Best tags for a fantasy story?

[LittleChaosMachine]

I’m horrendous at actually figuring out which tag to use for my fantasy ya stuff I post on Wattpad. Was wondering if anyone knew what the most successful tags were?

[stella_vigo]

I’m not the best at figuring out tags, but what I usually do when adding tags is keep one tab open to search for the tag on Wattpad and see how many stories are using it the bigger the tag is, the more likely readers will search for it, I guess?

So I start with the fantasy tags. There’s the obvious #fantasy tag and the more specific subgenre tags like #darkfantasy and #highfantasy.

After that would be audience tags like #ya and #newadult. I just did a Wattpad search and #youngadult gives nearly 100K results, whereas #ya gives less than 20K. If I have to choose one of those two, I’d go for #youngadult since it’s a bigger tag.

Then we have the character-related tags??? I’m not sure how to call them but they describe your cast. So if there are teenagers, I’d tag #teen; if the lead is female, I’d tag #femalemaincharacter or #femaleprotagonist or both; and if the cast is quite diverse, I’d add #diverse, #diversity, or #weneeddiversebooks.

Then we have the content-related tags, which I guess can include character-related tags but I’m not a tag expert. Is it about a curse? Tag #curse. Is the story violent and gory? Might as well add #violence, #blood, and #gore. Do the characters use portals to go to other worlds and have superpowers? You can add #portals, #otherworld, and #superpowers.

There are some additional tags that may not fall under the above categories but could be added, like #featured and #undiscovered. And not all tags have to be big—it’s easier to rank higher in smaller tags than bigger ones, and if they describe a big part of your story, you might as well add them too.

Here are some of the tags I currently have on two of my fantasy books. Both are the first books of two very different series:

I hope this helps

[LittleChaosMachine]

yeah it does, thanks!

[JJJ000YYY]

#freethelgbt is a great tag if you have queer characters in it too (or you can even just put it because you’re lgbtq+ yourself) I dunno if its successful but it does a good job advertising any lgbtq+ content you have

[JJJ000YYY]

Tho tbh Wattpad has been getting worse and worse visibility wise so it’s impossible to see what actually works anymore

[NotARussianBot]

I appreciate that webnovel platforms often have complete lists of tags, it would be helpful if Wattpad had the same