Controlled Vocabulary

For a version of this page that can be used to browse our available products and their aligned tags, please go here for titles and merchandise released under our Duck Prints Press general imprint and here for titles released under our Duxxx Prints Press explicit imprint.

We use a controlled vocabulary for tagging genre, format, ratings, and more, to ensure uniformity across our various publications and publication platforms. This is similar to the system that Archive of Our Own uses, except that it’s developed internally, and modified with input from our authors as appropriate to their individual stories. As more publishers consider approaches that include tagging systems, we thought that sharing our system might be helpful to people. This list includes all tags we’ve used for our books, our anthologies, our backer-exclusive stories, and elsewhere.

Our shop uses two different sorting systems to facilitate navigation and help prospective readers locate content they’d be interested in and avoid content they’d rather not read. The first of these sorting systems is Categories. The Categories are over-arching information about the following areas:

Format (eg, eBook)
Genre (eg, Modern with Magic)
Rating (eg, Adult Audiences)
Relationship (eg, MLM)
Series (eg, theme months)
Story Elements and Tropes (eg, hurt/comfort)
Work Length (eg, novella)
Merchandise (eg bookmarks)
Explicit (note that explicit categories are not listed below; they are on a separate page)

Categories are designed for quick navigation of our shop, and reflect only the most prominent themes of a given work. Furthermore, our categories are nested, and we will reflect that in the bulleted lists below.

To provide more in-depth information about each work, we also use a Tag system. Tags provide more extension information about a work, including content warnings, sub-themes, and more. They may include or imply spoilers. While many tags could fall into multiple categories, for organizational purposes we’ve sorted them into the following tag types, and each tag is assigned to one, and only one, tag type. All categories are also tags, but not all tags are also categories. Tags are written all lowercase, always.

alpha/beta/omega dynamics (eg, mating cycles) (note that alpha/beta/omega dynamic tags are not listed below; they are on a separate page)
book format (eg, pdf ebook)
character feature (eg, bipoc character)
character gender (eg, trans character)
character profession (eg, professor)
character religion (eg, muslim character)
character romantic orientation (eg, aromantic character)
character sexual orientation (eg, pansexual character)
creature character (eg, werewolf)
era (eg, regency)
fanworks (eg, character in a “Queer Fanworks Inspired By…” story has had their gender swapped)genderqueer character (eg, trans character)
genre (eg, welsh mythology)
kink (eg, bdsm) (note that kink tags are not listed below; they are on a separate page)
merchandise (eg sticker)
narrator point of view (eg, pov third person)
platonic relationship type (eg, characters are twins)
rating (eg, explicit)
relationship type (eg, interspecies romance)
setting (eg, academia)
special occasion (eg, wedding)
story elements and tropes (eg, established relationship)
warning (eg, major character death)
work format (eg, epistolary)
work length (eg, novel)

Tags are generally used to give a more specific idea of what a story is about. Usually, tags are assigned if they reflect prominent themes of the work in question, with the exception of warnings. Warnings are used for any content we feel may be potentially triggering, and will be listed for a given story even if the thing being warned for is only briefly mentioned or isn’t described in detail. This doesn’t mean everything will be tagged, but we do our best to be thorough, and we are always open to receiving feedback that our tags should be modified.

We will aim to update this list monthly.

Last updated: 4/18/23