Your Prompt Was Declined by PromptBase? Here’s How to Fix It. Part 1
What to do if the prompts you want to sell on PromptBase get declined?
PromptBase has a set of rules that determine whether your prompt is suitable for being listed on the marketplace. To check these rules, I recommend to first of all take the time and read the Prompt Submission Guidelines.
If a prompt gets declined, PromptBase will indicate which rule was violated. In this article series, I’ll make a deep dive into the most widespread errors that beginners do, and show, using real-life examples from my prompts that got declined, how to fix them and get your prompt listed on the marketplace.
This is the first part, where we will look at “too specific” prompts. Navigate to other parts:
Problem 1. Your prompt is too specific.
This problem is described in point 3.4 of the guidelines.
“A general rule of thumb is a prompt is too niche for PromptBase if it is trying to combine more than 3 ideas, or has 3 ideas but one of those ideas is too niche.”
For example:
With this prompt, you can generate photorealistic images of people reading during the evening hours.
Let’s analyse this prompt to see what ideas are used here.
- who: people, a limited set of potential characters, because we don’t include, for example, animals, movie characters, etc.
- time of the day: it’s only the evening hours.
- the action: reading books.
If we put ourselves in the shoes of our potential buyers, would we like to pay for a prompt that can only generate images in this very narrow use case scenario? How many images of people reading books at night can one possibly need?
This is why PromptBase declines these prompts: they are too niche. There is a very little chance that someone will buy them because they are fitting only a very narrow set of purposes.
So, how can we solve this?
Step 1.
Make the prompt customisable. Use variables to offer your potential customers a variety of scenarios to apply the prompt to. For example, in this prompt, introduce a variety of activities, like cooking dinner, or playing a guitar, etc.
You can also play with varying the character of this prompt: maybe, you want to not only limit it to people, but introduce an alien, a dog, a cat, a movie character… the more options the user will be able to customise, the better. But remember, your prompt should actually work with these variables.
Step 2.
Run these new variables through Midjourney to make sure you get a consistently good result.
For example, as you can see from the below set of images, the activities are different, but it doesn’t prevent the image from having the same distinct visual style as the other images generated with this prompt.
Step 3.
Now, introduce this variety into the prompt examples. Try to show, with your example images, that this prompt is suitable for people that want to generate all those different scenarios we talked about before.
The 9 images you use should have different things depicted on them to let the customer know how many potential use cases this prompt will fit into.
Remember that the customers don’t see your prompt in the store before the purchase is made! The only way for you to prove that this prompt works for a variety of use cases is to actually show that with your images.
Step 4.
Finally, let’s make sure that the prompt itself will do all the things we described above when someone buys it. You should 1) include a character variable; 2) include an action variable.
The final result, in my case, looks like this: [the character] [the activity] in the evening hours, in the style of futuristic maximalism, unrestrained forms, darkly romanticism, Bechers’ typologies, glossy finish, intricate imagery, futuristic and minimalist sunglasses, close-up shots, cosy evening scene with warm lights, atmospheric, homely — s 500
This way, generating a few more correct images and adjusting the variables, you can make sure your prompt gets accepted after review. Happy prompting! ✨
