How not to not announce sequels · 4:53pm Jul 12th, 2012
Update: Now they've both brought back story tagging and added a sequel tagging system, so my advice here is back on for the most part, although it may be slightly out of date. Original post below the break:
I happen to feel strongly about this issue, so allow me to give a little tip/rant to any author who cares enough to read it:
If you make a sequel, make a blog post about it and tag the story in the blog post. Don't just assume that anyone who favorited the story is watching you, because there's a good chance that they're not. Take me, for example. I have 158 favorites, but I'm only watching 15 people, and their stories only make up a fraction of the ones I've favorited. Despite that, I have a desire to know when sequels come out to any of the stories I've favorited, not just the ones made by people I'm watching. I haven't actually asked other people about it, but I very strongly suspect that a lot of others feel the same way. It doesn't really take too much effort either; making blog posts is incredibly easy, so there's no reason not to.
tl;dr version: Make a blog post announcing any sequel you make to a previous story you post and tag it to the story so that people who favorited the story but didn't watch you can still learn about the existence of the sequel.
I was super-lucky to run across this blog post. I'm actually considering making a sequel to a story I've written, and I was a bit worried about how I'd notify fans of the original. But now I know. Thanks a bunch, bro.
259193 You're welcome. I'm pretty happy helping to spread the information, since both the readers and the authors benefit from it.
Sometimes I wonder if people are even aware of what those story tags do. I only seem to be notified of blog posts from people I'm watching.
706216 Actually, I think this blog post may be obsolete now. I remember seeing an admin mention on one of the site blog posts (I think it was the one about the new notification system) that story tagging was disabled because some people were using it to make anyone who had favorited any one of their stories see all of their blog posts. I should probably edit this post to mention that, lol.
706223 - Really? Because I've been using it for a while, and I can tell you that blog posts that have story tags get a noticeably higher number of views.
706234 Hmm. That's kind of weird then. Not sure what's going on in that case, because I just went back to the notification changes blog post, and found the conversation again. Here it is (slightly edited to make the most of the site's limited quoting feature), if you're interested:
706248 - Yeah, what knighty describes there is pretty much what I always thought that feature did.
706275 I don't think he was talking about the proper use of it, though, which was about giving people updates actually related to the story. There were a couple stories which I actually unfavorited because their authors were totally missing the point of the feature, and tagging every single one of their stories despite the blog posts being totally irrelevant to most of them; unless I've majorly misinterpreted it, that's what knighty was talking about.