Hey just noticed something... I've been on Chyoa for awhile. I don't have a huge following, due primarily to my less-than-reliable posting habits in the past. However, I've changed that with a newer story, Steve vs the building. I saw that my written stuff averages around 100 views or so. The character page, where I have 4 pictures of naked women, and little else had *10 TIMES* that. Not here to bitch, or be told to "get gud" with my writing...Just wondering what else I could do to increase my audience? Any tips?
Here are a bunch of tips that don't require you to be a good writer. https://forum.chyoa.com/threads/getting-people-to-read-your-story.6343/
Character pages will typically get more views as it is something that a lot of people will check out more than once
Don't make the mistake of obsessing over views and likes. Obsess over favorites instead! Seriously though, there's not much you can do about it, other than edit the chapter titles to be more clickbait. I find that (through my own reading habits) that people will tend to read what they deem (or have deemed) worth reading, and not much else, and that decision tends to be made by raw chance. That means that the only way to make sure readers stick is to avoid the easy mistakes (spelling, grammer, not having a cover for the story) and/or have an interesting premise. But, as long as you upload at least every so often, then you should be good.
Of course there's an element of chance involved. You'll see different stories on the front page depending on when you visit, for example. But people don't randomly pick stories to read, they choose based on very clear pieces of information (some of which you mentioned and others I mentioned in the thread I linked). But people especially don't continue reading a story (in your words "stick") by pure chance. That's ridiculous. 9 stories out of 10 (on CHYOA) I stop reading after 2-5 chapters because they just don't appeal to me. A story that "avoids the easy mistakes" can still be incredibly bad. With perfect English and a brilliant PR strategy a story can still be bland, confusing, boring, offensive, unexciting, and so on. It takes more than just "upload at least every so often" to attract and retain viewers. A steady stream of shit is still shit. And a trickle of solid gold is still gold, no matter how slow it may accumulate. Other times, what someone writes may be objectively incredible, but it may still only be appealing to a small niche. The best scat story of all time isn't going to be as successful as even a middlingly OK incest story. Is that "raw chance"? Hell, no! That information is out there if you care to look, you just have to do the legwork.
Speaking of steady streams of shit... there's an Image story that has almost 10 million views. No plot. Just image after image and a couple of paragraphs spewed out after each. I've long held it shouldn't even be on this site. It doesn't meet half of the guidelines for stories being added. Hell, the first chapter is a single word.
