State of the Fandom

Posted by SarahBella in State of the Fandom with Sarahbella | 1 comment

I thought that for this week’s State of the Fandom, I’d give a tutorial on navigating the Dungeon at MVF.  Fanfiction is my passion- it has been ever since I discovered Harry Potter fanfic four years ago.  I’m a prebeta at a Harry Potter site and between the three sites I’ve worked on (The Quidditch Pitch, Simply Twilight, and now My Vamp Fiction), I think I have a pretty good grasp of how to navigate eFiction.

So you create your account, and then you think, “Now what?”  Well, I’ll tell you what.  You figure out how to navigate the site.   First thing’s first, click on the Account Info button on the top of the screen.  This will take you to your account.  From here, you have nine options.

Manage Favorites – From here you can catch up on your favorite fics, series and authors, as well as delete those that aren’t really your cup of tea.

Add New Story – This one is pretty self explanatory. The only thing you’ll need to be aware of is when you are uploading your fic there is a small button underneath the story text box.  It has an icon of a clipboard with a W on it.  Click that icon and another text pox will pop up.   Copy paste your text there and it will keep your formatting and not add any extra HTML coding. Click insert when you’re done.

Manage Stories – This is where you can view the number of reads and reviews each of your stories has gotten.  You can also add a new chapter to an existing story and respond to your reviews from this screen.

Add New Series – From this screen, you can create a new series and add stories to it.

Manage Series – Here you can add more stories to your series, you can rearrange the order of stories in a series, add a banner to a series, and remove stories from a series.

Edit Bio – This section is your ‘About Me’ page.  You can tell everyone as little or as much about yourself as you want to.

Edit Preferences – Here is where you set up which email notifications you want to receive.  Once you’re in here, the options are mostly self explanatory.  You can choose contact for new reviews, contact when an author responds to your review, contact when favorites are updated, (all of which I would recommend checking), display table of contents for stories (you’re going to want to turn that off), and use tinyMCE editor (which I would recommend using.  It makes uploading banners and such so much easier).  You can also verify your age and set the default sort method (most recent or alphabetical) for looking at stories.

View your statistics - From this page, you can immediately see the number of stories you’ve posted, number of series,  how many reviews you have written and how many challenges you’ve authored.  You can also see how many people have favorited you as an author, favorited your stories and series.   In addition to all of that, you can see how many stories, series and authors you have favorited.  You can view each story and series individually and see their reviews and ratings.

Logout – That really says it all.

Once you’ve established that you want to be notified when your favorite stories get updated, it’s time to add some stories to your favorites.  Otherwise, we won’t have anything to notify you about.

There are several ways to view the list of stories on the site.  The main page always lists the five most recently validated stories, but there are several other options.  You can click the Most Recent tab for a complete list of all the stories updated in the past seven days; Titles will give you a complete list of all stories hosted on MVF.  You can also Search, if you know the penname or title you’re looking for.

So, let’s click on Most Recent.  The first story listed (right now) is ‘I’ll always have Paris’, by Penn Ames.  Each story starts and ends with thick blue bars.  In the top one, you’ll find the title, author, rating and number of reviews.  In the bottom bar, you’ll find Add Story to Favorites, Add Author to Favorites and Report This.  Click Add Story to Favorites, and you’ll automatically be emailed every time the author submits a new chapter (‘I’ll Always Have Paris’ currently has nineteen chapters with more to come).

If you choose Add Author to Favorites you’ll be notified each time the author submits anything new, regardless of which story it belongs too or if the story is new.  This is great if you’ve read other stories by this author and know that you want to read everything they post.

You can also favorite a series in this same way.  Click on Series from the homepage and you’ll find the same list and the same blue bars.  The only difference is that these are series, not individual stories.

Another feature that a lot of people overlook, is the Top Tens lists.  From the homepage click Top Tens. There are thirteen options on this page, ranging from Most Favorite Series (Wicked Wednesday) to Longest Story (Horizons by MVF staff writer Megsly) to Most Prolific Reviewer (currently our very own Saluki, but wouldn’t you love to be the one to dethrone her!!)  Check out these lists.  The stories, series’ and authors listed here have been reviewed and favorited and basically recommended to you by your peers- other readers.

Back to the homepage again (I know I jump around a lot, sorry!).  There are always three featured fics.  We change these out every Wednesday, in honor of Wicked Wednesday- and that week’s Wicked Wednesday fic is always featured.  The other two fics are featured because their validation betas have brought them to our attention as being well written, well thought out, all around good fics.  Be sure you give these fics a read, every week; who knows, you may find a new favorite!

Challenges – This is where you can find your writing inspiration, or inspire others.  Site members can issue challenges to other writers, or respond to challenges issued by others.

I think that covers most of the site.  If you guys have any questions or comments, post them below and we’ll get them answered!

♥SB

Th-th-th-th-th-that’s all folks!!