Given that this group is based around finding the gems in the ****, I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of techniques you can use to determine if a story is worth checking out when it's not in here. Conversely, this is also a guide to making your stories as appealing as possible if you flip it around.

Please note that this is in no way a guarantee of a good story. It will help you avoid the bad stuff, but sorting the good from the mediocre takes a bit more finesse. I should also note that I only review stories I have read all the way through. The only exception was the time I read a Sonic Displaced, which should be self explanatory.

While the author can't affect everything about how their story will be viewed, they can affect the following:

1. The Title.
2. The picture.
3. The short description.
4. The long description.
5. The tags.

Title

The title must snappy and eye catching. "My Time in Equestria," for example, is guaranteed to drive away most readers before they even glance at what the story's about. "Princess Celestia is Replaced by an Ohio-class Submarine," alternatively, will attract people to read the description simply through sheer 'wat' factor. Quotes, references, and/or clever wordplay relevant to the story's subject matter are also good ideas.

Cover Art

The second thing a reader will see after the title is always the cover art, if a story has one. Having a good cover art will sway many to read your story who wouldn't if the art was bad or not present, so finding a high quality piece is a must. I try to get mine custom made, but if that's outside your reach go trawling the internet for a good fit. Making one yourself if you have no drawing/Photoshop skills is not recommended.

Short Description

Descriptions, first of all, must have perfect grammar. A spelling mistake or typo anywhere within is a red flag that many readers have learned to pick up on. Double and triple check your writing before uploading it. The rest of the art is all about making the description interesting enough to grab the readers attention while avoiding spoilers it and keeping the description tight enough to avoid losing it.

A good short description is generally a single lengthy sentence or two shorter ones that gives the basic premise of your story. Anything less than that and the readers who would be interested won't know what it's about, any more and you risk giving stuff away.

"Fluttershy ends up reforming Chrysalis, the two eventually fall in love."

This is a not-very bad short description. While short, it completely spoils the story. It also has a comma splice, which is a grammar error used to 'avoid' run on sentences.

With her life partners busy being grumpy over the holiday season, Sonata Dusk decides to recruit Sunset Shimmer to take her to the local Hearth's Warming festival.

This is a good short description. It says what the story is about, is pleasant to read, and doesn't give away the ending. In fact, it doesn't even say whether Sonata actually succeeds in recruiting Sunset. It's entirely possible that Sonata will fail, and that her failure will convince her sisters to go with her instead.

Long Description

Long descriptions are a bit more tricky. At this point you've either convinced the reader to click on your story, or you are currently in the feature box and your short description is no longer the first thing people see. That means you have your reader's attention, now you just have to keep it.

For many, "Lesson Zero" was the episode where FiM metaphorically "grew the beard", since it established that Twilight's duty to send reports weekly ended.

However, the events could have taken a different direction entirely.

For the example, what if the Mane 5 did the sane thing at the wrong moment? What if Celestia wasn't so merciful towards Twilight? And to make things worse, Celestia got a sadistic sense of humor and an idea for an untraditional punishment?

How will Twilight act during her stay in one of her biggest fears and a total opposite of her usual orderly life?

Find out in this story!

Alright, for the first two chapters the story is for everyone. Starting with the third chapter, however, the rating is "Teem", because of some... Aristophanes-ish humor and some shards of fetish. You have been warned.

Ok, this is a terrible long description. Asking questions of the reader like that is annoying and heavy-handed, and feels more like a used-car saleman trying to make a deal than a good storyteller ensnaring you in a web of words. The "find out in this story!" at the end screams of desperation, and is a bigger turnoff than a few spelling errors. Also avoid rhetorical questions like, "What could possibly go wrong?"

