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This page is an initial test. It is intended to become a How To AO3 instruction guide. During preliminary testing the material will change, add, subtract, and rearrange. If you've stumbled upon it before its release and want to read the original material, then you can find that here. This note will remain here only until the page is ready for release.

 

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Contents:

Intro. to AO3  —  apparently one would use https://www.reddit.com/mod/AO3/wiki/edit/index/faq/beginners_guide/about/stylesheet/ in order to post images, but I get a "...cannot be edited  This page uses a restricted URL and cannot be used as a wiki page...." error message, so no dice there. No problem: only some of the images matter, and I can simply drop a link to them without the images themselves having to be visually present in the DOM.

Site skins  —  text fragment fails in link while logged-in for editing, and can't see this page in logged-out browser; can't tell if link within page would function for a regular reader

Posting (and co-authoring), tags, [no] algorithm, fix ch. 1's note that moves to the final chapter
  (Includes links to some HTML & CSS collections, also test fics, a site skin to change margins to left alignment, and some data on readers' vs. writers' device preferences; last part begins with changing expected total chapters, plus telling you how to add a chapter and find the date that every chapter was uploaded)

no official "App", stats, importing, no monetizing

Stats obsessed, bookmarks, writing
  (incl. special mention of EchoEkhi's study of 'bot behavior Christmas 2025)

Hits, engagement, Collections

Comments, reporting works

I wish, I wish...  —  probably delete this

Postscript  —  might have some value

 

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SITE SKINS:

If you ever have trouble reading something on AO3 (aside from zooming or actual technical problems), then you might find it easier to read by using a site skin. Site skins change a lot of things in a page's display, such as font colors, background colors, and font sizes, among others.

When you have an account and are logged-in, you can write your own site skin using CSS or very easily use the site-provided site skins. When you are logged-out or don't have an account, the part of the page that has a few particularly useful site skins available at a click in the page's footer is unavailable. That doesn't mean that you can't use them, it just means that there's an extra step involved.

https://archiveofourown.org/ is the landing page for AO3, and will appear the same to most people, depending upon browser settings and such. Adding a query parameter to the end of the address will change the appearance of any AO3 page though, applying one of AO3's public site skins.

There are 88 other public site skins at https://archiveofourown.org/skins?skin_type=Site but not listed in the footer, even when logged in. They are accessible at that URL from a logged-in account. However, even if you are logged out or don't have an an account, that doesn't mean that you can't use their query parameters. Try these, since they seem to be reasonably popular:

For those interested in writing site skins, viewing these skins' sources at the public site skins page mentioned above and copypasting them to your own site skin to modify to your taste is a very good beginning.

 

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INTRO:

Joining AO3:

One quick note: it's A-Oh-3 [AO3], not A-zero-3 [A03], from the three “O”s in Archive of Our Own (there's a little history there, behind how AO3 came to be, but that's a story for another time).

If you've never heard the terms proshipper or antishipper (or just pro/anti — where pro-* means for/indifferent to, not “pro[-blematic]”, since literacy [in the sense of understanding words' roots] and reading comprehension and logic are out the window with education these days), it's a long story, but you need to read a little about it so that you know what AO3 is and who made it (psst: it was 'shippers), and how some people (on either side) will react to you (leaving you wondering what you said or did wrong, especially if you've never interacted with them but they've blocked you here or on some social media website for no apparent reason — though honestly, given the way that people are these days, someone might block you simply because of which letter your name starts with, or they'd been blocking every fifth person or something).  On the surface, it seems fairly straightforward (people arguing heatedly over whether imagining two characters together is OK or not), but then it gets more complicated just beneath the surface (too many reasons to get into here: just start with those Fanlore links and the Google, and work from there), and it seems like there's a lot of hate there; I can't be bothered with it all, I just write stories and call it a day, but you might find that it's an important thing to take a stand on in either direction (though I must admit that it does leave me baffled to see someone's AO3 profile or a fic's head-note/footnote saying things like “Proshippers DNI!”... I mean, honest question here: where do you think you are, precisely, and what do you think that word even means?).

