Writing Proper Tags: Editorial, Not Just Genre

Tags are not genre

Genre, sub-genre, and theme are their own fields on a catalog entry, and Weave already asks for them separately. Tags are a different job: they are an editorial call about what a title is actually LIKE — its structure, its premise, its specific tropes — written so it surfaces titles that share that feel, not just titles that share a broad category.

A title tagged only with genre-level words ("action", "fantasy", "school") tells a searcher almost nothing they couldn't already get from the Type filter. A title tagged with real structural tags tells them exactly what kind of story this is.

Full statements over single words

Prefer a complete, specific phrase over the single word it gets reduced to. Compare:

| Instead of | Write | |---|---| | strong | weak-to-strong | | strong | overpowered-main-character | | reincarnation | classroom-reincarnation | | school | classroom-reincarnation | | — | based-on-a-light-novel |

The single-word versions are ambiguous — "strong" could mean a title about someone who starts strong, someone who becomes strong, or just a title with strong side characters. "Weak-to-strong" and "overpowered-main-character" are two different premises that a single word can't tell apart, and a searcher looking for one specifically does not want the other. The full-phrase tag IS the information; don't compress it back down to a genre-shaped word once you've thought of it.

Tag for search intent, not description

Ask what someone would type if they already loved a title with this exact feel and wanted more like it. A tag earns its place when it would strongly match this title against OTHER titles that share its:

• Feel — tone, pacing, the emotional register the title lives in.
• Structure — how the story is built: is it episodic, a single continuous arc, a slow burn, a fast escalation?
• Tropes — specific, recognizable story beats a fan of the genre would name directly (a tournament arc, a childhood-friend-returns plot, a "isekai" that then subverts the genre it's in).

If a tag would apply equally well to half the catalog, it isn't doing this job — that's a sign it belongs in Genre/Theme instead, or that it needs to be made more specific until it actually discriminates between titles.

Format: dash-separated, always

Every tag is written as a single dash-separated token, never spaces:

• Correct: weak-to-strong, classroom-reincarnation, based-on-a-light-novel, overpowered-main-character
• Incorrect: weak to strong, classroom reincarnation

Spaces inside a tag break keyword matching and search/filter behavior — the dash-separated form is what keeps a multi-word tag functioning as one single, exact-matchable keyword instead of several loose words that could partially match unrelated titles. Lowercase, no punctuation other than the dashes themselves.

Quick checklist before you save

• Would this tag distinguish the title from most of the rest of the catalog? If not, sharpen it or drop it.
• Is it a full phrase, not a single genre-shaped word?
• Is it dash-separated with no spaces?
• Does it describe feel, structure, or trope — not something Genre/Theme already covers?

Well-tagged entries are also worth more on a bounty — see How the Bounty System Works for how tags factor into the Gold tier, and Completing a Full Catalog Entry for where to find source material to draw good tags from in the first place.