I rant about this often, and I finally decided to put it up on my LJ in the hopes that someone would see it and help make fanfiction.net a better place.

Despite the old saying of, "Don't judge a book by its cover," most people tend to judge appearances anyway. Which is why your title and summary are extremely important when posting a fic. Small errors can turn a lot of people off, so it's very unreasonable to whine about a lack of reviews when there's something you can do besides shouting at your readers.

Titles are not as big a problem as summaries, but they are worth mentioning anyway. In titles, the first word of the title and nouns and verbs should be capitalized while small words (i.e. as, the, a, was) should not. Remember your helping verbs. Another thing that should be addressed is the usage of numbers in titles. "Queen of My Heart: Part One" looks a lot more professional than "Queen of my heart part 1." Don't believe me? Look at any book with a title that follows the aforementioned example.

One of my biggest issues with titles is spelling and grammar. Spellcheck is there for a reason. Don't make excuses about "I didn't know how to spell it" when you know perfectly well you have a way of checking it. People will think you're stupid and careless for making such an error and will most likely not read it. Remember: The better it looks, the more readers you're likely to have.

Finally, most authors have trouble with titles; they almost always seem to sound stupid. DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT! Unless it is completely irrelevant to the fic, it's fine.

Now, onto summaries. Much of the above goes for summaries as well: Proper spelling, grammar and capitalization should be observed, numbers should be spelled out, etc. Don't apologize for the summary; everyone always hates their summaries and it's a rare talent to write a perfect summary.

Please, please don't ask for reviews in the summary. It's annoying. It implies that you only care about reviews, even if that's not the case. Those little "R&R" symbols are extremely annoying as well. That being said, please don't say "No flames" in your summary. That's what makes flamers flame. It makes me want to flame, too, when I see that someone is so insecure that they have to put that into the summary.

Basically, the summary should not be written to anyone. Few people like seeing, "Please review!" "NO FLAMES!" "The summary sucks, but it's way better, I promise!" "Summary inside." "Just read it and find out."

Thus concludes this entry.