I finally wrote part 2. Click here to read it.

Awesome. You’ve written a fanfiction. Now you want to post it. Where does it go? Do you post to fanfiction? ArchiveOfOurOwn? Livejournal? Tumblr? Well aren’t they the same? Not at all! Each website, even though they each have a rather wide audience, each have different audiences. So, let’s first get an introduction to the different fanfiction websites there are. In my second post, we can look at the audiences for each, and where to post for each story.

I do know some of these websites more than others and so I apologize if I miss specific features. I also spend a majority of my time in the anime and manga area of fanfiction, thus most of my knowledge is based off experiences in those areas. The first half is mainly factual and covers three of the websites that I have experience with, while the second half is more opinion based and covers a lot of other websites that I don’t spend as much time with. There will be salt. Lots and lots of salt.

Ff.net is arguably the biggest and most popular place to post your fanfiction. Being over a decade old, there’s plenty of stories for you to dig through, as well as a wide range of story plots for you to read.

Pros: Ff.net has the largest audience, and tends to thus have the greatest diversity in both writers and readers. Most likely, you’ll find something there. It also has a large list of betas available for each fandom and communities which are collections of stories in a fandom that all have some common feature, whether that be a ship, plot point, or type of AU. It also shows your favorites to everyone so that they can see what stories you enjoyed and authors you prefer. Lastly, its sorting feature, allows to narrow down by pairing, genre, rating, and other things.

Cons: While ff.net has an abundance of writers, there also tends to be a rather large amount of complete shit stories within each fandom as well. Though it is true with any site, it is particularly true with this one. It also seems to be getting filled with cliche, overused tropes that all seem to be written by an elementary kid. Though it does have a sorting feature, many do find it lacking in comparison to others, and also technically bans MA or explicit stories. (Not that that’s stopped any of us). Lastly, many writers find the story uploading process to be a pain in the ass though I personally am not bothered by it.

Archive is a much newer fanfiction website, and though there are less users, many attest to the fact that the stories are much better in general. Though still technically in beta, you wouldn’t know it. Argued as to whether it’s a pro or con, archive does not let you automatically let you create an account, instead putting you on a wait list to sign up with and from there sending out a certain amount of invitations per day to actually make an account.

Pros: Ao3 tends to have a more mature audience. It also includes more fandoms with real life people such as celebrities. It also allows for explicit stories, as well as easier browsing tools, allowing readers in a simple glance to see rating, completion, pairing (M/M, F/M, F/F, other, general, and no pairing) and content warnings for sensitive material. They also include tags, so if you’re looking for a story that’s au, or perhaps centered around a certain topic, you can search for stories in that fandom with that specific tag. Archive also has a much more customizable search function (Not that I can figure it out) and also does not filter out crossovers. You can also download stories that you read, and bookmark others that you might want to. Lastly, you can change the website’s interface, under skins, making smaller margins, larger text, and changing colors. There’s also a collections section, similar to ff.net’s community feature, though I don’t know anything about it.

Cons: Since the website is newer, you’re not going to find classics written 7 years ago like you will on ff.net. You’re also going to have a much smaller selection of stories for different mediums, and in general. (Naruto has 387k stories on ff.net. Archive has 12k) Granted, most of the ff.net stories will be shit, but there’s still some hidden treasures in there. AO3 also has a rather steep learning curve when it comes to figuring out how to navigate everything and all its features (and some things are just confusing as hell). Lastly, it has no messaging feature

Wattpad, unlike the other two websites listed above, is home to both fanfiction and original stories. Most famous for its One Direction stories, it houses a wide variety in both fanfiction and general fiction. It houses some impressive, professional-looking book covers, and some website wide contests.



Pros: If you’re looking for One Direction stories, you’ve come to the right place. Wattpad also features site wide contests for everyone to participate in. It also has some of the best organizational features for readers with an easy to navigate library.

Cons: Wattpad is more focused around original stories than actual fanfiction unless you’re in the above mentioned One Direction fandom. There also tends to be a younger audience (ie middle and highschool) on Wattpad. It’s also heavily centered around the romance genre, so general stories are few and far between. Lastly, it’s near impossible to use the site without making an account, with popups that you can’t bypass telling you to join.

Part 2

In which I didn’t know enough to write a pros and cons list, I only needed to mention a few things, or I needed to be a bit salty.

Wattpad: I will start by saying that I don’t use Wattpad anymore and used it only for a short period of time in which I had reached the bottom of the barrel for stories. I find the user base lacking anything actually mature and its authors seem to have never heard of a complex sentence as there is no flow to most of their stories at all. The stories are also only sorted by most popular and thus only gives the shitty, cliched stories that are Mary Sue self inserts any attention at all and the fans themselves tend to be air headed middle school kids whose vain attempts to write only end in spectacular failure. And frankly, who wants to actually admit that they use Wattpad?

Livejournal: I will admit it. I know what livejournal is, I know it houses fanfiction, and I have gone to the website. I still have no idea how to use it though, and thus I can’t really write much about it.

DeviantArt: I don’t think I would have found out that Deviant Art even hosted text posts if it hadn’t been for the poetry that would occasionally pop up on the front page back before their website had decided to finally enter this decade’s design scheme. I find that the only fanfiction DeviantArt really has is reader inserts, usually within the Hetalia fandom. And we all know how reader inserts narrated in second person usually work out (I’ll give you a hint: its not the most pretty thing). Now that I’m just confessing all of my fanfiction sins, I might as well admit that I did spend a few dark weeks in the reader insert stories, looking for Levi x readers stories from Attack on Titan and Jack Frost x Reader stories from Rise of the Guardians and Kuroko no Basket *shivers* Dark times indeed. The website is also actually pretty strict on its mature content, and lemon/smut posts are actually taken down pretty quickly, which, really, is the only reason I was desperate enough to read the reader inserts in the first place.

Tumblr: No link because I’m gonna assume you’re on Tumblr because that’s where this was originally posted. Tumblr has some of the most creative, wide range of fanfiction there is, and I find most of it rather great, and the Role Playing communities are also quite lovely. It would be my go to fanfiction website if, you know, it was somewhat easier to find the stories. We’ve all gone through that struggle of trying to find a post only to be completely clueless as to where it went. So, all in all, tag yo shit.

Quotev: Not gonna lie. I have yet to find a fanfiction story on this website that I actually found decent. I look at it in the same way that a Reddit user looks at iFunny and Buzzfeed when they steal stuff off Reddit. Except I just kinda despise Quotev because of it’s terrible mobile layout for reading and its terrible stories in general.