Hi J, I want to ask you this; How can I be successful in writing Sherlock fic, Thank you so very much.

Depends on what you mean by success. In the world of fic, is that finding a nice, receptive, insightful, understanding audience? That audience doesn’t need to be thousandfold. Or, are you chasing the numbers — lots of hits, plenty of kudos, piles of comments? Or is success being simply well-known within the fandom for whatever reason?

Just like there are one-hit-wonder artists, there are fic authors whose fame within a fandom may be based on even just one stellar story. Then there are those who have written dozens and dozens of consistently high-quality and popular stories and enjoy a certain position of familiarity in the minds of their fellow fans because of that.

Or… could success be that you’re please with your stories, that you’ve achieved your writing goals with them and feel like you have developed your writing skills along the way? Equating AO3 statistics with story quality is the wrong way to go. Every skilled author has to start somewhere.

In fact, success can be all of those things that I mentioned above. 

For the sake of argument I’ll assume that by success, you mean becoming a popular author who gets a nice amount of comments and other reader interaction, and whose name is familiar to many fandom members. How does one achieve that status?

The short answer would be hell if I know (LOL). The long answer would be that I think there are many ways to climb that mountain. It can happen fast or it can happen slow. You might have to chip away at it for years, or perhaps a big-name fan suddenly discovers your work, loves it and promotes it. It’s a combination of hard work and luck. There are also types of fic which are more popular than others.

Let’s have a look at some of the features I have noticed in the fic lives and careers of popular Sherlock authors. Not all big-name ones feature all of these, but there may be some commonalities.

Good language skills. Thank god the occasional typo, grammar error and oddity can be ignored by most readers, but frequent mistakes will put off a lot of people. Get a beta — a native speaker one. Listen to them. Use Grammarly or some other tool. Work on building your vocabulary. Know your canon right down to the smallest detail. Getting major canon details wrong can easily make you look like a recent arrival (nothing wrong with that, of course, but we’re aiming for the stars here so let’s be ambitious.

Fresh angle and distinct style. What separates your Sherlock stories from those of other authors? Identify that, and cultivate it. We’ve seen particularly inventive, sexy and well-characterised AUs launch their first-timer authors into instant stardom. Be original. @engazed is a splendid example.

Consistency in quality. @silentauroriamthereal is the perfect example. In terms of the quality of writing, picking up a SilentAuror fic is like picking up a bottle of champagne instead of some cheap bubbly — the brand is a guarantee of excellence.

Complex, novel-length fiction. Lots of readers love short stories, but the really popular authors tend to also do multiple chapter stories. They don’t need to be posted one chapter at a time — for instance, SilentAuror publishes entire stories on one go — but they can be, and that way of doing it can help inspire readers to comment more and to stick with a story after getting suspended in the excitement of a good cliffhanger.

Deliver what you promise. Don’t publish WIPs which get abandoned. Yes, it can happen to even experienced, skilled authors, but there is a simple fix to this: do not published a story until you’ve written enough of it that you can be certain it will get finished. Having to wait years for chapter 21/? can put off a lot of readers, and there are many in your potential audience who don’t even read WIPs.

Never publish a rough draft. Once again, find a beta. Fix what they suggest. Edit your stories. Fine-tune them. Let them simmer. Never push out anything that’s not polished. It seems to be a very common beginner mistake to push out chapter 1/? instantly once it’s drafted, get a few comments, then realise they have no clue what to do with the story next, and it gets abandoned.

I would always advise anyone to write what they want to write, not what they think is popular. I like to believe that being calculating by writing something just to please an audience rather than pouring one’s real passions into the text would show in the look and feel of the story. That being said, there are ships which are more popular than others, and in the Sherlock fandom in particular, stories containing (well-written!) explicit sex are warmly embraced. A gen casefic will, sadly, tend to get less readers regardless of the writing quality than a steamy johnlock romance will.

Success can’t be produced alone. You need your fellow fans for it. I think you’ve had a good start in interacting with them, which is something I always recommend if someone wants advice on how to find a readership. Tell people about your stories, but don’t be obnoxious about it (my pet peeve are new authors who show up in other people’s AO3 comment sections just to promote their own work). Be interested in their stories and help spread the word about them. Comment on fics. Rec fics on Tumblr and Twitter. Make friends. This is a community above all.

Finally, the most important piece of advice:Write. Write some more. Write a lot. Write many stories. Publish them. 

This is the one step you can’t avoid if you want to be a successful fic writer: you gotta do the writing.

Rare is the author who rises to fandom stardom overnight with just one or two stories (SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John is a rare example). Only writing can teach you to write better, and the more you publish, the more likely people are to discover your stories. A readership is born and grows slowly, but once a certain critical mass is achieved, it growth will start spurring itself on. Except on rare occasions, the only way to get there is one step at a time.