Crowdsourcing Opinions: Tag-lines and Summaries

[disgruntled_owl]

 I’m trying to get better at writing alluring taglines and summaries for my fic, and would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

• What often catches your eye when you're scrolling through options of fic to read?

• Do quotes or excerpts intrigue you, or do they tend to be a turn-off?

• What features of your own tag lines have made you particularly proud?

• Do you find the techniques that draw your attention vary by fandom?

• What plays a bigger role in your decision to click on a piece: the summary or the tags?

Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Comments

[marginaliana]

Hi, I have lots of thoughts on this... :D

I definitely go for summary first before I look at the tags. If I'm brand new to a fandom or a pairing, I'll go through in a fairly systematic way using pairing tags and kudos, but I'm almost never using other kinds of tags to pull me in, only to decide things that I don't want to read in a particular moment. So I start with most popular but I don't necessarily read every single thing as I go through.

My interest level by technique definitely varies by fandom, depending on what drew me to the fandom in the first place. Which doesn't mean that the non-matching technique is a bad one, but does require a certain amount of judging the important elements of the canon, I think. Like, if it's a fandom with a lot of humor, then I think it's better to go with something short - a line or two of dialogue, a one-sentence set up for the premise. But if you're working for a more dramatic fandom, then you can get away with having the summary be longer.

I really like a quote or excerpt as a summary when it's funny or when it gives you a particularly revealing emotional moment... but then sometimes it reveals too much. So when I'm choosing one myself, I always take care to pick something relatively early on in the story. Something that sets the mood for the story rather than being the punch at the end.

Things that pretty much never work for me: a bit of poetry all by itself (although it can work if you pair it with something more specific to the story). An excerpt that's too long or that has a lot of author's note-style things in it ("I was high and eating cheetos at three am when I wrote this, lol!"), which I'm pretty sure you already don't do!

My one moment of using warning notes that made me especially proud: I wrote a very weird religious fic and the warnings I gave were "May be offensive to the religious. May be offensive to the non-religious. May be offensive." Apparently that drew in some people who wouldn't have otherwise read it! But I guess that shows that humor can be a good draw, even when the fic itself isn't that funny.