Tags & Description.

Use relevant tags that apply to the whole story, & use enough, but not too many, to give an idea of the story. approx 5 is ideal

Write a decent description of the story, like you would see on the back of a published book. About 5 sentences is good

Most people, myself included, are browsers. If you can't interest us in the description we probably won't stop to read. A good intro will get you noticed. Don't also be afraid to ask at the end for comments. People are more willing to leave them if they know you want them, and they see you answer them.

FYI, there is a 500 CHARACTER limit on the description. This includes spaces and punctuation. If you would like five sentences, they would have to be very, very short sentences. Personally I would like to see a concise, attention grabbing description in the description and a more lengthy blurb in the story note, which allows up to 800 characters. Together they can provide quite a bit of useful information...

HOWEVER, neither of these things really has much to do with "promotion" the idea behind this specific tip was to get people TO your story... granted getting them to open it is a very good idea, but you have to start somewhere, yes?

500 characters still allows 5 sentences with 10 words of 10 characters each, plenty of space for a proper description.

The description is what is seen on the list & search pages, & on the author pages, which is how stories are found.

This description could then be used in peoples signatures, as per point 4

eg; Heres my new story: [Description]

It can be the first post of the story thread, as per point 2

The description is also pretty much the only thing promoting existing stories, as thats what a reader sees on the author pages etc

Promotion is about promoting something, so you have to state what the something is.

ah but you are not reading all the rules for signitures either then... because putting the "full" description in the signiture, along with a link and any "additional" information will put the signiture over the character limit... so I guess what I'm trying to say is... please pay better attention to the rules and guidelines before making suggestions to our authors that are impractical for them to do.

Honestly, the better option here, option, would be for the author to use the 'my media' link in their signiture, although, a banner link is more visually appealing and tends to get more clicks. In case you haven't seen one it looks like this:

[sharedmedia=stories:stories:2770]