Getting people to read your story

TheLowKing

TheLowKing

Really Really Experienced
At the time of writing, there are a whopping 26,619 stories on CHYOA. So how do you make sure your once-in-a-generation masterpiece stands out in the crowd?

Some tips, presented as an easy-to-digest numbered list. Note that these are PR tips, not writing tips.

  1. Use a cover image. Ideally it should be at least vaguely sexy. Hardcore sex is an option, but a tasteful lingerie picture can work just as well. I would discourage using AI art because it tends to look samey, and so makes your story looks samey. Just about anything is better than nothing at all, though! Make a photo of a tree from your window, boom, done. I'm not even kidding.
  2. Write a short, snappy synopsis that makes it clear 1) what the story is about, and 2) what kinks you'll be focusing on. Don't beat people over the head with it, though, that's not sexy. Awful: "meh im just bored". Bad: "This is an mdom incest harem story!" Better: "When Brea returns home from a semester in college with new patriarchal beliefs, she is eager to teach her brother Michael to use her as his personal slut". Don't put your whole story here, though: 20-50 words is a good target.
  3. Pick a good title. I prefer something vaguely sexy that tickles potential readers' curiosity and/or genitals. This is an erotic story site, after all, most people are here to get their jollies off. The subtitle is far less important because it only appears in a couple of places. Good: "Milky Adventures", "Futas & Fertility", "Harem Hotel". Bad: "Ambassador", "Jimmy's Life", "Normal", "Yet Another Naruto Fanfic". (Some of these are are titles of real stories on CHYOA; I've read none of them, and make no claim as to whether the stories themselves are bad or good.)
  4. Add tags to your story. CHYOA's tag ecosystem is kind of crappy, but tags are still one of the better ways for people to find the kinks they like. You want your story to be found, so add accurate tags. If you can't be bothered to individually tag every single chapter (understandable!), then at least tag your story's major kinks in the first chapter. If you know what to tag, but not sure what to tag it as ("facefuck"? "face fuck"? "throatfuck"? "throat fuck"? "deepthroat"? "deep throat"?), search and see which is/are the most widely used, or check this list.
  5. Publish often. Every time you publish a chapter, your story will be on the first page of most recently updated stories for about 2-3 hours. This attracts a lot of readers: in my experience, 2-5 times as many as you normally get in the same period. It makes a huge difference. It's far better to publish 1 chapter every 2 days than to publish a batch of 7 chapters every 2 weeks.
  6. Engage your readers. I know, you hate "like, share, and subscribe!" I hate it too. But there's a reason every creator under the sun does it: it works. Don't beg, though, and don't overdo it, or you risk annoying people. Author's notes are a good place for it. Ignore rude comments (you can't win), but always reply to neutral and positive ones. Try to be kind and pleasant, but don't be afraid to tell people 'no' if they suggest things that you're not into.
  7. Underpromise, overdeliver. Odds are this is just a hobby for you, and sometimes life gets in the way. It happens. It's far better to occasionally surprise your fans with an extra chapter than to disappoint them by falling behind on an overly ambitious schedule. Falling behind is also deeply demotivating, which risks a death spiral. My personal rule is that I promise to publish just half as often as I think I can.
  8. Keep a small backlog of unpublished chapters This ensures that even if you don't have time, energy, or inspiration to write for a few days, you can still publish a chapter on schedule. There is a trade-off here, though: the larger your buffer, the less responsive you can be to reader feedback. You have to decide what the best balance is for you.
  9. Spell-check and grammar-check. It's incredibly easy to to overlook silly mistakes, and they make you look dumb. Thankfully, computers are great at finding them, so let 'em. (I spell-checked this post and found 3 errors.) And remember: sentences start with a capital letter.

Excellent! Now you've got people actually reading your words. The only thing you have to do now is to make them the good words.

Easy!
 
Most of these are "how to make people click once" kind of hints. I am not saying that it is unimportant but you should not expect loyal readers by merely doing this.

5 is the best method. (It also means that shorter chapters are your friend) Also, you must use the very short period of being "new story" to the full extent. Never publish an embryo of a story to 'test the interest'.

6 won't work. Not really. Chyoa is not YouTube. Realistically, you won't get to the top of "by rating" or "by most viewed" no matter how many likes, favorites, or bookmarks you get. There is no almighty algorithm to recommend your stories, unless you somehow get into the story of the week. But for this you need to do 5 to the extreme and write something interesting for a wide audience.
 
wicker said:
getting people to read is not the problem, staying fresh and getting likes is
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Hvast said:
Most of these are "how to make people click once" kind of hints. I am not saying that it is unimportant but you should not expect loyal readers by merely doing this.
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But you have to convince people people to make that first click to even have a chance of turning them into loyal readers. Every person who sees your story and scrolls past it because you didn't take 5 minutes to add a picture is a missed opportunity.

Hvast said:
6 won't work. Not really. Chyoa is not YouTube. Realistically, you won't get to the top of "by rating" or "by most viewed" no matter how many likes, favorites, or bookmarks you get. There is no almighty algorithm to recommend your stories, unless you somehow get into the story of the week. But for this you need to do 5 to the extreme and write something interesting for a wide audience.
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Just because there's no all-powerful Algorithm that you can manipulate to your benefit doesn't mean it doesn't matter how you interact with your readers. Few people use the like button, and even fewer take the time to post a comment... but those comments are read by many more people, and the way you choose to interact with them can either dissuade them from reading, or encourage them. And if you want loyal readers, talking to them is a great way to keep them coming back.

