You also have to factor the number of favorites. One of the reason for the success of my *little* story is that it has more people having put it as favorite than any story (bare 60 of them) have likes. There are two types of likes you can receive, one is the random one that you have to fish out by baiting readers with a chapter and waiting patiently that someone noticed it. Or you can have a large corral full of readers that will get notified of the chapter no matter when it goes out or how long it is visible. And of that number a small percentage (between 2 and 5 percent and it is abnormaly high) will *like* your chapters, but it offers you nearly guaranteed views.
Has anyone considered doing a full site analytics? Not just one story. This could give a better picture for all users to use when to post or when to read.
When to read is "all the time" as you could NEVER take in all of the things published every day, nor would most people WANT TO.
Well, I think that these kinds of attempts to fully analyze and optimize the best time to post, done in several iterations, would lead to a worse situation compared with just posting at a random time. (It is similar to the situation of two competing companies. If one of them convince their employees to work an hour longer per week without getting paid to get an advantage, the other company would do the same soon. If this goes on, none of the companies have an advantage but the working conditions get worse and worse.) Like others already mentioned, spreading the publishing time throughout all days and hours of the week would be the perfect solution. While some writers seem to be online all day long , I just assume that most readers have their special habits. They could read - in the lunch break - on the bus on their way home from work - at the weekend only - when the kids are in bed - ... So if you spread out the time of publishing, the intersection will include more and more "groups" of readers and give them a chance to fav the story and become a regular reader.
That makes sense. The only thing that nags me though is say a writer posts a new chapter a few hours ago and it is off the front page. A reader hasn't read any of the stories nor is aware of the author is, but may be interested in that type of story. Should stories be up on the front page for at least 24 hours instead of limiting the number of stories on the front page for those doing updates? I know that may or may not be enough time either, but it does give both parties more opportunities. Enlarging the groups of readers for all writers.
If stories would stay there a whole day, the front page would be cluttered up with them. (and too many options affects decision-making) In the last 24 hours, there were around 95 updated stories while the current list only shows 18. If someone wants to see more, he could follow the link to the complete list. But it could be nice to have a personalized front page which only shows new stories and updates from the reader's favorite categories. (Not sure if there is already a suggestion about that.)
Another thing to point out is that not all of us are in America. I'm currently here in sunny old England so all this talk of EST and PST are irrelevant to me.