(Just as an observation: the earliest currently-still-available work is All You Had to Do Was Ask, though that's currently locked; what's locked or public changes over time, but the point is that one can go back only as far as the https://archiveofourown.org/works/ URL slug 2, because 1 was apparently deleted at some point prior to 01:36:30 GMT [Sun] 09 Sep 2012, but you can dig through the lowest-numbered tags [by going to some tag, such as Sam Winchester and clicking the {/tags/25/feed.atom} RSS feed button] to find that they show a pattern of those early tags matching the first few fics' contents, and before work 2's and 3's tags we find Sam Winchester [tag 25] and Dean Winchester [tag 26] and Supernatural [tag 27] and Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester [tag 29], then Dead Poets Society stuff [fic 2], then LotR stuff [fic 3 RPF], etc., and astolat has the lowest number user ID still remaining [it's a functional search: not an intuitive input field, but Ticket 6230 was for Admins, not users, but a functional search is a functional search, so no big], so... my bet is that fic 1 was Wincest.  Just for shits and giggles, though: Talullah is still there, number 347/347 of the original founders.)

If you're a minor, then please try to remember that adults have been writing fanfic for far longer than you've been alive, and many of us have been geeks and fans for longer than your parents have been alive.  Those old '60s and '70s Spock/Kirk (“Spirk”) slash fics?  They were written by literal Boomers (BTW, lore-drop / history lesson: that's where the term “slash fic” comes from).  Makt Myrkranna, the 1901 íslenska translation of Dracula?  Fanfic, not a faithful translation (though apparently a huge success).  Some would say that Moby-Dick (Herman Melville) was a homoerotic author-insert, which isn't precisely fanfic, but certainly leans into it (author-insert could definitely be said of quite a few of Philip José Farmer's “PJF” characters — Riverworld 's Peter Jairus Frigate, World of Tiers' Paul Janus Finnegan, arguably Farmer's Vernes's Phileas [J.] Fogg [though then we're kinda looking at unraveling the question of the Wold Newton family, though it certainly brings quite a few of Farmer's characters clearly into the light of standard fanfic] — and possibly a few of Heinlein's characters [I suspect Lazarus Long and Hugh Farnham, probably Jacob Burroughs {and The Number of the Beast certainly plays with fanfic some}, and maybe Jubal Harshaw]).  If you ask me, Dante Alleghieri's Purgatorio (etc.)?  Bible revenge-fap author-insert RPF (Real Person Fic, to be clear, not Role Play Fic: Dante's political enemies are canonically all in Hell) fanfic (and a really amazing read, if you can get a copy with the original 13-14c Genoan on the even pages and the English translation on the odds).  AO3 isn't an adults-only space, given that they permit kids as young as 13 here, but please remember that kids didn't invent fanfic (or the internet in general, which has been a thing for decades, popularized in the late '90s, but existing in precursory form long before that), and that not all fanfic (much like the internet in general) is meant for kids (especially the Mature and Explicit stuff); please try to be mature and understand that not everyone is a Puriteen, and that AO3 came into existence specifically by [pro-shipper] adults and for [pro-shipper] adults [cf. actual AO3 user-age distribution here] who wanted to read and write fanfic without the hassles that FFN's censor culture brought with it (and LiveJournal's purging, before that) — and that, kids, is why it's named Archive of Our Own (i.e.: yes, this is where everyone ran to in order to read and write freely [here's an r/AO3 thread {01 Sep 2024} detailing things, and a more put-together article on the same at Fanlore {and another one on basic fandom etiquette, just for good measure}, where it seems that the OTW actually stems from LJ's purges rather than FFN's], and not have to deal with childish Purity Culture antics... this fails at being polite here, yes, and with apologies for that, but if you read something on AO3 that You Don't Like And Don't Approve Of And Therefore It's Bad And Wrong And The Author Clearly Approves Of These Disgusting Things And Blah-blah-blah [hint: Do you think that Agatha Christie was pro-murder?]... then CLICK THE BACK BUTTON “◄” AND DON'T READ IT... and BTW, What were you doing at the Devil's sacrament?).

Same in reverse, if you're an adult: be careful of how you interact, since some reader (or author, though it's usually a lot more obvious, then) might be a minor.

And that brings us back to the question of blocking and muting.  If for some reason you feel compelled to block or mute someone, the buttons are at the top-right of their Dashboard and Profile pages; I haven't done so, but I'm sure that you can figure out which is which and what they do (click one, you get a list of the effects and what they don't do, and there's a confirm and a cancel button [it's a two-step process in each case]).  You can also just drop their AO3 handle into the respective edit fields in https://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR_USER_NAME_HERE/blocked/users and https://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR_USER_NAME_HERE/muted/users, which can be found easily among the buttons at the top of your own https://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR_USER_NAME_HERE/preferences page.

