Personally, I'm against tagging at all.
If you have a good premise and a good summary, people are going to read your stuff whether you have it tagged or not.
No, tagging is pretty useful. Helps clarify content and what not and attract readers interested in certain stories. I think you should tag pairings/possible pairings (if you don't want to give away any spoilers), genre (hurt/comfort, shipping fic, AU, etc.), and possible trigger warnings (rape, assault, domestic abuse, and so on). I'm most used to the tumblr and Archive of Our Own tagging system, so I don't know how applicable this would be else where.
Clarifying content? Attracting readers? Isn't that what the summary is for? Isn't that why we keep nagging new authors to write a proper summary instead of just saying "I Suck at Summaries"?
I'm not using any sites with a tagging system, so I find the whole thing jarring to begin with. For me, tagging belongs to boorus, not literature archives.
edited 12th Sep '15 2:56:26 PM by amitakartok
If you have a pairing, tag the people involved.
It makes it easier for the readers who are interested in the kind of story you write to find your work. For example, you have written a story with a specific pairing. The readers who like this pairing can filter out your story from all the others which don't have said pairing. (Personally I think that fanfiction writers should only tag their final pairing...I have, for example, a very hard time to find good John/Mary fanfiction because most of the story which are tagged that way have actually Johnlock as endpairing and tag it only because they spend the first half of the story breaking John and Mary up).
Staring At My Own Grave
I tend to appreciate people tagging for pairings because there are some pairings that I like / tolerate and others that I'd rather not have what seems like a bait-and-switch on. It can be vital in some fandoms, too. One of my current fandoms, for instance - has almost every fan fiction writer for it pairing up brothers/clones and... I do not see that kind of relationship in canon and I have a visceral squick toward incest (because...incest) and to "clone-cest" ( Screw Yourself always has struck me as narcisistic if nothing else) . Sometimes, people in this fandom will explicitly tag "no pairings" or "as brothers" to attract more gen-minded readers like me and to show they are going against the grain of most of the fandom.
I personally like to tag if I think I've written something where the themes are particularly triggering or injury-descriptions might be excessive for some people. Most of the time, I don't care to tag because I think rating, genre-tag (if horror) and hints in my summary cover it... and a lot of "my readers" know what to expect of my fics. However, If I really think something is harrowing or I want to actually attract a certain kind of reader as ghoulish as I am to a story, I'll throw a tag on.
On Ao3, I'm pretty sure a few of my fics have tags on to be funny. I've thrown a few goofy tags on, just for fun.
In which I attempt to be a writer.
Whoever the main characters are (what characters are present for over three quarters of the story), what the main ship is if there is one, and what genre the fic fits in best. If you don't want to spoil what the ships are, at least include if it's het/slash/multi etc. That's what I have an eye on more then what the specific ship is anyway.
I find that all too often, people will use the tagging section for a summary of what goes on in the fic and they still won't include the genre and major themes of the fic. I find genre tags to be extremely helpful as they help me find fics that fit the mood of what I want to read. Major themes of a fic are helpful as well.
A good rule of thumb is that individual tags should be one word in length and that the entire tagging section should not take up more visible space then the actual summary of the fic (unless the summary of the fic is supper short). Tags are more there for the search engine, the summary is for the person who might read the fic.
edited 12th Sep '15 11:13:15 PM by ObsidianFire
Yeah, I agree, I hate it when people try to be funny in the tags, because those are not helpful at all.
I think one should only tag the main characters (otherwise the list of names is getting too long), unless there is a rare character in the story. That one should be tagged even if the role is not that big.
In recent times I have stumbled over a couple of writers who basically said "I hope I tagged this right". So I thought how about we collect some thoughts about what is the best way to tag a Fanfic properly, and perhaps discuss some aspects. Like, how many tags should you use, is it a good idea to tag pairings which are part of the fanfic but are not the endgame, should one tag a story as slash and gen, and so any.
So, any thoughts?