The Art of the Subtitle

[RowanWrites]

Ok... I am looking for wisdom from more experienced writers.

Literotica gives you a title... and a teaser. Or is it a subtitle?

I am pretty sure the actual *tags* are completely useless, but I intuitively feel like the teaser/subtitle is a real opportunity for enticing readers, and I am curious about folks opinions. I feel like mine are pretty uninspired, and as I look over the stories, I can see that some are *really* uninspired... but I'm not nearly as clear as to what makes a great subtitle.

Who has some insight to offer?

 

[RejectReality]

It all depends upon the situation. Writing in I/T and have a title that you absolutely love, but which doesn't call out the incestuous pairing? You've got to do it in that description line. Some people may read everything in the category, but most are there for something specific. You need to signpost that from the get-go to maximize your readership.

Personally, when writing a long chaptered story, I tend to do little more than hit beats or highlights from the chapter. If I can come up with something witty and eye-catching, so be it. If not, it's not really making a huge difference for the most part. Middle chapters are not natural starting points.

The rest of the time, I'm either calling out pairings/kinks, or just doing what I do with most of my titles, and hitting the wordplay.

A Fine Substitute: Booty call interrupted, but her teacher Mom wants to sub in.

And I'll Get a Pole: Hot Mom's summer night fishing lands her a big one.

Boned: Hot Mom's witch costume gets her a bone for her cauldron.

( "Mom" is a much more powerful draw than "MILF" for the most part. )

Diggin' It: Treasure hunter hits a real honey hole - or rather, two.

One Whore's Town: It's not big enough for the both of them.

Hooters: He's looking for a rare owl, but finds some hooters instead.

One Incredible Costume: Daughter's friend has an unexpected Halloween treat for Dad.

Rim Fire: Breaking the bro-code with best friend's little sister.

 

[tenyari]

For posting a story?

There's a whole system for searching by the tags:
https://tags.literotica.com/
- so I highly recommend using tags that are very relevant to your story based on the guide here:
https://www.literotica.com/s/story-tags

The tag system is basically my go-to method of finding stories here. But once I have used it to narrow the field, the title and subtitle play a large role in my choice to click in or not.

Your 'subtitle' should be something that will catch the interest of a likely reader. A phrase that makes it appeal to the people who have an interest in that subgenre of erotica.

Note that if I find a story and click in, and the subtitle did NOT deliver for me, I remember that and am less likely to stick around with that author. But that is even more true with tags - unless it's one of the ancient randomly tagged stories.

 

[RowanWrites]

I guess I need to get more into the spirit of tags. I’ve never found them useful as a reader in literotica, but I’m probably missing out.

 

[Rustyoznail]

To be honest, I don't search by tags but others do. Tags are fine, but if someone is just browsing you need something to catch their attention. As RR noted, witty and eye-catching is good, especially if your title is a bit dull for whatever reason. E.G. For my story "Cricket Anyone? The Third Man", the title doesn't really say a lot, but add "Neha fucks a family of firefighters in a firestorm"...

That picked up a lot of attention.

 

[SimonDoom]

Everything is useful. I am a big believer in choosing one's title, tagline, and tags carefully, and I think my record suggests that taking care bears fruit.

As for tags: Before you publish your story, do some research about what the popular tags are for that sort of story. Go to the anticipated category and scan the list of most popular tags for that category. Always use the maximum number of tags (10) that you are allowed.

The title and tagline should work together. If the title is clear and descriptive, then the tagline can be playful and teasing. If the title is less clear, then the tagline should spell things out. The bottom line is this: when the potential reader has read your title and your tagline, the potential reader should have a pretty good idea of what the story is about, and the reader's curiosity should be piqued, such that the only way to satisfy the curiosity is to read the story.

In both, focus on word choice. Use words that are titillating, but also get the point across. I like to incorporate words in my title that are titillating and often show up in the popular tag lists for categories.

For example, in almost every mother-son incest story I publish, the word "Mom" appears in the title. I would regard it as almost malpractice NOT to do so. Note that HeyAll, the second most-followed author of all time at Literotica, takes a similar approach, and it's worked like a charm for him.

