Fictional Fans

At least 50% of my reading is rec based, and this is 95% for anything outside my main fandoms or pairings. However I think most recs do tend to include at least part if not all of the summary for that work, so I think that still has some bearing.

Also, while finding an author or artist one enjoys means one's likely to look up their other works, I find that summaries still are important to me. This is particularly true if, say, that author (or vidder) creates work in other fandoms or for characters I'm not so interested in. I'm lucky enough to have lots of choices since I'm in large fandoms so I do need to be convinced to try out something outside my main choices.

What you said about titles was intriguing though because I very rarely remember a story's title (and given all the fic searches going on everywhere, I'm clearly not alone). Plus if one searches at someplace big like AO3 it's clear that there are many stories using the exact same title across fandoms (or sometimes even the same ones). I have sometimes been pleased when reading a story to click with what the chosen title was, but right now I can only remember one story title that helped me remember the fic. It was a line from the Beatles Come Together and other lines from Beatles songs were used as chapter titles in a lengthy fic, generally quite aptly. Overall I think I'm more likely to be grabbed by the summary than title and at least some authors I've worked with as a beta hated having to choose titles, so I daresay the average writer would rather be challenged by the summary ;) But I could be wrong about that!

That last summary made me laugh.