Thanks, this is some good advice. Fortunately, I have yet to use any linking chapters. My story is an adaption of the Persona games so they won't be interacting unless I adapt the labyrinth games. I've already done fifty chapters using {first_name} for the P5 protagonist and can't be bother to change them for a crossover I might never bother with. I only changed the female protagonist of Persona 3 because I had an idea for a story with both her and her male character and had only put out one of her chapters. If I do decide to do a crossover, adapting the dancing or labyrinth games, I could just have P5 use his Joker codename and the P4 protagonist use his canon name since there means to be only one. The P3 protagonist will be tougher since he has two canon names and no codename, though tis is only hypothetical for now and those games seem to take place after the Phantom Thieves recruited Goro Akechi.
Good likes per view may also mean that your content attracts a small subset of users, who are starving for the fetish\setting\style you provide.
My bad. Any time I said "links," assume I meant "Chapter Titles." Any time I said "Variable," assume I meant "Customization Detail." My advice, as far as I know, applies to writing CHYOAs in general, and has nothing to do with the "Link Chapter" feature. Sorry for any confusion. If there's a chance you'll want them to have player-editable names later, you should probably set up the Customizable Details for them now, since the longer you wait to change a detail like that, the more work it'll be to go through and change all the names. Actually... looking at the Persona wiki now.... this could get clunky. {MIP_first} {Persona MC First Name} {Boy} {MIP_middle}{Persona MC Middle Name} {with} {MIP_last}{Persona MC Last Name} {Earring} That's such a Persona thing to have to think about! New Advice: HTML Link to some of the chapters on Google Docs, just so you can write sections in white text with a black highlight on a red page.
Comments might increase views as well as users might open the chapter again to read the comments. And if there is a reply to a comment, every user who commented before will get notified and might open the chapter again.
Huh. I didn't know that about Game Mode. Now that I think about it, my better-performing story had game mode enabled for a while until I figured out how to turn it off. It's unsettling to think that it might have been inflating my Views all this time. I doubt it similarly inflated Likes, though. If people are throwing your numbers off because they're typing the name of your story into Google, that's honestly a pretty good problem to have. If you somehow optimized your smutty story for SEO, or are throwing advertising dollars at it, that's probably outside the scope of this thread. The thind way I can think of to get google hits is by putting often-searched terms into your title. Established fandoms twigging on their favorite IPs clearly influence the results, but when something called manwha: The Gamer outperforms Superman, and those are the only two recognizable IPs in the top ten, established IPs are probably not the strongest element at play. 1.66 views per chapter based on just a change to the update schedule seems kinda high, but I can't think of any way to test or refute it. If you don't mind my asking, gene.sis, where are you getting your information? You raise some good points, but I'm not sure how applicable they are in the general case.
Having Game Mode enabled does nothing if it's not being used. Readers might be misled into thinking your story has Game Mode elements because it's enabled, but since the panel indicates when no variables are in use, most would (hopefully) realise it's not actually in use. In addition, many readers ignore Game Mode even if it's clearly important to the story, not understanding why they need to read the chapters in order. Still, the point is that views are an almost meaningless statistic due to being influenced primarily by random factors.
I'd argue that there's a difference between arbitrary and random. In fact, if they were truly random, it would actually make them less of a problem, since the randomness would average out over time as stories accumulated larger and larger sample sizes. But the fact that there's arbitrary noise caused by unpredictable (or in some cases, as you've demonstrated, predictable) human behavior doesn't change the fact that beneath the noise, some stories are more popular than others. Likes-to-Views ratio, while an imperfect metric, (since it's built upon the imperfect metric of Views,) is still the simplest tool we have for abstracting away the most blatant advantage some stories have over others: time. Older stories have exponentially more views than brand-new stories, and this will always be the case, regardless of other factors at play. The only question that can meaningfully be answered is "What percentage of my readers liked what I did here?" If you're gaming the system using google adsense, or trying to measure dicks with the Top 10 stories, or otherwise trying to use information from this thread to optimize your Likes, your Views, or both, you're very much doing it wrong. The only meaningful takeaway from this thread is Write More. But if you see a certain Chapter where your Likes suddenly go up while your Views naturally continue to go down, maybe that Chapter's worth a second look. Maybe you did something there that your readers will appreciate you doing again. Only one way to find out. You probably would have done it again anyway if you'd just kept Writing More. You're the one who did it the first time, after all. But there's no harm in thinking critically about your own work.