For another example, my most popular Exhibitionist & Voyeur story is "A Bikini With A Mind Of Its Own." E&V is not, usually, a high-traffic category, but that story has over 280,000 views. The score is only 4.45. The word "Bikini" in the title is the key, I think, because it's a sexy word. Think about it. Don't you think that a lot of male readers who want to read exhibitionist stories want to read a story about a woman in (or out of) a bikini? 5 1/2 years after it was published, that story gets over 100 views every day, despite its meh score. It's not on any toplists. The only explanation I can think of is the title. The tagline is "Erin goes to the beach and shows off more than she plans to." You pretty much know what you need to know after reading the title and the tagline.

The key is that when the potential reader has read both the title and the tagline, your story comes across as enticing. The use of key words and setting up the promise of an interesting erotic adventure is important.

I'm a big believer in the idea that you should follow whatever artistic goals you want to. There's no right way. But if you ARE interested in grabbing more readers, these concepts DO work.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Subquestion: How do people feel about using actual character names in titles and blurbs. I read a lot of taglines along the lines of 'Alice goes crazy at the French cheese festival' and I think to myself, great matches my Bree fetish, but who the F is Alice? I've tended to just use He or She or A teacher etc

 

[KeithD]

Subquestion: How do people feel about using actual character names in titles and blurbs. I read a lot of taglines along the lines of 'Alice goes crazy at the French cheese festival' and I think to myself, great matches my Bree fetish, but who the F is Alice? I've tended to just use He or She or A teacher etc

I think it's fine. It mostly depends on how many letter characters/spaces of what that will fit that provides as much as possible of what any title should--who/what/how/when--while being as catchy as possible. "Alice" isn't any less informative than "she" would be. Now, if it could be hinted that Alice was a he, that would be a catchy title.

(And I must admit I know and have worked with a fairly prominent Alice who once was a he.)

 

[NotWise]

I'm horrible at titles. The readers even laugh at me. I doubt I'm very good at the second line either. I've used them as a subtitle before -- that wasn't a good idea, because they sometimes don't appear with the title. I asked a similar question myself once, and the most resonant advise I got was from Yukonnights, who I'll paraphrase. Pick out the most important features of the story and list them in the teaser.

I think my most successful so far is for "My Sister's Wedding." it goes "Old traditions, broken vows, and dirty little thrills"

 

[SimonDoom]

Subquestion: How do people feel about using actual character names in titles and blurbs. I read a lot of taglines along the lines of 'Alice goes crazy at the French cheese festival' and I think to myself, great matches my Bree fetish, but who the F is Alice? I've tended to just use He or She or A teacher etc

I don't think it makes much difference unless the name takes up a lot more letters than the pronouns and thereby limits one's tagline.

I think my most successful so far is for "My Sister's Wedding." it goes "Old traditions, broken vows, and dirty little thrills"

This would be my critique of your title/tagline combo:

The tagline has no verb. All my taglines are sentences, often posing questions or ending in ellipses. I want to lead the reader to a door that I want him/her to open. Verbs help carry readers from point A to point B.

That's an incest story. I think you should make it more obvious in the title/tagline combo that it's an incest story.

Your story did very well, so any advice should be taken with a huge grain of salt, but if it were me I would refashion the tagline into a sentence or a question, include the word "brother" and more clearly suggest or describe the brother-sister dynamic in the story.

 

[jsmiam]

Don’t rule anything out as far as how/where readers find stories. Tags can be completely foreign to one person, used heavily by another. For finding stories,There’s the new list. The top lists. Searching by keyword. The comments/feedback portal. The suggested/similar stories. Contest stories. People looking at your list of stories because you published some OTHER story that they happened across so they looked you up. Tags. your next reader could have been from any of those categories.

Then on topic: sure make your subtitle as good and catchy and keyword filled as possible. Every little bit helps.