Diamond Tiara knows all about work delegation: if you want something done, have other ponies do it for you. In the name of that goal, Silver Spoon studies for both and Diamond copies her friend's efforts. It works every time. Except that Cheerilee just forced Diamond to switch desks. And with finals a week away and no personal knowledge for most of the subjects, the only ponies she can now hope to copy from are Snips and Snails. Something which may get her sent all the way back to preschool. And there's no way Diamond is going to lower herself to doing her own work.

Which means the colts are going to be learning on her behalf.

No matter what she has to do to make that happen.

It's for the best cause ever, after all.

This is a great long description. It doesn't ramble, it sets up the tone of the story, and it tells you exactly what you're getting into while spoiling zero plots points. You feel that evil grin on your face after you finished reading it? That's a good sign.

Side note: if your story is a crossover, especially if it's with something that is not universally known, make sure you put an Author's Note at the bottom saying what you are crossing over with. That way everyone who's never heard of your crossover or have heard of it but don't know it well enough to recognize it on sight can look it up and see if a crossover with that universe sounds interesting enough to read. Unlabeled crossovers are doomed to obscurity if you haven't picked something like Batman.

Tags

Finally, we get to the tags. Generally, less is more here. Putting as few tags on your story as possible and still have them describe the story in full is considered the best option. Also, try to avoid using "rainbow tags," which is a term used for tags that have many clashing colors and tones, such as comedy, dark, romance, adventure, Tragedy, and mystery. Basically, it comes off as the author trying to do too many things at once, and the tonal shifts make the writing more likely to be rough. Tags such as AU, human, crossover, and Equestria Girls don't count towards this limit though, as they are facets of the story's setting rather than themes of the story itself.

A good tagging set will have 2-4 tags, plus maybe a sex and/or gore tag depending on the subject matter. Example: Gore, dark, horror, thriller, and mystery, means you're about to set a serial killer loose in Ponyville.

Hopefully this helps, both as a way to determine what stories are worth your time, and to allow you to present your own work in the best possible light.

Rating

Now we get to what the author can't control, the reader response. You might have noticed that most stories have more likes than dislikes, even when they're total ****. How then, do you tell which stories are actually worth looking at? I use three checks:

1. The like/dislike ratio is at least 10 to 1.
2. the view/rating ratio is at least 10 to 1. This is less strict when the story has been completed for a lengthy period of time, as the view/rating ratio goes down without regular updates.
3. Stories with controversial subject matter have less strict standards.
4. Stories with highly popular subjects have stricter standards.
5. If a story has less than 300 views, the above are void. The sample size is too small.

To see this in action, let's take a hypothetical story that has 100 likes, 20 dislikes, and 900 views.

The like/dislike ratio is five to one, which suggests it's not very good. However, those that read it were more likely to leave a rating, either good or bad. This makes the results inconclusive, so the final test here is to look at the subject matter. If we're dealing with OCs of any kind it's probably bad. If it's fetishistic clop, or a particularly unnerving genre of horror, or just has an unpopular character, it's probably good. If a story about mind control based rape isn't down-voted into the ground, then it has a much higher chance of being good than a tale with a similar rating and a topic that doesn't get people up in arms.

Sources used:
Bad title: Every self-insert ever.
Good title: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/356622/princess-celestia-is-replaced-by-an-ohio-class-submarine
Bad short description: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/330183/soft-words-and-a-simple-promise
Good short description: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/356460/sirens-adventures-moonlight-sonata
Bad long description: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/140169/ab-initio-from-the-start-al-principio
Good long description: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/195040/a-confederacy-of-dunce-caps

My fellow reviewers, if there are any techniques that you use to determine good stories that I haven't put down here, please post them below. I'll make sure to add them to the list.

5683683 Spacing is important too. I don't want to read a story where all of the paragraphs are massive and they aren't spaced apart. If a story is formatted as such, it tends to hurt my eyes and give me a headache. USE THE ENTER KEY, LUKE!

5683711 That it is, but this is a thread about first impressions. If someone has clicked on the first chapter they've already decided to give it a try. The only time it would apply is if the long description had more than one paragraph.

