Quote by centrum1000
when does being drunk cross the line of consent?
When the person does something, or is coerced into doing something, out of character or they're uncomfortable with, because they're unable to make an informed decision due to being under the influence.
Same with mind control. Suggestion is fine, but the ultimate choice over whether to go through with any act must be taken by the individual, either at the time or prearranged.
Quote by M_K_Babalon
I was told by a mod, that one main thing they and the site goes by, is Chicago writing style.
If a mod told you this, they're wrong or were pulling your leg, lol. The guidelines are:
1. Is it readable?
2. Is it formatted consistently and legibly so readers can follow it (i.e. standard English conventions for paragraphing, basic grammar, spelling, dialogue formatting, etc)?
3. Does it fit within our terms of service?
4. Will someone find it sexy?
That's pretty much it. There's no house style, and certainly not one that's mainly useful for academic writing. Moderators do have differing levels of interpretation of the guidelines because we all come from varying backgrounds and countries of the world, but the basic principles are those above and no more.
There's no "need" to do anything different. It's up to you. The Novels category may well stay, who knows.
Quote by wxt55uk
With each chapter, I find myself changing the original storyline to mould it to fit a genre... this novel feels like it is being chopped up into a series of short stories within the longer one
That's surely down to writing confidence and structure? A movie is made up of scenes and each scene is about something and they join together to form a cohesive whole. Chase scene. Love scene. Dramatic tension scene. Backstory scene. Character hits rock bottom scene. Overcomes it and learns something scene.
In an erotic novel, if you can't break a story down into defined scenes that fit together then it implies the overall structure might need work. I doubt anybody embarks on a movie with no idea of what highs and lows, scene beats and character interactions are taking place along the way. So if an author doesn't have a plan for the novel and just writes each chapter as it comes, it will feel choppy.
I don't know what obstacles you need to overcome to adapt your existing work to Lush (content terms of service violations or simply editing, for example) but if the original isn't able to be broken up into scenes as it is written, then maybe restructuring it as a whole would be prudent before attempting to serialise it?
If all you want to do is break it up every 8k words or so and publish each part in Novels, go for it. Now we have the ability to refine by tags, and improved searching is on the way, maybe it makes moot the fact that there isn't much of a signal in the Novels category as to what the story is about?
The only reason removing it was even being considered, as I've mentioned a few times in this thread, is because putting things in defined categories with appropriate tags and threading them together with the Series link feature is a stronger signal to readers and search engines that helps put your work in front of more people who want to read it. If you're happy not taking that opportunity, it's entirely your call.
Quote by kistinspencil
So the only way to add to it is to use the Lush design thing or do an upload from the story edit page
I think so. I've not found any other way.
Quote by kistinspencil
Where is that located?
From your profile > Stories panel, click the Covers subtab.
It is a thing. And you've commented 😃
However, due to the manual nature at present, if you've emailed your audio story off, it won't have been assigned yet because the dev team are on holiday till next week.
Quote by HoseJockey55
How can I edit or change a cover image
Visit your story, scroll down and hit Edit. You can then click the cover pic to upload or select a new one. If it's been designed in the on-site designer it should load it up and be editable, but sometimes if there's a lot of site traffic it struggles for some reason.
Bear in mind if you change the pic, it removes your story from the site and puts it back in your Stories > Drafts area so you'll need to Preview it and resubmit to the moderators. Please put a quick message in the Moderator Notes box to say you just changed the cover and we should be able to get it back on the site fairly quickly.
It is supposed to notify you but I think it got inadvertently missed off the list of alerts. I'll prod the dev team when they're back in the office and see if they can add the notification.
RRs can be awarded any time, even years later if a mod stumbles across a piece from yesteryear and loves it. So a notification is important. Thank you for raising this.
Woohoo! First one of these things I've managed to place. Really enjoyed reading everyone's takes on the theme, and loved the other deserved winning entries. Honoured to be the filling in a Susie-Annie sandwich.
Thank you Kimmi (and Jen) for the generous prize coins. And to Dom Twin for reading and judging. Kimmi, you are a beacon of awesome here.