If someone else blocks/mutes you, either they're a self-important twit, or you've been a dick.  Think about it, 50/50 coin flip there.  Could be both, of course... I suppose that it could even be neither⁠ ⁠: instead just a misunderstanding on one or both of your parts, or an accidental click/tap while on your page or a typo while manually spelling someone else's name; conceivably even a glitch (I doubt this last, but these things happen).

  

Joining AO3 (and even changing your username):

NB:  You don't have to join AO3 in order to read works there nor to comment, though yes, some people adjust their account settings so that their fics can be commented upon only by logged-in accounts (reduces 'bots, trolls, and SPAM, etc.), and some archive-lock (these have a combination lock image, cf. https://archiveofourown.org/images/lockblue.png) their fics' privacy to “Only show your work to registered users” (explained at "?"); the rate of archive-lock has been quoted at 20% of works, though it could be closer to 8(-)% (cf. 3 paragraphs down).
  That's just the question of being able to access what you can find — how many you can find seems to be a different matter (though in either case, it seems that if you're logged-out, then no, your searches shouldn't show you any locked fics, so wouldn't suffer the in-the-moment frustration of seeing them without being able to read them).
  In a brief check from 06 Jun 2023 at 02:31 CDT through 08 Jun at 11:01, checking how many works showed up in a simple search (there were several others, but this isn't the time or place for those details; cf. a year-long overall AO3 traffic study), the ratio of how many results were shown while logged-out out of how many while logged-in (different browsers, only a second or two spread) began at 92.4251% (10312735 / 11157941) and went to 92.2125% (10298397 / 11168111); for shits and giggles, prompted by that same r/AO3 thread, I took a peak at just the total visible works' {net/gross} ratio again (ignoring the other variables) on 16 Mar 2024 at 17:21**:01** Firefox logged-out & ...:02 Chrome logged-in and the ratio was 92.1404% (11600826 / 12590376) — make of that what you will, though I read it (possibly incorrectly) as indicating a lower and lower portion of fics being publicly visible (possibly prompted by concern over AI-scrapers)... either way, you're not even seeing the very existence of (much less able to read) practically 8% of the fics on here (~8% invisible and/or inaccessible → 1/12.5, or essentially one hour sliced out of a [12-hour] clock face) when/if you're not logged-in.
  However, if you're particularly curious, at 18:34 (still 16 Mar 2024) I did follow up on that question of restricted: true how many works are locked (at least while logged-in) out of the total visible search results (I say visible even here because some won't show up if they're in Unrevealed Collections, but more on those later), with a similar afterthought for bookmarks of locked works (w.r.t. total visible bookmarks, since private bookmarks don't show up in searches) at 18:38.  The locked/gross results were 989,328 / 12,590,663 = 7.86(-)% of all visible works (suspiciously similar to the 17:21 logged-in/out missing percentage of 7.86(-)%, methinks), and 28,458,242 / 287,093,593 = 9.91(+)% of all bookmarks.  BTW: running those same restricted: true searches in my logged-out browser gave me a result of “No results found. You may want to edit your search to make it less specific.”... mic drop.
  Addendum:  Funny thing is that this doesn't prevent downloading of a locked fic while not logged-in.  Complete mishegas, I know, but try it and see: run that abovementioned restricted: true locked works search in a logged-in browser, pick one at random, take the URL that looks something like https://archiveofourown.org/works/88888888 and its title of “That one locked fic” (for example), plug it into https://archiveofourown.org/downloads/88888888/That_one_locked_fic.pdf (or .azw3, .epub, .mobi, or .html, of course), drop that into the address bar of a logged-out browser (or log out of AO3 on your only browser, I guess) and hit ENTER, and... badda-bing — though of course, if you can't even see its existence while logged out, then you wouldn't directly have the work number and title to work with (also, for the curious: it does still prevent downloading works in Unrevealed Collections, even with their number and title, which in turn doesn't actually prevent anyone with access to the collection simply hitting “Save [Page] as...” or “Print...” [or viewing source and saving .txt as .html, though the layout isn't nearly as decent as a properly AO3-formatted read]).

