Fictional Fans

The usual thing I wind up doing for my summaries is either a single line from the story (possibly slightly altered to remove punchlines/spoilers) or a brief, literal, summary of the story. So either a tagline, or a "this is what I was aiming for". I have no idea how it works for my readers - presumably it works for some people and doesn't for others. I freely admit I am lousy at summaries.

Lyrics or poetry quotes as colophons can work as a summary in the right circumstances. I'm sure I'll run across something, someday, where it did. So far I haven't, but this may be because I'm not looking in the right places or at the right authors. The thing is: when you're using someone else's words to describe your story, you have to have your story matching very closely with the feeling of the quote you're using - if it's even slightly off, it's not going to work.

The kinds of summaries which don't get me reading: the ones I saw a lot of on ff.net where it's "I wrote this on a sugar high/I don't really like this/I won't post new chapters until I get reviews/I thought this idea sounded really neat so I wrote it" - basically, author notes as summaries don't work. Particularly not self-deprecating ones - I mean, if you thought it was so bad you weren't sure about posting it, you need an editor, not an ego-boost comments section.

Also, on a purely stylistic note: please put your author notes at the end of your fic, where I can read them afterwards if I want to, or skip over them if I don't. Please do not put them at the beginning of the fic, and if you're using a service like AO3, where there is a specified field for author notes, please do not put your author notes in the main text body of your story as the first five to six paragraphs on the page! (I suspect the fic which was doing this had been transferred to AO3 from FF.net by means of straight copy & paste, with minimal attention paid to more than the bare basics of filling in the compulsory fields on the posting form).