First of all, congrats on getting started with fanfic! That’s awesome and we’re excited to see what you create!
Now, so, a lot to parse here, please bear with me.
🔹users on AO3 sometimes put multiple unrelated stories into the same work as chapters.
There are many problems with this.
🔹if a reader wants to leave kudos on multiple stories within your work, they can’t do that.
🔹readers interested in specific stories within your work will have a hard time leafing through the work to find the story they’re looking for.
🔹you cannot provide a summary for each individual story within your work, so fewer people will find them.
🔹if your work has stories that include different characters and tropes in each of them, rather than each story being about the same characters and tropes you will run up against the tag limit and be unable to accurately tag your work.
Here’s what you should do instead
🔹make each story a separate work.
🔹it’s okay if they’re short. many people, ourselves included, put flash fiction and drabbles that are only 100-500 words long as separate works.
🔹this is very common and accepted. It makes it easier to tag, summarize, search and kudos each work.
Here’s how you can connect your related but separate works into a ‘book of short stories’.
