Phew! Hey everyone, I’m new to the authors hangout but came over as soon as I found out about the place, I love the idea about authors bouncing ideas with one another haha. My question is, how do you go about recapturing the audience’s attention to your story/ries? Say you’re writing chapters but the views and likes aren’t as much as the previous ones and you find yourself unable to reach those high points again, what do you do to fix that? I ask from both curiousity and wanting to know if anyone else has had a similar thought process to me. Any response is helpful though, and thanks for reading this post haha.
Don't worry about it too much. I just keep up a daily release schedule, and folks find the story. Sometimes they make requests and I incorporate them if I can, or explain why I can't at this point. Sometimes I burn out a bit, but by keeping a slow, steady pace it seems to keep interest. I guess it comes down to what you're looking for with your writing. If you're looking for praise and immediate likes, write what's popular. At the current time there seems to be a large amount of popularity with the Incest, Futa and Embarrassed Nudity stories. None of them really appeal to me, because I'm an old romantic who likes to write long dialogues and buildup... (I did include Incest at reader's request, but to be fair, I asked them, and raising the stakes in that manner worked MUCH better than my original plan or 1st draft, so I'm happy.) If you're just trying to tell a story you want to tell, write that. You'll have more limited appeal, but people who like your story will REALLY like your story. People drift away, and come back, like any website. If you keep up your volume and are consistent, folks will occasionally Like Bomb your story when they come back. (Nothing's more fun that seeing that "161 notifications" All from one person. )
Views are pretty irrelevant. Every time the page is opened, it gets a view. So it is pretty normal that early chapters have much more views than deeper chapters. (There is a suggestion which would allow Unique Views of logged in users (as part of the ranking algorithm)) So I'd recommend you to rely on Likes and Favorites. As brevdravis said, some users are off for a while and then come back. And even those who come online regularly might miss the update notification for your story. Others might see the notification but wait until you have a few chapters written, maybe even checking the chapter titles to avoid reading a cliff hanger. And then there is also quality and reward. In my "Alternating Wife", there is a peak of Likes (22) at the orgasm chapter but also at the following afterglow chapter while the rest is around 13 with a small decline to later chapters. (There, you can also see the difference of the views depending on the chapter depth. The 14th chapter has only a tenth of views of the second chapter but the same number of Likes. So I'm pretty sure that there are about the same number of readers.) So as a recommendation... update regularly (I'm slow, so I try to do write a 1k words chapter per month for each story)
Speaking of, I just recently got like bombed. 78 notifications, all likes from one guy XD and thanks for the advice too, it helped a bit and kinda calmed me down. In the end it’s better to write what I like rather than to write what’s popular, also I’m not so certain how to write incest anyways, I’m a fairly new writer but if anyone ever requests it I might give it a shot haha.
Congrats! Feels AWESOME, doesn't it? I try to remember to follow whoever does that for me. Lets em know I'm willing to hear anything they want to say about the story without being pushy. And I know Quiet Streets is the more accessible of my stories if you're looking for something to do. It's non-con/impreg focused, but lots of potential for anything you WANT to write there. A Special Hell is much more niche, and while I love working on it, I know I'm not going to get many adds on that because it has a very specific style which isn't the easiest to write. (Considering that every single character has their own motivations which need to be taken into account.) Glad I could help you, and I always like talking about the "Process".
Yeah, if there's a magic secret to getting likes, I don't know what it is...some weeks are pretty dry, and sometimes somebody'll go on a splurge and leave 10-20 likes and bookmarks on branches they like. I just keep writing, try to cater to audience tastes as far as my own allow.
Well my current story has two character focuses, one male and one female. The female one was more popular AT FIRST with likes and comments, now funny enough it’s the male side that gets all the attention with the female story struggling to keep up XD so I’m curious how that happened though I have a few speculations haha. Since you’re here I do have several ideas for different stories but the one I’m working on publishing I’ve had second thoughts on lately. It’s a bit more emotional and doesn’t follow the proper story formula, it’s more like a series of short stories really. It’s called Confessions where each chapter is a new character confessing to something big in their life they’ve done, thing is maybe it’s not fit to what people are looking for? I’m hoping it’s more accessible because, like you, my current story also has characters with a solid goal/personality/charm. Idk, I feel I’m not doing the best job explaining it haha, I suppose I’m having second thoughts about the new story. What do you think, any thoughts?
If only it was that easy haha. Really we take the risk making a story and hoping it gains appeal, then the next step comes in getting support via likes/comments/favorites. People forget that feedback is truly important and can even be argued as core to better improve a story through writing or ideas. But we can’t push people into helping us, so we just keep writing.
If you assign the story role "Author" to someone, they can access chapters with direct links. (I think they can't see the chapter answers.)
