Promotion, Promotion, Promotion

Even real people can make for hot fanfic!You can't get anywhere in this crazy workaday world without promoting your fanfic. It used to be that the Internet was a little homespun community of guys who liked Gundam Wing writing stories to jack off to. Once the big corporations took over with their Pets.com this and their Govworks.com that it became all glitz and glamour. A simple Dragon Ball Z Goku inflation fanfic couldn't hope to get noticed without an IPO and venture capital investors. Then came the Internet crash and with it the web rings. As a form of distributed marketing, web rings allow fanfic authors to share promotion with each other. It's basically a communist collective farm of Xena dyking out with Calisto, but it works and that's the important part.

Whether you're writing fast and dirty Skinner and Mulder slash or a romantic epic about some minor Final Fantasy character marrying Kefka you can rely on web rings to get the word out. Join as many web rings as you can. In fact include as many crossovers as possible in your story so that you can join the web rings. You don't have to really include them in the plot, just have Highlanders and Autobots jerking off in the background of a random sex sequence.

The Five Commandments

Allow me to leave you with the five commandments of erotic fanfiction. Handed down from the elders of the largest Mr. Bean erotic fanfiction webring these rules are immutable and universal. If you follow them then you can rest assured you have created an original and compelling piece of garbage for horrible nerds to beat off to.

1. Thou shalt not be afraid of the taboo. Inflation, cripple and amputation fetishes, cannibalism, and even child rape can all fit into the framework of your 300 page novel about Penny from Inspector Gadget.

2. Thou shalt not ignore the obscure. The Sentinel, Nightman, and MANTIS, are all perfectly viable choices for erotic fanfiction despite the fact that they were cancelled almost immediately. Your obsession with rejected TV shows should know no bounds.

3. Thou shalt always include thyself. Self-insertion fanfiction makes the world go round. After all, who wants to jack off to Lara Croft and Xena having lesbian sex when they could instead jack off to Lara Croft and Xena tag-teaming some anonymous dork from the Internet? Don't be afraid to include friends and relatives as well. Try to work all of your social issues into the story.

4. Thou shalt arbitrarily continue your story until you die from eating too many Cheetohs. The greatest stories ever told didn't have a beginning, middle, or end, they just kept going and going and were filled with seemingly random plot twists and the inclusion of the entire TGIF lineup.

5. Thou shalt grow angry at the slightest criticism for thou art a true artist. Your work is genius and there is no reason to be ashamed. Those who dare to criticize your Tifa genital torture sequence are simpletons who fail to comprehend the gravitas of your work. One day ten thousand years from now alien philosophers will ponder the meaning of your Trunks/Cloud mutual masturbation sequence, and then your existence will be vindicated.

Go out into the wide open world of the Internet and prosper! You are chosen to lead our people to a promised land of violent man-on-man X-Files love affairs and tender lesbian Sailor Moon yarns. God be with you all.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)

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