Tips for posting fic to NL
1. Both Title and Summary must be family-friendly (#3 under Submission Rules), i.e., not contain vulgar language or graphic description.
2. The summary is also a good place to put your Disclaimer (which is required on all fics. You can use the generic one that appears at the bottom of every page of NL or write your own.) The purpose of a Disclaimer is for the author to acknowledge that they do not own/are not profiting from the use of any of the recognizable characters in their fic.
3. Summary, Story Notes, Chapter Notes, and End Notes:
- The Summary should be a brief lead-in/teaser/synopsis of your story. Some authors use an excerpt from the story itself.
- Story Notes are where you can put things like "written for ______ challenge," "inspired by," thank your beta reader, etc.
- Chapter Notes are useful for including a sort of further summary about how the story progresses in that chapter. If you highlight possible triggering content, Story or Chapter Notes is a good place to put those.
- Some people include blanket thanks for reader response to the previous chapter, apologies for a delay in posting, etc. in Chapter Notes. Since Chapter Notes appear on the story's index page, it might be better to put those in the End Notes, or at the top of the chapter. (You can separate those from the body of your chapter with a horizontal line -- see the toolbar above the Story Text box.)
- End notes are good for inserting an explanation of chapter content, like translation of words/phrases in another language, or clarification of an obscure reference.
4. You can put your story in as many categories as apply: for instance, a story may be a one-shot, Season 3, babyfic in response to a Nine Lives challenge! After each one is added, click on Return to main categories if you want to get back to the full list and add more.
5. To add multiple Characters, Genres, or Warnings, hold down the CTRL key while clicking on each item you want to include. (To remove one, keep holding down CTRL and click on that item again.) Keep holding CTRL while you scroll down to see additional choices. (For Mac users, it's the Command key instead of CTRL.)
6. Ratings: Stories are rated in the following manner:
- G (General): No curse words, sex, descriptive violence, etc.
- T (Teen): Maybe a little violence, a swear word or two.
- M (Mature): Violence, language, some gore, sex (but not a specific play-by-play of the sex itself, just allusions to the act)
- E (Explicit): Anything goes, with as much description as you want. Not for the faint of heart.
The RPF ratings ("real person fic" - for McReedus) follow this same system, except for the inclusion of -RPF to distinguish them from the regular categories in the ratings list; e.g., G-RPF, T-RPF, M-RPF and E-RPF.
7. You can change your chapter numbers to a title if you like or, for a one-shot, you may want to replace Chapter 1 with the story name.
8. Formatting: If you have trouble with extra spaces being inserted between paragraphs, etc. when posting fic, here are some options that may prevent those issues:
- When copying a story from Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or similar word processing software, click the Word icon by the story text box and then paste your text in there. That will strip out some of the weird HTML that gets put in.
OR:
- Copy the text from your document, paste into a blank document in Notepad (.txt), then Select all and copy the text again before pasting into the Story Text box on NL. Then add text formatting like italics, or insert any story breaks (horizontal line.) Paragraphs turn out perfectly every time.
OR:
- You can upload a story from your computer hard drive (does not work from the cloud, like from Google Docs.) Click on Browse to select the story file.