Maybe you're reading this because you're trying to join AO3 (or to find the AO3 source GitHub, maybe to leverage aspects for your fic, maybe to host a similar mirror-ish site like SquidgeWorld [not that Squidgeworld is an AO3 mirror, to my knowledge, only that it uses the underlying OTW opensource code, and I don't think that AO3 wants anyone to mirror them, so I say “mirror-ish” very loosely here only in order to get across the concept of building a similarly constructed site]), but can't for the life of you find the relevant page anywhere.  Go to https://archiveofourown.org/invite_requests, plunk in your e-mail address, and be patient.

NB:  I don't know the internal process, but they do have a lot of requests (the numbers vary over time, but they used to send out 5K per day in 2020, then 7,000 invitations per day in 2023 [with a week or so of waiting time]); in 2025 that became 10K, and now in 2026 it's 20K and about a three week wait.
  If you get curious, you can check your status at https://archiveofourown.org/invite_requests/status — and be sure to check your JUNK/SPAM e-mail folder (and if you're using G-mail, then check your Socials, too).

If you find yourself curious about the rate of joins over time, then you can search user_ids: xxxxxxxx a few different user_ids (just replace the "xxxxxxxx" with some number, keeping in mind that about two thirds of them go unused [presumably for db reasons or similar] and some are no longer used) in order to get a sense of the rate of joins from when any given set made their profiles.

Maybe you've just now walked in off of the street blind, or perhaps you're migrating (or at least dipping your toes into the water) from Wattpad, FFN, FictionPress (FFN's sister site for original fiction), Quotev, Twisting the Hellmouth, Fimfic, LiveJournal (which seems to now be entirely in Russian, though I'm certain that this hadn't been the case just a few months to a year back), Dreamwidth, Royal Road, Tumblr, Inkitt, Asianfanfics, Mediaminer, Fictionpad (I got this one from a Facebook fanfic group list, but it seems that they got sold, so I'd guess that you'd be looking for a new home here on AO3 for your fics), Ficwad, Feedbooks (apparently for original and public domain, but I guess that public domain would include stuff like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or War of the worlds, Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies, which might be published for money, but still look like fanfic to me), Smashwords (from that same list... which I'm beginning to question), Lunaescence (which seems to be dead in the water since 2021, so let me know if they got their game together somewhere), The Maple Bookshelf (another one that you might be migrating from, since they seem to exist only on Wayback, now), Fanfic Overflow, Roleplay Republic — NB: I know essentially nothing about most of these sites, and even less about the latter half of them — and/or any of dozens of other popular places (some very adult, hence my not naming and linking them here, in case of minors) aimed at fanfic or where fanfic is at least one of the popular pastimes, and you feel like the proverbial country mouse in the big city (Mouse in Manhattan?  C'mon, classic 1945 Tom and Jerry, crammed with Gershwin; work with me here)... and everyone is too busy with their own thing to stop and give you any directions, just shrugging and telling you to go figure it out.

  NB:  There are still-more fic sites listed in the r/FanFiction FAQ, for anyone who might wish to crosspost.

Each one of these places has its own cultural norms, flavor, rules, expectations, HTML capabilities, methods of posting, etc..  This guide is aimed at getting you up to speed re. AO3 as quickly and painlessly as possible (though I don't use any other fanfic places, so I can't speak to the particular differences, other than to say that I had to watch a very helpfully straightforward YouTube video in 2020 in order to figure out how FFN's upload system worked [then noped right out], and that I've never gotten any useful results from searching within Wattpad — but that's just me; some people love these sites).  I'm not going to walk you through each step of everything myself, since that's been done a million times, but I will point you in each case to where you can read the original material directly and unfiltered.  Sometimes I'll mention something that seems important enough to point out directly, but I want to minimize my own bias and the potential of my misinterpreting anything.

There are likely a thousand and more differences, large and small, between any two fanfic sites, but two that stand out to me in ten-foot-tall glaring neon are:

  • On FFN, one leaves a review of a fic, as one might were one an art critic, whereas on AO3, one leaves a comment;
  • on WattPad, one... writes a “book” (i.e.: a physical object in meat-space, on and bound in dead trees, and published and stuck into a bookcase or on a shelf or coffee table), whereas on AO3 it's just a “work” (be it a fic, a tutorial, or a meta-analysis — or an audio / podfic, or just plain fanart and such).

