How-to: Make Your Story Page Interesting — Summary (tl;dr) · 7:28pm May 22nd, 2014

Even though I didn’t get to say everything I wanted to, I still somehow managed to write eight thousand words on how to create a good story page. If you are reading this you either went in out of curiosity after you finished reading everything else or you just didn’t want to take a look at any of the crap I spat. Both is fine with me, really. I can start rambling way too easily.

So here is some sort of checklist you can use and memorize when you create your story page. It’s what I’ve mentally been using for a long time now, and it worked pretty damn well.

Story Title
• Format it properly (capitalization).
• Don’t use the “Character Verbs (a) Noun” scheme or any variation of it.
• Keep it short (should take less than two seconds to read out loud).
• Don’t use it to tell what the story is about (don’t spoil anything), use it to gain attention.
Cover Art
• It’s always better to have some cover art over none at all.
• Get the general mood of the story across, but don’t spoil anything.
• Keep it simple; overloaded pictures drive your readers away.
• Keep the aspect ratio so that the image is wider than taller (or at least don't use a ridiculously tall image).
• When in doubt, use a simple vector that shows the main characters.
• Don’t use real photography unless you have a very good reason to.
Tags
Story Tags
• Don’t use more than three tags (two are the best).
• Certain tags are bound to get the story a bad initial view regardless of what you do (Crossover, Human, Anthro).
• Certain combinations of tags have the same problem (namely Dark, Alternate Universe, Tragedy, Adventure).
• Try to use tags that tell what the story IS (e.g. Comedy) instead of tags that tell what it CONTAINS (e.g. Human).
Character Tags
• Don’t use more than three tags (try to decide if a certain character is really that important).
• Use the CMC, Mane Six, and Other tags as a way to describe the sidecast instead of adding every single character that appears in the story.
• Only use the OC tag if you absolutely need to.
Rating Tags
• Don’t rate a story Mature-only if it doesn’t contain explicit sex or gore (with few exceptions).
• Only rate a story both gore and sex if you have a very, very good reason to.
• Use the age rating as a way to show how “extreme” or “light-hearted” your story is.
Description
• Long Description = Short Description (Keep both below 250 characters; try to not write more than two or three sentences.)
• Don’t tell us what your story is about, show us why we should read it.
• Unexplained twists, puns, foreshadowing at the end are a good bonus.
• Put absolutely any meta content (like list of editors) at the bottom, not at the top.
• Avoid the More-button if you can help it.
• Don’t spoil anything that could ruin the story. For that it is advised to not directly talk about the story contents.
Chapters
• Same formatting rules as the title.
• Keep consistency (both for average word count per chapter and their titles/syntax).
• Don’t write obnoxiously long chapters (in other words, keep them below 10,000 words).

That about sums everything up. I hope this was helpful in some way and that you learned something too. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

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