Exactly. It only has a real effect on views if there are structures like loops and hub chapters. For example, there's a story that only has an introduction and 27 link chapters linking back to the introduction. So no matter what chapter option you choose, you will add a view to the introduction. The numbers presented are just calculations based on the described behavior. So if the behavior is as described, it will result in the respective number of views. (I can do the calculation again in a more detailed way if you want.) As the number of views doesn't represent the number of readers, you can't calculate that percentage. It would even be more meaningful to calculate something like "Likes per Favorite" or "Avg. Likes per Favorite" That certainly works. A short while ago, I got a notification [username] liked your chapter Go For Her Ass. The liked chapter is in the middle of the story and the only chapter that has been liked. After taking a look, I can tell it's worse than other chapters of the story, so it seems weird that it is the only chapter that got a like. But the chapter is tagged "anal" and has the term "ass" in the title. So if someone doesn't care about the "nonsense" before and after that chapter, they might just have searched for one of the terms and just read that single chapter, ignoring the rest of the content.
I don't get it either. I have a story going where 6 straight chapters are just female names, as each character gets an introduction. One of the chapters in the middle has like 25% more views and 50% more likes than the one before or after, except it is just a name in the story map. I'm not sure why people are drawn to that one specifically. But hey if they like it, they like it.
Huh. These are interesting counter-examples. It's possible I've been reading too much into something with a small sample size.
Is that chapter tagged with something that might be searched for? The update schedule might also have made a difference. Maybe it was the last chapter that has been posted in a while. So some readers might have stopped reading and actually considered pushing the like button they forgot about the last few chapters as they were too invested in the story. If it was like that for a while, maybe some readers came back to the branch and deliberately pushed the like button as an incentive to get you to continue. As for Likes, the most likely reason might be that the chapter is actually better than the others. As for Views... If the following chapter was published a while after that one, readers might not remember exactly what happened in the last chapter, go back, reread it and then continue. (In that case, the number of views is more likely up in the following chapter as well.) Or there are search terms that let the chapter pop up very often. Or you looked at the chapter so often that the number of views went up that much. For Views, there are so many different reasons they might go up that they are not reliable in any way. A Like can only be given once by one user, so they are rather reliable.
That would *also* be surprising, considering how I wrote her to be a misanthrope to start. But she also gets the chance to nearly deck the story villain, so that's probably what's getting liked. Yeah it's probably a combination of these, I just thought it was funny that a chapter with such an unassuming title would stand out. I tagged it with "Lesbian Romance" and "Bad Singing" so maybe I found a new kink in the wild. In your example, "Go For Her Ass" pretty much tells the reader exactly what they're getting.
here’s something that I think is pretty relevant, pretty verifiable proof that when you stop posting to a story frequently it pretty drastically drops the number of likes for subsequent chapters. Maybe I’ll get back to the like ratio that I had earlier but that’s probably where it is now.
Dang, somebody's living their best life in 4K. Jan 3 to Jan 10 (1 week between updates) shows a similar drop from 40s to 20s, but it rebounds with the second Jan10 update. I'm wary of drawing conclusions from such a small sample size, but it's food for thought. I take it you can't find any difference between the writing in the chapters?
In my experience, if you publish multiple chapters at (nearly) the same time, the last one will have significantly more likes than the initial one(s).
If there’s a decline in quality I can’t tell. I mean I have absolutely canned full chapters that I didn’t think met my standards, I wouldn’t post if I didn’t think it was worth it. One thing that I did notice is that I’ve stopped putting tags on my chapters and I wonder how much of that’s a factor.
Here is one for you. 16 people liked the chapter I posted but 91 people voted in a poll I attached via a link for the same chapter.
