it's always readers driving this. Fandom is a gift economy. If your cooking is intentionally low effort, don't be shocked that it won't always find a place on someone's very limited plate at the potluck. /end

Sometimes you'll have to go through a significant amount of skill growth to accomplish some of these things. If you don't want to do that, it's totally fine; life is busy, life is hard, you want to have fun. But it's not other writers getting kudos telling you this to be arrogant or dismissive, /6

Even stronger are doing your research, taking care with your prose, editing, and being thoughtful about your plot and characterization. These take time and effort to learn. People are more likely to recommend you to other people, and without an algorithm on Ao3, word of mouth is very powerful. /5

There ARE ways to improve your chances. Running a spelling/grammar check, cleaning up your formatting, and reducing giant blocks of italics and strange formatting, making sure your tense and perspective stays consistent through a scene are all work, but fairly low effort and high impact. /4

There's absolutely nothing you can do to change someone's personal preferences for writing. There will always be readers who sort only by kudos. There will always be people who skip your fic for using lyric titles. There's no formula for pleasing these outliers. However -- /3

This post is definitely prompted today by someone specific but I've seen this attitude as pretty pervasive when returning to fandom.

I am not being unkind when I suggest putting more effort into your work pays off. I've seen readers say they'll close fic if a chapter is too long -- they're picky /2

fingers crossed for you!

Oh this is beautiful 🥺

It can and often does! I couldn't really figure out how to tackle longer fics for the longest time, because planning + prep made me feel like I'd already solved everything, so I ended up splitting the difference between briefly outlining and just writing and it's been working much better for me

Thank you! What not writing at all for a few years will do to someone, apparently. I'm finally delving into longer fics too, on track to finish a second above 50k early next year!

Thank you! I was in the grip of several things this year haha

I've got my chin on my hands eagerly awaiting the next one. This stuff is like magic to me, haha

This is really incredible! I love the choice of colors and the size/shape you picked for the leaves is really perfect. It's beautiful when viewed at a distance and even cooler when you zoom in on the detail. Lovely work as always 🩷

This is coming out so beautifully!

I'm also not the person to come to for cheerleading if I don't know you at all. I'd like to be able to give genuine encouragement not just "keep working on it, you're doing fine."

Yeah, getting unsolicited feedback sucks! But this is very solicited. And to be frank, I'm not the person to come to for SPAG. I'll happily do it for friends; for a stranger, I'd much rather read something and give notes, as I've frequently offered.

The fun part is the last several times I've bumped into this i made SURE to double check and received all assurances.

And personally my feedback is SO gentle. A lot of additive stuff, like "it could be interesting here if --" or "you could expand or reorder this to create a sense of anticipation."