5683683

I gotta disagree with that Ratings thing. Judging a story by its ratings is one of the reasons the mods made it so you can't see them until there's at least ten likes/dislikes. This story has a 7:1 ratio and does a pretty good job of getting across the plot and everything, yet by what your logic seems to be it actually isn't a good one. People dislike stories just based off characters, shippings, and so on, having one of your first tells on whether it's good or not is not the correct way to judge if it's good or not.

A story is supposed to be judged off the story itself and not the ratio. The ratio is there so people can give their opinions occasionally without commenting, but that's still not something to trust as a full reason of statistics and all that. The ratio is affected greatly by people and thier biased opinions, so it can be very hard to know if it's a good story or not based off the ratio and your logic in that respect if you want to think like that.

5683717 Now I feel like the guy who brought a stick to the gun fight...

5683683
5683718

Following on from Shadowblaze, again on the ratings point, a story could be hit by trolls. If it had a 9-1 rating that would immediately make it bad, but what happens when that one single downvoter was either a troll or someone who simply didn't like Flash Sentry, for example. We all know it happens.

5683718
5683736 These are not hard rules but more general guidelines, and I've adjusted the title of the thread to reflect that. If I see a story that catches my eye and the descriptions are good, then I'll give it a read even if the ratio isn't optimal. These mostly help decide when I'm on the fence about something.

Just because we should judge stories based on their content doesn't mean that we do. If that was the case then crossovers wouldn't have a massive popularity boost despite most of them being terrible.

5683683 Gotta chime in my disagreement as well. What you have is how to tell the difference between a bad story and basically every other story in existence. Yes, a bad description indicates that a story isn't good. But a clean or intriguing description doesn't indicate a good story. It just indicates one that can hook a reader to look inward. I've read plenty of stories that were intriguing or interesting but weren't good. Make a snap decision based off of the description, the rating (which is often a fickle thing), and the inclusion of cover art is how you identify a story that you might want to consider reading. It is in no way indication of a good story.

5683741

Hoo boy, do I have something for Displaced/Crossover stories.

I think one of the main problems about Displaced is execution. Ninety percent of Displaced is some new brony who just joined Fimfiction and wants to include himself/herself in the MLP world. Five percent is just trollfics and military armies or something of the sort fighting them. Then there's like five percent good ones. Like, for example you have this one idea where some guy gets Displaced there and somehow gains immortality. But the kicker is that he somehow misses every event that happens. This gives a more in depth explanation of what would happen.

But, like I said, one of the main reasons they get hate so much is not because its a necessarily bad idea, it's the execution. Having someone who knows everything about MLP and is very intelligent would be great to have there, say Shiro from Log Horizon as a brony. He's an excellent strategist and would have any problem over with in a cinch. But you have so many stories, like the story this thread began off of, giving it a bad name and so everyone generally avoids writing it. Because only a few skilled authors are able to pull off a successful one.

Tl;Dr

Execution is a main mess up in Displaced stories. Every one that does it wrong makes us go:

5683683 What a great post!

Let's see... this might be a red flag for reviewers and a tip for writers alike, but I keep an eye out for cliched rhetorical questions. Sometimes these can be intriguing and can lead to a worthwhile tale, but then there's this particular question which usually turns me off the story before ever reading it:

"What could possibly go wrong?"

If you're a writer, do not do this. Not in the short description; not in the long one; never. I say this because, as a reader, it tells me the writer has a poor sense of what is hackneyed and stale, or they are too lazy or apathetic about their tale to give it a proper description. That in turn says something about how well they've written the story.

That's just the first thing that pops into my head. I'll see if there are other things that jump out as red flags, but the above list is pretty handy!

5683750
5683718
5683736 Again, probably good. These guidelines are in no way a guarantee. This post exists to give you a sorting algorithm, one that you can adjust to your own preferences.