Speaking personally, if I really like your story, I'll probably continue reading it no matter how rude you're being in the comments or elsewhere. But if I'm already hesitating or if I'm not sold on the story yet, then the realisation that the author is a jerk could well be the last straw. And vice versa, if you seem like a cool friendly person who is fun to interact with, then maybe I'll keep reading when otherwise I might've stopped bothering. It's not black-and-white, but you can shift the balance a little in your favour, and it costs you almost nothing to do so. (Especially compared to the tens to hundreds of hours it takes to write a story!)

Hvast said:
It also means that shorter chapters are your friend
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Technically true... but I don't want to encourage a race to the bottom where everyone keeps trying to write shorter and shorter chapters in order to "beat" other people to the front page as often as possible. This is one reason why I'd like to see CHYOA adopt some less manipulable indicator of story length like wordcount (in addition to the current ones, not in place of them).

Hvast said:
Also, you must use the very short period of being "new story" to the full extent. Never publish an embryo of a story to 'test the interest'.
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Good callout! I should've definitely included something along those lines. Don't write 2 chapters of setup without payoff and then going away for a week while you write 2 more chapters! In fact, in my experience, even though your story qualifies as a "new story" for a full week, it's only the first 1-2 days that it'll really stand out. After that, even if you continue publishing chapters, attention will rapidly dwindle to the long-term average.
 
1 & 2 finally pushed me to add a photo to my story and make my synopsis quite a bit less vague.

Keeping a backlog can be difficult though, it feels difficult to hold back spicy chapters after an exposition chapters. Tend to do most of my writing on the weekend, maybe I’ll adopt 8 to try saying one for midweek(and do a final edit pass then).

Thanks for the tips!
 
BeyondTheWallOfDream said:
Keeping a backlog can be difficult though, it feels difficult to hold back spicy chapters after an exposition chapters. Tend to do most of my writing on the weekend, maybe I’ll adopt 8 to try saying one for midweek(and do a final edit pass then).
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You'd be surprised at the minor errors you make while writing the first draft of something, let it marinade is the best advice I've seen on this site in a long time. I was skeptical at first, but it's proven itself to be reliable for me. Interestingly, outright sex scenes rarely have such errors (so long as I keep track of hands lol): I suspect that when I permit the flow to write itself, the chapter ends up error-free (at least in terms of traditional errors), meanwhile a normal chapter can suffer from writer's block mid-chapter and require several edits to reach a draft.
 
I've been keeping meticulous track of likes and views on my current story over the past 2.5 months, while posting a new chapter on most days. Views/hour and likes/hour for each weekday, assuming UTC:
Code: 
| Day       | Views | Likes |
|-----------+-------+-------|
| Monday    |  52.7 | 0.587 |
| Tuesday   |  57.1 | 0.625 |
| Wednesday |  46.8 | 0.711 |
| Thursday  |  47.5 | 0.415 |
| Friday    |  58.1 | 0.703 |
| Saturday  |  50.8 | 0.783 |
| Sunday    |  53.5 | 0.617 |
|-----------+-------+-------|
| Weekend   |  52.1 | 0.700 |
| Weekday   |  52.5 | 0.611 |

This is only one datapoint, so I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from this, but I see no reason to avoid the weekend.

[edit] Made a mistake with my stats causing certain hours of the day to be de-emphasized. Fixed now.
 
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TheLowKing said:
I've been keeping meticulous track of likes and views on my current story over the past 2.5 months, while posting a new chapter on most days. Views/hour and likes/hour for each weekday, assuming UTC:
Code: 
| Day       | Views | Likes |
|-----------+-------+-------|
| Monday    |  52.7 | 0.587 |
| Tuesday   |  57.1 | 0.625 |
| Wednesday |  46.8 | 0.711 |
| Thursday  |  47.5 | 0.415 |
| Friday    |  58.1 | 0.703 |
| Saturday  |  50.8 | 0.783 |
| Sunday    |  53.5 | 0.617 |
|-----------+-------+-------|
| Weekend   |  52.1 | 0.700 |
| Weekday   |  52.5 | 0.611 |

This is only one datapoint, so I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from this, but I see no reason to avoid the weekend.

[edit] Made a mistake with my stats causing certain hours of the day to be de-emphasized. Fixed now.
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AVOID THURSDAYS!!! This is what we needed to know!

Seriously though, that's great work and very interesting to see. I would have thought, as Gene. sis suggested, that weekends were a busier time to avoid, but apparently not. Interesting stuff. I just wish I had the patience to do something like that.
 
Just published a chapter. On a Thursday. In the morning. But life being what it is I have to publish when the opportunity is there.
 
The data has since shifted: Tuesday is worst!!! Only 11.5% of my likes on this story came in on a Tuesday. Sunday is best for raw likes, 16.0%. No doubt due to all those people coming out of church with a renewed desire for carnal sin, and feeling very thankful when they find it.

Monday is best for likes/view: 1.25% of views yielded a like. Tuesday is once again worst, at just 0.95%.

Friday is best for views (16.0% of my views came in on that day), and Wednesday is worst (12.9%), but Tuesday is close (13.5%).

So there you go. A rationalization for publishing on almost every weekday. :P




Except Tuesday.
 
TheLowKing said:
The data has since shifted: Tuesday is worst!!! Only 11.5% of my likes on this story came in on a Tuesday. Sunday is best for raw likes, 16.0%. No doubt due to all those people coming out of church with a renewed desire for carnal sin, and feeling very thankful when they find it.

Monday is best for likes/view: 1.25% of views yielded a like. Tuesday is once again worst, at just 0.95%.

Friday is best for views (16.0% of my views came in on that day), and Wednesday is worst (12.9%), but Tuesday is close (13.5%).

So there you go. A rationalization for publishing on almost every weekday. :p




Except Tuesday.
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This is valuable data! Right, okay, avoid Tuesdays.
Looks at roster...next day off is Tuesday.
 
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