Story title originality check

[Darkniciad]

I try to have titles that are original ( at least to Lit ) so I usually search to see if a title idea I have has been used before. The problem is that I've found this to be rather unreliable, and time consuming.

Fortunately, now that Lit has gone to friendly URLs, there's a far more reliable way to see if a title has been used on Literotica before.

Bring up one of your stories, such as:

http://www.literotica.com/s/home-by-the-sea

In the browser address bar, backspace the part that is your title ( home-by-the-sea in this case ) and type in your title idea. For example:

http://www.literotica.com/s/earth-mother

If your title has any punctuation, ignore it and use only words, each separated by a hyphen. Also ignore apostrophes. So "John's Gambit" would be "johns-gambit" Treat numerals like words. "1,001 Ways To" = "1001-ways-to"

If a story or poem comes up, then the title has been used before on Lit. If you get a "This story is awaiting moderator approval" message, you may want to go to the next FURL in line to make sure that a new story or poem hasn't used the title after the previous one was unapproved.

You do this by adding a hyphen and the number 1, like so:

http://www.literotica.com/s/earth-mother-1

If that one also comes up with the moderator approval message, move to -2.

In this case, I can see that the title exists on Lit currently. From there, I can make a decision about whether to tweak the title, see if it exists in the specific category I'm going to write in, etc.

Having a completely original title isn't that big of a deal, but if you pick a title and end up being only one of a dozen stories in a single category with the same title, you get pretty lost in the shuffle.

It's not 100%, as we can change the FURLs from our member pages, which would keep the actual title from showing up with this trick, but I doubt many people are doing that.

Just thought I'd pass this along

 

[PennLady]

Thanks, Dark. That's handy. I usually do quick searches but this will help even lazy people like me.

 

[Darkniciad]

No problem

Had enough newcomers asking questions along these lines of late, so I thought I'd try to head a few off at the pass.

( At least for the few hours this will survive before it gets buried on page 2 )

 

[estragon]

Dark, Maybe a "How to"? Or something like "Darkniciad's Supplement to Lit FAQs"?

 

[Darkniciad]

I've considered writing a How-To on category selection and a couple of other topics, but *shrug*

If next to nobody is paying attention here, why would a How-To be any different?

I just toss out what I know, let those who want cannibalize it for what they can use, and then keep track of it so I can point people to it and save myself time in the future.