Yeah that's all good. Entirely up to you how you use them. I'd love the site to have some UX love one day with regards navigation hierarchy, content positioning and, most importantly, a few colour accents that aren't bloody red!
With regards the Refine By Tag functionality, as it stands, the unfiltered tag set is fairly static because the 8 offered are the top, most popular tags for that category. And for the home page it's the 8 most popular tags across the site. The tags are filtered based on other search criteria you type as well, so if you type more options, you get a different list.
When you select one, you then get a list of tags based on the most popular tags used in the stories that feature the first tag you clicked on (plus your other search criteria). And so on for each one you click as it narrows the filter to a smaller pool of stories that feature all the ones you select.
So, unless there's a glut of people writing stories about Bon Jovi lyrics who also use your tag, it's highly unlikely to pop up in the Refine By Tag set.
Quote by Chet_Morton
Imagine the disappointment of debuting the tags triple titfuck and bon jovi quotes and then discovering that newly created tags get buried at the end of your list. 😅
Yeah they're ordered by creation date at the moment, which is a bit annoying. But, side quest, before making any more you might like to read up on how to make the best use of tags. 😃
Yeah, dunno. There's a ruddy great chapter series drop-down at the top of each story if authors use it to thread chapters together. How many readers gloss over it because it's styled in yet more red 🙄🤣 or don't care about the rest of the novel because they're only interested in jacking off to the specific content in this particular chapter is anyone's guess.
Quote by JustForYou
a synopsis feature
Yeah, this is a good idea. If there was some way to autogenerate a table of contents, or for an author to state that chapter 1 is straight sex, chapters 2 and 3 are BDSM, chapter 4 is facesitting, etc, and that was available as a flyout on every chapter / submission of a novel, it would help readers and search engines to find and index the content more meaningfully. That way, we could keep the Novels genre and still benefit from more nuanced searching.
The only way to do that at present is with tags. But until we can set the tags in order of importance (and if all authors adopt this convention!) it's difficult to achieve with the current site tools.
Quote by JourneyYoung
if you tag something "novel" you basically lose out on what the top-level category for the story actually is.
Yes, and that's the primary driver behind the proposal. "Novel" carries no weight at the URL level, both for potential readers and for search engines. The only way to determine genre is via tags or reading the whole thing. And as you say, tags aren't sortable. Yet.
But if you were to put chapter 7 in the Facesitting category, you attract people who camp on categories to find new stories, and it's a strong signal to search engine spiders that the story is about that topic, allowing better results for people who search outside of the site (i.e. potentially bringing in more specific traffic from people who don't know about the site).
The predominant arguments against ditching it seem to be:
a) People who combine chapters into one submission can't easily categorise the various story arcs in one genre. That's a valid concern, except multi-chapter submissions are a bit of a hack to get round writing too-short chapters. Even a chapter of 1-2K words is still a chapter and could be a discrete unit, published separately. And according to the story length poll, combining chapters with the intent of beefing up the word count may harm your chances of people reading the entry.
b) Authors don't want people to dive into a chapter in the middle of the story and would prefer it was read from chapter 1, in series. This is impossible to achieve on the web. That's like saying you wish people would always land on the home page of your website and navigate from there to find what they want. Every page of a website is potentially a home page when search engines allow you to jump in anywhere. It's your job as a website content creator (or story teller, in this case) to make sure they land on something relevant and to inform them it's a multi-chapter piece and might not make sense without the earlier bits.
Interestingly, the above phenomenon is not unique to putting the stories in specific categories vs putting them all in the Novels category. If someone searches for a set of keywords, and chapter 11 pops up in the search results, would you as an author want to stop them reading it and force them to start at chapter 1? No. It's conceited to think that you would. The only way you can mostly guarantee that outcome, would be to publish it all in one loooong story (a single URL) and omit anchor points at chapter junctions.
We do have the same issue with Microfiction and Flash Fiction: neither of them indicate genre. And it is annoying. But the difference there is that each offer a specific and defined challenge for authors, while the Novels category doesn't. And we don't allow chapter series in the Micro and Flash categories.
End of the day, the site needs to connect readers with content they want to read. So any and all signals we can use to achieve that is a win.