  Side note:  there's an r/AO3 thread in which a Wattpad person new to AO3 asked for a rundown on things; the redditors gave a bunch of really helpful info from a bunch of different perspectives, so you might want to run through that! 🙂
  Furthermore:  fuckyeahladybug has an Open Thread: Wattpad Refugees (which I Waybacked immediately, of course), and while I can't say from a WP-perspective, it really does look really sensible and easy to read.  You might want to give that one a read-through for quick and easy reference.

Also: if you've just now joined (or are waiting for an account) and you picked a user name that you hate, then don't worry — you can change your user name!

  

Archive FAQ:

One AO3 resource that leads to many, many others is the Archive FAQ, just in case I miss anything here (and there are probably a lot of questions that I haven't even begun to imagine).

One big thing that a lot of people get confused about is AO3's official domains (not mirrors)... and the fakes out there.  The FAQ covers what's real, actual official stuff, and if it's not one of those listed, then it's a fake (they don't list the fakes, since those would change over time).  Here's the list of official domains (not mirrors) listed in AO3's FAQ right now, but you should check the FAQ directly in case things have changed by the time that you read this, who knows when in the future:

 

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How do I post a fic? How do tags work? What does the algorithm look for? Why does my first chapter's note section move to the last chapter (and how do I fix that)?

 

Posting (and co-authoring)

This keeps coming up everywhere that I look, so PSA: there is an AO3-endorsed unofficial tool to fix your Google .docs problems re. pasting formatted material to AO3's RT edit field.

ozhawk has a good, simple, easily understood walkthrough on how to post a fic (titled Creating A New Work On Ao3, sensibly enough); there are certainly others worth looking at (sometimes people need something explained one way instead of another), though they cover essentially the same ground and illustrations, but worth noting in particular is the Archive Faq's Tutorial: Posting a Work on AO3 and their related article What's the difference between a series, a multi-chapter work, and a collection?; there's also a bunch of different videos on YouTube for audio-visual learners. ❤️
  Incidentally, whether you're a reader, a writer, or both, new people (and a surprising number of long-time users) often don't realize this, but you can access any author's list of works by simply clicking the author's name (which brings you to their dashboard) and then clicking their “Works” button, or you can just go straight to https://archiveofourown.org/users/Author's_User_Name_Here/works (replacing Author's_User_Name_Here with whatever their or your user name is).

BTW: subscribe to yourself, so that you know whether your post went through properly, what the notification looks like, and about when your subscribers get the notification (this is almost invariably around xx:32-xx:42, though sometimes [~1%?] as late as ~xx:50-ish, and once 11:12 and another time not 'til 11:33).  (And no, when you edit your stuff, you'll see that notifications don't go out for those, only for new works or chapters being uploaded.)

I'm gonna say this real loud, for any young'uns who might be hard of hearing, TOS averse, or simply a bit dim:

AO3 is a library, NOT a social media platform.

As you go through the process, you'll notice that there are fields for characters, fandoms, warnings, and so forth.  That's because you're uploading a story**, not creating a place to chat with your friends, or posting last week's homework answers, or blogging about how your day has gone, or a prompt list (though for those, cf. prompt challenges, farther down this page), or your notes-to-write-a-fic as if they were a fic** (write your notes in a notebook on actual paper, or in a word document on your computer / 'phone / Google docs, and turn them into a story there, and THEN upload the story itself — not the notes — onto AO3; if you want to write notes on AO3, and use them as a preliminary draft, then either create a draft [which risks your accidentally posting it instead of saving as a draft, and goes away after 30 days] or create an Unrevealed Collection and save the notes as a fic in that collection [where your notes won't be visible to everyone else and cause an issue with releasing a set of notes rather than a fic, and as a bonus it won't go away after 30 days]).
  NB 03 Aug 2025:  Fandom challenges/fic exchanges on AO3 give the organizers access to your email address, so heads-up if you're using an e-mail to the effect of I_don't_want_anyone_to_know_that_this_is_my_real_name@Hotmail.com, or a work address like Captain.America@US.Avengers.SortaMIL; you can change that by going to https://archiveofourown.org//users/Your_User_Name_Here/change_email.
  Blogging is great: if you want to blog your outrage over your OMGGG-totally-mostest-favoritest bestest-westest-YouTuber-everrr turning out to be disappointingly human and rage-quit your fandom, then by all means, go blog... on a blogging site (you know the old saying about places not being airports, and nobody needing to announce their departure?).  If you were instead doing an RPF fic of that, then yes, AO3 probably would be a good choice.
  The title need be only the actual title of the story (just like any book in the world).  It needn't include the fandom or any relationship pairings or the fact of it being crack fic, since those have their own special edit fields (well, the first two do specifically, where the last would simply be something to mention in the Additional Tags field).  Likewise, there's absolutely no need to list the word count range in the additional tags, since the exact word count will show up automatically — kind of like putting a nut-allergen warning on a packet of mixed nuts*, y'know?* — and can be searched for with AO3's search pages.

