Story tagging
- Thread starter SciFurz
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That's not very practical or useful if the outcome is wrong. I'll have to put in a note at the next submission.
KeithD
Virgin
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Pissing in the wind isn't very practical, either. But, that said, Laurel isn't claiming a privilege that nearly all publishers in the mainstream don't claim as well. If you look at their contracts, you'll see that they retain the rights of cover, design, and marketing. And if the author doesn't like it, they either better have a whole lot of leverage with the publisher--usually based on previous profitability for the publisher--or they are free to find another publisher.
I just had my Halloween contest entry deep sixed by her decision to change the category and the tagging, so I sympathize. But you generally get better than what you pay for here.
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ElectricBlue
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I'm not sure that will make much difference. She is doing it more often, judging by the number of recent questions on this. I suspect she is trying to standardise the tag system, maybe with an eye on some future upgrade, I don't know. A note might help, but I doubt it.
She's changed my tags for the better, every time, usually by adding tags I'd never thought of.
H
Heartsongs
Guest
I've been grateful for the changes admin has made for me... always been for the better. I'm trusting their judgement to help find the best outcome for my stories. (Tags and categories) I wish they did have "Friends with Benefits" category though.
If they're relevant I don't mind, but for instance adding threesome to Daily Life with Furry Girls is completely wrong. It's one guy with five girls and the series isn't even erotic.
Vix_Giovanni
Literotica Guru
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Threesome is a tag that gets a lot of clicks. Probably more so than mfffff.
Keep writing and stick with the methods of Laurel's madness. As she gets to know your work, you'll be surprised with the insights she has for your tags.
In my first post, she added "college" as a tag, even though my story's not a college sex story. For my more recent posts, she invented the tag "father daughter incest romance" for my stories and added "love story" and "sensual" which are tags that I wouldn't have thought to use.
That, to me, is clickbait. I already had people complain that DLwFG and another short story had no sex in it for instance. I don't want readers to get expectations that aren't there and get blamed for it.
Vix_Giovanni
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I hear you. But there's no "blame" to be assigned here; this is Laurel's site, and she is both the arbiter and best read of any eyes that will survey your work.
You may want to temper your expectations and shift your paradigms as to the writer/reader dynamic around Lit. If tags/clickbait are the bulk of the negative feedback you receive, then you're doing far better than most writers.
But that being said, if your complaining readers told you that their specific complaints about your story's lack of sex were directly related to expectations they had after clicking Laurel's tag, then your problem seems easy to fix. I'd suggest you send her a PM with a link or screenshot of that info and ask her to update the tag.
But otherwise, you're extrapolating as to why readers complain.
Regardless any steps you take, some readers will complain. The tags could be completely "right" and some reader might complain it was misleading. You could precede the story with an A/N that the story has no sex scenes and readers might complain that you didn't include sex scenes. You could be James Patterson writing anonymously for kicks; I don't think anyone in the AH would be surprised if some anonymous reader criticized you as a hack that could never write professionally (because many, if not all, of us have had some reader "advise" us of that at some point on Lit).
I'm not trying to criticize or belittle readers; they give us their time and attention for free and read our work, God bless them! But it's par for the course that inevitably you will get some unduly and unfairly negative feedback about things that are outside your control.
Except there is in the opinions of some readers. If there's unfounded interference from a third party in what I do (in this case writing), then it irritates me.
To complete the picture on why that is so for me, I've had to deal with the blame game for many years before I had to quit IT due to burn out. The whole receiving the blame for what was not my doing was a big part of it and i've become very sensitive to it.
I can deal with some of that annoyance, and thankfully I haven't had a complaint recently, but I'd like to nip it in the butt before it happens, hence my original question. When it does cause trouble for me I have no choice but to drop what I'm doing here for my health and that would sadden me a lot.
SimonDoom
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Very interesting. I had no idea Laurel played such an active (and creative) role in tag selection. I haven't paid enough attention to my story tags post-publication to tell if she's done something similar to mine.
It wouldn't bother me if she did. I see tags purely as a way to grab more readers, and if Laurel's intervention does that it's fine with me, even if I don't fully understand her choices.
Hypoxia
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I suspect Laurel has more critical tasks than tweaking tags (like speed-reading up to hundreds of submissions daily) and so delegates that creative drudgery to buggy warez that scan texts and spew whatever into the TAGS fields. If your mature romance is tagged as LESBIAN VAMPIRE EIGHTSOMES, you'll know why.
Vix_Giovanni
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I didn't either; I had just assumed, like Hypoxia commented above, that the tags were delegated and probably added after a quick scan. But perhaps like EB commented further above, there's future plans for tags and Laurel (or some other authorized person) is taking a direct role. I didn't pay attention to the tags before, but I've started to after noticing the attentive helpfulness in the tag selection.
RandyD1369
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WOW! Where can I find some of this realistic stuff? LOL. I love it and promise to steal it, file off the serial number, and use it in dialog someday.
Hypoxia
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Eight lesbian vampires will be at your door Real Soon Now. Can you pay cash?
ElectricBlue
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It's a relatively recent thing, if my memory of the tags I originally submitted is correct - everything I've submitted in the last six months, I reckon, has had a tweak or two - always for the better.
ElectricBlue
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Maybe, but if so, it's pretty clever buggy warez, because it's coming up with tags that are good, but not triggered by anything directly obvious in the raw text.
For example, I have a recent story with three characters, one male always called Adam, but two women repeatedly called Madeleine, Maddy, Mads, and Jillian, Jilly and Jills. A word frequency counting bot would see that as seven names, but the new tags were mff, trio, male female female, and three way (all of which were added by Laurel). That's a very clever bot or a human being. I choose clever human being
.
Bramblethorn
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Not many readers use tags to navigate, or even see them until after they've already read the story, so I wouldn't worry too much on that account.
Maybe not now, but accurate tagging is essential to get good search results when it comes to the amount of data like on this site.
Laurel sent a nice message explaining they try to fill out all ten tags on a submission when they're not all used and add what they think is relevant for readers. DLwFG already get eight default (and obvious) ones from me so there's not much room there.
No wait, nine. Almost forgot the harem tag.
There are a few sites who handle tagging in an interesting way and one uses a couple of mandatory categories upon submission that make it easier for users to add relevant tags like gender, species, themes or kinks. I think that would be a help to users here, including a pop-up list of official tags to look through (per category).
ElectricBlue
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Out of curiosity, what was the tag removed? Was it replaced with another tag?
MichaelGH
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It was ‘demons’ and my story’s about a guy who summons demons.
ElectricBlue
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That's fairly benign, I'd have thought. Odd.
MichaelGH
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Yeah especially because rapist-murderer-serial killer-Hitler made the cut.