Quote by wxt55uk
I have slowly been adding a novel tag to my many novel genre chapters.
That's fine. If you want to duplicate tags and category, nobody is going to stop you. All I meant was that it's usually redundant because people will tend to search for stuff in that category anyway so you can use one of the 10 slots for other tags instead. But if you want to use both, by all means do so, which allows people who are maybe not specifically interested in that genre alone to find your work when browsing tags.
In the case of "novel", it makes total sense to add it as a tag in case the category ever gets axed.
Quote by wxt55uk
There doesn't seem to be a way to orderly arrange tags
No, sadly not at present. It's system-determined. The dev team are aware of it and are seeing if there's a way to let us set the order.
You could thematically link them. That would work. If there's no obvious follow-on from one to the next, it's fine.
What we're trying to avoid in Flash and Micros is someone telling a single story 100(0) words at a time: chapter 1, 2, 3, ... Anything else is fair game.
Love this idea, Kimmi. Thank you. Here's mine...
City lights stretch twelve floors beneath my open robe and juice-coated thighs.
“For real?”
Cole’s measured tone, tinny through the speaker: “You'll know as the clock strikes midnight.”
The hotel TV broadcasts New Year’s countdown. New opportunity.
Heart racing, I withdraw sticky fingers from my pussy. Inhale. Shuck shoulders, silk pooling my ankles.
The muzzle flash from the building opposite precedes the tinny ricochet.
“Good girl. You just made partner.”
Quote by kistinspencil
If it is the first three in the list, how are we to control that? The order of the tags is not always maintained when a story is posted.
I don't think it'll be the first three in the list. And I've asked if we can control the order of the tags. They're considering it.
Quote by pinkysurprise
"Top three" meaning "the three most popular" or "the first three"?
I don't know yet. I'm awaiting clarification. I presume the most popular but don't quote me.
Quote by lynnwitt
It must be stored in a cookie
Yes. localStorage, so it's a silo for private browsing sessions.
Quote by kistinspencil
Ten tags is a tenth of a whole micro. If I see that many, I'll probably just skip it altogether.
I've made a note for you about Microfiction specifically in the Summary section of the OP, but it stands to reason not to force tags if they don't fit. A few well-chosen, relevant tags are better than a glut of loosely coupled tags for the sake of filling the available slots.
It's a judgement call and entirely up to you. The tools are merely there if you wish to improve the chances of people discovering your work on the back of similar stories they enjoyed.
There's no AI involved, haha. It just looks at the tags and looks at the popular stories du jour and picks the first three it comes to (assuming there are three: there may be fewer, or none). An hour later the situation may have changed and you might see a different set.
At the moment, matches will probably be weak because, frankly, tag use is a little haphazard. Hopefully over time, as authors choose better tags and we weed out the more obscure ones, matches will improve.
There's no implication of endorsement whatsoever. Why would there be? Amazon sellers don't endorse "Products you might like" at the bottom of their pages. People who write a health blog don't have any say if a link to a web page about suppositories pops up in the Google search results. It's based purely on matching tags and what others are reading.
What you're saying is that if someone writes a story on oral sex in a bar bathroom, you don't want your story Don't judge a book... to be suggested, so someone who enjoyed that type of story could try yours?
As of this week, story tags take on a more prominent role in Lush so if you wish to improve your story visibility then you, as authors, should choose the best tags that fit your story themes. Doing so will increase your chances of readers finding your work.
Here are the ways tags interplay now:
On the main stories page or any category story list page (e.g. Seduction), you can use the Search feature to find keywords and refine your searches by clicking one or more tags. The more tags you click of the most popular ones listed, the better the match, as the story must contain ALL of them AND your search term(s) to be considered.
Clicking any tag or category when reading a story will list all stories containing that tag (e.g. Cunnilingus). You can then click up to 8 tags, adding more popular tags to refine the search to stories that contain all of them. As above, you can twist down the Search box and type keywords or author name or select a genre to narrow it further to find what you want to read.
