The Ao3 Subscriptions Give Me Anxiety. Every Time... - Otter's Rock

There’s no way I know of to purge subscriptions since each AO3 user controls for themselves which authors and stories they subscribe to.

I’ve struggled with this a little bit myself in the last year or two. I used to write pretty much entirely for one fandom and mostly for one ship in that fandom. When I stopped writing that, I didn’t know what I’d write next.

It took some internal convincing to give myself permission to start bringing over my old fics from FFN because I knew anyone who was subscribed to me would get the emails with those old fics in them. But then I remembered that just because I get a subscription email doesn’t mean I open it. I receive them almost daily but I only click in maybe once a month or so.

I think it’s good to remember that you’re allowed to take up space (as far as “space” is a concept that can be applied to the internet) and you’re allowed to have more than one interest. If someone isn’t interested in the fic you wrote, they won’t read it. And that’s not a knock against you, it’s just that they aren’t into that fandom or that topic.

The last several fics I wrote were silly stupid oneshots that made me cackle but only appeal to a very narrow subset of humanity, let alone fandom. And that’s fine. It’s an Archive of MY own too, and that means that I can post whatever fics I want to - whether people decide to read them or not.

I can offer you two practical solutions if you have trouble coming to the conclusion that I did.

1) Use a pseud. That allows you to keep all of your works on the same account, but separate them out with two different usernames. Your subscribers will still get the emails, but they can always filter out the second user name if they really don’t want to see them.

2) Add your work to an Anonymous collection at the same time that you post. No subscription emails will be sent out so they won’t even see them - but your username won’t be attached to the fics. You can still reply to comments as “anonymous author” and you still control your fic, unlike when you orphan it. If you ever decide to remove it from the collection, the subscription emails will go out at that point. I explain in more detail in this ask over here.