 

[Bramblethorn]

To be honest, I don't search by tags but others do. Tags are fine, but if someone is just browsing you need something to catch their attention. As RR noted, witty and eye-catching is good, especially if your title is a bit dull for whatever reason. E.G. For my story "Cricket Anyone? The Third Man", the title doesn't really say a lot, but add "Neha fucks a family of firefighters in a firestorm"...

That picked up a lot of attention.

It's been mentioned that future site updates will increase the importance of tags, so even if they're not doing you much good now it may be worth getting them right for the future.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

One of my stories has way more views than any other. It has the tag 'interracial' included. I doubt that many who clicked because of that tag actually read it, but some did.

With a series, I ended up titling chapters by the plot or emotional payoff, but what gets readers is a chapter promising a sex act. So "X has meal with Y and returns the favour" was a crap tagline, because readers didn't compare it to the previous chapter where Y provides oral sex to X. It would have been much better to have "X has meal with Y, delaying that blowjob".

"X finally gets fucked again" - excellent tagline. "Long week. X and Y celebrate the weekend" - you'd think the nature of celebration was obvious, but no.

"Shower" and "sauna" are good words for taglines, similar to 'bikini' mentioned upthread.

I think my best title: tagline combo is "Chaperoning Matthew: Four bisexuals get very drunk." Suggests exactly what the story provides, clues people in that we're not just reading about hot bi babes of the female variety.

 

[stickygirl]

It's been mentioned that future site updates will increase the importance of tags, so even if they're not doing you much good now it may be worth getting them right for the future.

Unless I'm missing a trick, the only way to change tags, title, subtitle is to create an Edited version and represent it. That puts a lot of extra work on the mods making it a slow process.

I appreciate the necessity for checks or else an innocent story could be edited to include banned topics. I guess there's no half-way house.

I'd dearly love to edit my story collections with chronological ordering and better subtitles etc. What? - plan ahead - me??

 

[MelissaBaby]

If I am remembering right, back when they did the last update, Manu said something about how they they at some point going to give author's the ability to order their own Author's Page, create their one series lists, etc.

I'm waiting for that. Like I'm waiting to get Social Security.

 

[tenyari]

Unless I'm missing a trick, the only way to change tags, title, subtitle is to create an Edited version and represent it. That puts a lot of extra work on the mods making it a slow process.

They could make tags more important by simply making it the default way stories are presented.

Three ways to do this - each with it's own flaws:

1. Show a category view that is merely the 'top 20 hits' of tags.
2. Keep the category list but the entries in it are only based on tags, not what category an author picks.
   1. Possible variation: related tags - stories show up in the categories if they have 3+ relevant tags to that category.
3. Just move the 'tag search' system to the top of the list for ways to find stories, and put the category list somewhere else.

- These are all lesser modifications to the system that would shift how important tags are. The first option means what the categories are will be in constant flux, the second option makes tags extremely important to getting into a category, and the third option has the least amount of impact, just changes what people see first.

Obviously all of these are open to people gaming the system - but that can already be done with categories.

The first two methods will also greatly harm the findability of any story that was published before the tags system was added to the site, because those old stories have wierd tags. There is also a risk in the first method that if it pulls from those old stories some really weird tags could show up as categories, like a tag for "walks away", or "the man", or whatever...

 

[Pureotica]

It's a bit wonky when writing a series, rather than a serial because it doesn't give many characters for the title. I like to keep the series title and use an additional title for the episodes, but there isn't a non-clunky way to do it. I normally put an author's note with the information. I use the description for a brief premise summary.

I don't know if people search by tags or not. I try to put relevant tags so the right audience can stumble across the story. Individual kinks can be remarkably specific. My submissions are so sporadic and my readership so small that it probably doesn't matter. But I'm trying to finish some of my zillion projects so that I actually have some content up.

My problem. When I'm writing I always get more ideas, and I have the attention span of a gnat.

 

[Xyzz90212]

The art of the subtitle: 5 ways to get people to read your work.

 

[tenyari]

On the topic of the subtitle: Is it worth it to change the subtitle for each chapter posted?

- I'm on the fence on this one, I've seen good and bad cases for either approach. But I do think it should be thought about when picking them.