Between the end of a story and its comments, a Similar Stories area displays up to three trending stories that either match the top three tags in the current story OR the top three trending stories from the same category (if the current story has no tags). This acts like a "You enjoyed this story, so you might also like..." shortcut.
Since tags are now used to make story suggestions, it pays dividends to carefully choose the best fitting and most popular tags that represent themes in your story. Imagine if a visitor reads an anal, milf, schoolteacher story and your story comes up in the Similar Stories list. If they click on it to discover you've lied and your story doesn't contain those elements, you're going to piss readers off and they won't come back to your work.
The art of picking good tags is to use ones that are already there. Avoid creating new ones unless absolutely necessary. So, when you start to type a tag name, browse the list that pops up and click the best fitting tag. Repeat for each theme represented in your story. You can attach up to 10 tags, so it makes sense to list as many as possible to increase your chances of discovery.
Think about how a reader might search for your content. If you create your own tag such as 'nineteen-year-old student teacher' then you'll be the only person with that tag and it is unlikely to ever become popular. So, unless someone else happens to write an identical type of story and uses your tag, your story will never appear on anyone's Similar Stories list. That means you're cutting off your potential exposure.
It would be far better to use three tags here:
nineteen-year-old
student
teacher
Then, anyone who uses those three (fairly common) tags on their story will potentially match your story in their Similar Stories list, and anyone who refines their search to add one or more of these tags because they like nineteen-year-old student teacher stories are more likely to find yours in the results.
Unless the tags are popular age denominators (16, 17, 18, 21, and 30 are common) then it's probably better not to waste a tag for something like 'fifty-one-year-old' because very few people will be looking for someone specifically of that age. It'd be better to use a range like 'mid-fifties' if you think age plays an important part in the enjoyment of your story. If it's incidental, consider not using such a tag.
Think also about the language you use in your story and try to match tags to suit it. If your characters are a bit posher, you might consider the tag 'fellatio'. If your main character is a street hooker, you might choose 'cocksucking' or 'bj' or 'blowjob' instead. Again, the idea is to choose tags that reflect your content as well as possible.
A further note on this: there's not much point using a tag that's exactly the same as the genre/category of your story. Anyone who wants to find stories that are in one of our categories should use the category search filter, as it's a stronger signal and more likely to yield stories that match their interests. Tags are used to refine the search and provide additional context about specific thematic elements in your story. Note that the tag refiner will filter out any tags that exactly match any genre chosen as a category search parameter.
To increase the chances of exposure and allow readers to find content they will enjoy:
Choose relevant tags that represent story themes in which you think people might be interested to search.
Choose from existing tags where possible and do not create your own unless absolutely necessary and you think others will start to use them.
Choose popular tags where possible.
Choose appropriately worded tags that fit the narrative style of the story.
Use as many of the 10 available tag slots as you can, but don't put tags in for the sake of it to fill up empty slots. Relevance is key. Microfiction stories may, for example, employ far fewer due to the limited word count of those stories.
Hopefully the above information will help you select the perfect tags for your story that allow readers to find your work and enjoy it.
Call it divine intervention or zeitgeist or whathaveyou, but your shirehorse is in the lobby: a bookmark feature went live yesterday.
To access it:
1. Start reading a story.
2. Nudge the scrollbar up a smidge to make the bottom story toolbar appear.
3. Click Bookmark to store your position.
This also works on audio stories. When you revisit the story, it will scroll down to where you bookmarked.
A few caveats:
If you bookmark the same story twice, a popup tries to appear (presumably to ask if you want to overwrite the bookmark) but it's obscured by the story text. It's been reported and hopefully that's a simple tweak.
It only works if you're browsing in a regular window. If you're using an incognito/private browser window, it will only remember the position for the duration of your session.
Otherwise, enjoy.
Quote by joe71
I'm in! Amy's Mom
And very good it is too.
I'm also in. Some fabulous stories in the competition that's already bursting with festive fuckery. And with 10 days left, there's plenty of room for more. Get your fingers tapping and join the fun.
Can a man not even shave in peace?
Teen
Quote by Chet_Morton
record himself in multi-track, singing it as a barbershop quartet. Is that an appropriate use of this feature?
If it turns people on, sure 😃