5683769 Except the original post was 'how to determine if a story is good'. You can set up guidelines to help determine whether or not something is probable, but the moment you start making snap assumptions you're not really judging based on anything more than the front and back of the book.

5683771 Which is why I'm changing the post. This post is going to be around for much longer than one afternoon, so feedback and tweaking to optimize it is important.

5683754 Wait, "My Time in Equestria," is an actual story name? I wrote that up as an example of a bad title, otherwise I would have cited the work I was using.

Anyway, I've adjusted the post a bit. now the stuff about the rating is at the bottom instead of the top, and the wording has been changed from "good" to "looking into" and "checking out. " Hopefully that will better convey the original intent of helping people find the best stories with the least effort.

5683718 Actually, now that I think about what is your ratio minimum? The 10 to 1 thing was something I pulled out of a Rage Review, and might not be the optimal threshold.

5683683 Interestingly, I made a blog post about this sort of thing myself, and a few of the same things you've mentioned I covered there too.

Of course, those were just things I said made me excited to look at a story, not things that actually influenced my final, post-reading opinion. If there was a way to know if a story was good before reading it, well, we wouldn't have to get people to read through at least a substantial amount of the story first. It makes a difference to the first impression a story gives, not the actual content.

What makes things more confusing is when authors actually go out of their way to perform a sort of 'bait and switch', where they'll present a seemingly bad story to give it more depth later on. Stuff like this makes all this sort of thing a bit tricky to gauge.

I think it's highly important for any writer who wants to get his work at least somewhat noticed to be aware of these sorts of things, but it's also important for reviewers to look past them in the case of a genuinely good story that simply has bad advertising.

Just in case the downvotes were worried we judged solely on appearances here.

5683851 Exactly. I've seen stories that passed all my checks and still sucked, and vice versa. It just helps to have any system at all.

Also, I get the feeling that if I hadn't included that section about ratings I wouldn't be buried in dislikes. Eh.

5683854 Possibly.

It's actually why I made mine a blog post. It's quite easy to present a system you'll have made for perfectly innocent reasons, but make it seem like it's a rigid set of rules that you can't get around.

Ratings are a rather fickle beast themselves. For starters, the ratio you'd expect of a 'successful' story varies wildly with the amount of views, and in the case of too few views, is completely unreliable altogether. I find it only becomes worthwhile to start properly examining the ratio past at least 300 views, otherwise your sample is simply too small to get a proper idea of how a story was recieved.

5683864

I find it only becomes worthwhile to start properly examining the ration past at least 300 views, otherwise your sample is simply too small to get a proper idea of how a story was received.

This. This is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for. Adding it to the list.

5683851

I think it's highly important for any writer who wants to get his work at least somewhat noticed to be aware of these sorts of things, but it's also important for reviewers to look past them in the case of a genuinely good story that simply has bad advertising.

Pretty much sums it all up right there. Still, if I'm looking a story to review out of a group of other, possibly more worthy stories, there is some value in having criteria for a quick decision.

5683854

Also, I get the feeling that if I hadn't included that section about ratings I wouldn't be buried in dislikes. Eh.

Well, I actually rated you up, so there. The reason I did so was because I understood that you didn't mean any of that as a set of rules but as guidelines. Besides, ratings actually do tell you something about a story. It isn't always the same thing, but I think you nicely covered some generalities.

Bottom line in all this is that the "meta-game" of fic writing (descriptions, titles, etc.) actually is important, and it may be something a lot of folks overlook.

5683885 More importantly, it's something that doesn't have any written rules or warning labels attached. Every last one of us has learned this through experience. We weren't told that it existed, we found out on our own. Part of why I wrote this was to put those unwritten rules out in the open where the unaware can find them, and so I can refine my own technique by comparing it against other's.

5683683 About the cover art...
What do you think about making those by moving the original character with photoshop?
I'm asking because I do that a lot. It's way better than my drawing.

5683995 Looks pretty good to me. I was talking about the obvious art style clashes that sometimes pop up.