 

[SimonDoom]

On the topic of the subtitle: Is it worth it to change the subtitle for each chapter posted?

- I'm on the fence on this one, I've seen good and bad cases for either approach. But I do think it should be thought about when picking them.

Absolutely. You should never repeat a subtitle. Always come up with a new twist. If you don't have something new to say about your new chapter, then what's the point of the new chapter? You're wasting the reader's time.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I think it's fine. It mostly depends on how many letter characters/spaces of what that will fit that provides as much as possible of what any title should--who/what/how/when--while being as catchy as possible. "Alice" isn't any less informative than "she" would be. Now, if it could be hinted that Alice was a he, that would be a catchy title.

(And I must admit I know and have worked with a fairly prominent Alice who once was a he.)

One of the most famous Alices around is and has always been a he (though not always an Alice; he started out as a Vincent IIRC).

 

[Bramblethorn]

The first two methods will also greatly harm the findability of any story that was published before the tags system was added to the site, because those old stories have wierd tags. There is also a risk in the first method that if it pulls from those old stories some really weird tags could show up as categories, like a tag for "walks away", or "the man", or whatever...

The method used for auto-tagging those old stories seems to exclude common words like "the", so "the man" isn't going to happen, but I guess it's possible if there's something they missed out of their list of common words.

Another problem that might need addressing with an increased use of tags is the problem of redundant/synonymous tags. Suppose I want to read a story about female domination. Looking at the popular tags in BDSM:

dominant female
dominant wife
dominant woman
dominatrix
domme
f/f
f/m
fdom
fem dom
female dominant
female domination
female supremacy
femdom
goddess
lesbian d/s
lesbian femdom
lezdom
married femdom

That's eighteen different tags implying female domination, even before getting into less-used ones and misspellings like "female dominate". Some of those are synonyms, some like "f/m" and "lesbian d/s" are more specific, but a reader who just wants to read about a dominant woman might be interested in any and all of them. It also makes the tag cloud less useful for niche topics, since a reader has to wade through so many redundant tags to find the ones they're after.

There are ways to make that far more effective. One of the other sites I post on has a fantastic tagging system which understands that "femdom" has a bajillion synonyms and is a subset of "dom/sub", which is itself a subset of "BDSM". But it's a lot of work to set up and maintain.

 

[tenyari]

Another problem that might need addressing with an increased use of tags is the problem of redundant/synonymous tags. Suppose I want to read a story about female domination. Looking at the popular tags in BDSM:

A solution to this is a hybrid. Tags like they work on some other sites. Not just erotica sites though. A preset list of tags, and then the ability to add some new ones somewhere 'down at the bottom', combined with some use of ********** to do 'autofill' when people start typing in a new tag, that suggests a similarly spelled already existing word.

When I look at the FAQ page for the tags, there is a decent list there already. A few more fill ins, and then the script attached to the form for making new tags.

Put a bolded caution on that form too, noting that tags that are less often used will be lower in priority, and often found only if expressly searched for.

The same script could also auto-correct known synonyms before the submit is processed.

 

[NotWise]

A solution to this is a hybrid. Tags like they work on some other sites. Not just erotica sites though. A preset list of tags, and then the ability to add some new ones somewhere 'down at the bottom', combined with some use of ********** to do 'autofill' when people start typing in a new tag, that suggests a similarly spelled already existing word.

When I look at the FAQ page for the tags, there is a decent list there already. A few more fill ins, and then the script attached to the form for making new tags.

Put a bolded caution on that form too, noting that tags that are less often used will be lower in priority, and often found only if expressly searched for.

The same script could also auto-correct known synonyms before the submit is processed.

You can refer to the tag cloud for the category your posting in to get an idea of what tags have been used and are being used. I get most of my tags out of the tag cloud, then add a few that are specific to the story -- knowing that those may never be searched.

 

[RowanWrites]

It all depends upon the situation. Writing in I/T and have a title that you absolutely love, but which doesn't call out the incestuous pairing? You've got to do it in that description line.

Love insights RR! Wow! A lot to digest. Thank you!