to tell authors what to do, just give them some things to consider so they can make informed decisions for themselves. Especially if they're new to AO3.

[sdkshelly.livejournal.com]

Oh well yes, I think one of AO3's greatest strengths--that it's set up for maximum flexibility for the author in regards to how they tag their works, etc.--is also one of its biggest weaknesses on the reader side of things. But my main point in pointing to the filtering/sorting system was to explain my point of view. How it's still fairly easy to find what you want word count-wise and that drabbles as individual works don't make it harder to search through ones masterlist for longer works.

ETA: OH and I meant to say, I don't think you're trying to tell authors what to do; I did not get that impression. And I do understand you weren't trying to be insulting and I appreciate that. I'm just adding my voice to the conversation. :)

[snowgall]

I like having your voice in the conversation - you make good points.

And I edited the post a bit to tone down the "clutter up" language. I didn't remove it entirely because that would have been dishonest of me and make your comments seem irrelevant, but I did strikethrough and change the wording a bit to be more neutral. See if that's any better.

[sdkshelly.livejournal.com]

I really appreciate that! Thank you!