Thank you so much for the help!
The word count grouping works like a charm and the advice on scaling up the cover and font size helped immensely.
I tried out the main_category and main_ship method you're using but had problems where it didn't reliably get the correct main ship where sublist did so I switched back to using that.
I also ran into a bit of an issue with the cover bugging out since some of the works in my library don't have a relationship tag but i fixed that with the following if anyone's curious:
Code:
{#ao3_ships:'ifempty(sublist($,0,2,","),"No Relationship Tags")'}