AO3 Comment Of The Day — How To Post A Work Privately On ... - Tumblr

So you want to archive your work but you don’t want all of it visible to everyone else. What you need to do is make a collection!

Collections have lots of uses, but this post is going to focus on using a collection to make some (or all!) of your works private so that only you can see them.

1. If you’ve never made a collection before, start by going to your Dashboard and then choosing Collections from the sidebar (on desktop) or the top of the page (on mobile). Then click on the New Collection button and fill in the information.

2. In the Header Section you only need to worry about giving it a name and a display title. This is because you’re just making this collection for yourself. The other infoboxes are there for you to fill out if you’re creating a collection for a fandom event.

The name is what you’ll use to add works to your collection. Choose something unique so that you don’t accidentally try to add your work to someone else’s collection.

The display title is the name that people will see if they go to your Works page. You can use any name you’d like here, but remember that it will be visible to others.

3. In the Preferences Section, you’ll want to set your collection as moderated and unrevealed.

Moderating your collection means that the owner (you) gets to choose which works get added. If anyone else tries to add works to your collection, you can refuse. Keeping it unrevealed means that no one can see the works that are inside of it. They can see the collection, but it will look like it’s empty.

You can leave the rest of the sections empty. Those are all for fandom events and informing other people of rules and other information. None of that is necessary in this case.

4. After you have created your collection, you can edit your existing works to hide them. Edit the work and scroll down the posting form until you get to the section called Associations. The first text box in that section is Post to Collections/Challenges. Type the name of your collection into this box and press enter. Don’t worry if it doesn’t show up in the dropdown. As long as you provide the name (and not the display title!), you’ll be fine.

5. Save your edit and congrats! You’ve successfully made that work private so that only you can see it.

When another user visits your profile, they’ll be able to see you have a collection. They’ll see the display name, and they’ll see the total number of fandoms and works that are in your collection. By clicking the number next to the word Fandom, they’ll be able to see the list of all of the fandoms you’ve written for in that collection. However, if they click the number next to the word Works, they’ll just see a message that says, “This is part of an ongoing challenge and will be revealed soon!”

If you want to see for yourself what it looks like to other users, visit my AO3 profile and see for yourself.

Oh, and I’ve tested it out and it seems that if you post a new work and add it into the collection immediately (while posting), subscribers won’t get notified about it! So that’s a bonus too :)