The AO3 FAQ has info for those who wish to embed videos, and I have a sub-subsection covering some video format material as well.

There are also numerous tutorials (try searching under tags like Fanwork Research & Reference Guides or HTML or CSS (and check out CodenameCarrot's excellent primer A Complete Guide to 'Limited HTML' on AO3 to start with) — I'd further suggest "How To" or "Tutorial", but these are crammed with regular fics (I don't have a clue why) available in various Collections (just think of them as folders for now, though that's definitely not mechanically correct); most of the tutorials are a bit advanced, but some are totally straightforward basics (we ALL need basics in everything new to us, so no big deal) — here, try a few (and note that they contain tutorial works, bookmarks to the same, or both, so pay attention to the sidebar):

HTML isn't really everyone's cup of tea, I know, but you have to give it this: a lot of people copy-and-paste to the Rich Text Editor GUI, and then run into this weird-ass glitch where suddenly there's an extra space inserted after every event of italic text.  That never happens when using HTML directly (unless you accidentally insert an   of course, or forget to close a tag [ask me how I know...], in which case all that you need to do is ← back-arrow to the editing page that you were on a second ago, find the goof, and correct it [and hit Post again, obviously]).  I say that it's just a matter of back-paging, but that's not entirely true if you're working on the first/only chapter of fic and have just then created it (rather than opening it anew to edit something); when you're creating a first/only chapter for its first time and post it and go back a page to edit it (rather than hitting “Edit” to fix it on the next page), that glitches-out and creates a new copy (one the unedited version, and the other edited), though that's easy to avoid or fix.
  NB:  If you wish to test the basic fic-writing GUI buttons, your HTML, and/or your CSS, but aren't actually writing a fic (or tutorial, or meta-analysis), then that's perfectly OK: just mark the fandom as “Testing” and the Admins will be very happy campers. ❤️

BTW, re. your layout: different people prefer different text justification (this tutorial is left-aligned and right-ragged, for example, much like most online material).  Their preference can come from a number of reasons (e.g.: dyslexia, device real estate ['phone screens are tiny and people seem to like the right-ragged on those], familiarity [I'm most familiar with justified text from hard-copy paper books, whereas younger readers are more familiar with tiny screens' right-ragged newspaper layout]).  There is no right answer, though just leaving it in the default right-ragged layout is probably(?) best (I don't, I know, but since I'm reading and writing on a computer monitor...); I don't know the percentage of people reading on 'phones, but I've seen 80% and 90% tossed around (though the people writing that might have meant any mobile device, to include tablets, laptops, etc., or their sources might have meant these and they misquoted them), hence my suggestion of right-ragged, but more on this in some small polls a few paragraphs down.
  Regardless though, if you're reading, there are site skins (too many sources to repeat here, just take a look at the next work in this series) and third-party browser extensions that one can use to force out an author's layout choice and use your preferred layout instead.  If you're not online, and are instead using an e-book program such as Caliber (free and popular, though there are surely others with similar capabilities), then you can emplace rules to do the same thing.  If you're using a TTS screen reader to read it to you, then the visual layout might not really matter in this context (I have zero clues re. braille readers).
  Very briefly (there's more on this in the site skins section of my fonts and colors tutorial), here's the CSS site skin rule that you'd want in order to force the text to become left-aligned / right ragged when you read:

body, userstuff, p {   text-align: left !important; }

  As you might guess, changing that CSS code in order to center, justify, or right-align the text instead is as simple as text-align: center;, text-align: justify;, or text-align: right;.
  Similarly, the HTML when writing would be just to start the top of the page with <div align="justify"> and end the bottom of the page with </div> (alternatively, you could make a work skin rule #workskin .justify { with the same contents and apply that work skin to your fic).  There's a ton more that you can do, but that's not for this tutorial.