My main activity here on steemit is reading and writing fiction. As anyone who reads fiction, I have genres I really like such as most of scifi excluding the military, fantasy excluding the vampires and werewolves that seem to be everywhere today, but most of all I like my fiction speculative and brainy.

When I post a chapter from my ongoing work, there is the option to add up to five tags, and like so many others here on steemit I've mostly been using the sweeping tags that really don't tell much about the (sub)genre I'm writing in. But then the subgenre for my current work is kind of hard to frame. There is alternate history with postapocalyptic ... err ... postcryptocalyptic aspects, but then when I think about it hard, the speculative fiction genre my work fits in best would be mythpunk.

And I'm not the only mythpunk author here on steemit. @everittdmickey wrote an amazing series in that very same subgenre, and I'm quite confident that if i was to spent a day or two browsing the sweeping fiction, books, writing and story tags, there would probably be a few more mythpunk authors writing cool stuff.

Recently I started off by replacing my old primary tag ,book, with the main genre of my work mythpunk, and to be fair, it hurts a bit. I get less views on my work, less upvotes and as a result ofcause, less payout on my posts. As people are less likely to find my work now with one less sweeping tag to search in, its quite expectable for exposure to go down in the short run.

I would like to argue though, that if you as a fiction author also start using the more specific genre classifiers, and help promote the use of more specific genre and subgenre tags by other this should sort itself out. Once clusters of authors start forming around subgenres, we should expect lovers of those subgenres to come flock to these clusters.

My argument thus: Start using an appropriate subgenre name as the primary tag, a genre as the second tag and maybe third if appropriate and only use the sweeping tags as the trailer to the tag list. Yes you will possibly get less views and receive less payout in the short run, but in the long run, it should make steemit a much better platform for fiction, making it easier for readers and writers to find each other.

Starting with my next Ragnarok Conspiracy chapter, my tag list will look as followed:

mythpunk speculative scifi fiction story

If you write fiction, I really hope you will follow this example. Use genre as tag. Use subgenre as the primary tag. Help make it easier for readers to find the work they really love, even if it means that possibly, for a while they may end up less likely to find your work.

I truly hope I am making sense here and that I am getting through to other fiction authors in a way about the importance to the platform.

@croupierbot

If you are a minnow author by the definition used by the @croupierbot Minnow Fiction Author Support Lottery (you have less than 10.0 MVEST to your name and haven't powered down), a bit of a teaser for the upcoming $5.- SBD lottery. In the next lottery that should be announced in a few days, you can nominate Minnow Fiction Author posts, but only posts that use the genre or subgenre of the fiction at hand as one of the posting tags will compete.

I will look how things go with that lottery to see if I'll use the same prerequisite for consecutive draws.