What makes a story popular?

Bookmarks only notify you when a chapter is added to the end of the branch, so you might miss interesting branches.

I use the favorite button to bookmark stories. (I don't use bookmarks for chapters.)

 

The only thing I've noticed really is that a sex scene in a chapter generally means more likes than one without it, so I find drawn to putting one in almost every chapter.

It does annoy me a little when some chapters get a lot of favorites or bookmarks but relatively few likes. I mean, surely you must have actually liked them if you favorited them.
That been said, some chapters I'm just happy to get down in print and out of my head, even if they're 25 levels down an unpopular branch and unlikely to be seen by more than a dozen readers. At least I don't have to carry them around any more.
A thing I quite like is discovering some chapters getting likes a long time after being written - which makes me curious enough as to why that I have to reread my older work, almost rediscovering it.

 

I bookmark chapters I think I may reread later. They may have some details like bios I might want to find later. I use favorites to power my notifications though.

 

That's interesting. I never really thought of using bookmarks in that way. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I kinda figured they'd be used to hold a place in longer stories, or at the end of branch so you'd know where to pick up again when more chapters start getting added. But it seems like favorites get used way more than bookmarks, and bookmarks are just kind of tabs within the story.

 

For myself, I use bookmarks as a backlog list of stories to get to, and favorites for the ones I am actively reading and want to see the updates.

I might use bookmarks differently if some other way of tagging to read later option shows up.

 

That's an interesting way of doing it too. So bookmarked stories become a kind of queue for you to read later. Maybe a 'Want to Read' designation like Good Reads would be useful.

I have noticed that and I agree that it's odd, but quite frankly I'll take what I can get.

 

I know the feeling. I am such a sucker for any sort of encouragement from readers at all. Comments, favorites, and the like all make me want to write on a story more. I'm like one of Pavlov's puppers lol!

 

I definitely see a pretty strong difference between sex(well in my case fetish fuel) and story chapters when it comes to likes


At the moment i release one chapter per day so my story gets a fair share exposure, but thats not something thats really sustainable in the long run

 

I have a story going right now that's a slow burn before the sex really starts and I've seen a big drop off in views. I still get a couple likes per chapter though from the folks that are sticking with it. More would be nice but I can't bring myself to throw sex in for the heck of it yet. That'll come soon enough.

 

Views don't mean much.

 

Well as a fairly new author who only averages 3 or so likes a chapter, it's the only metric I really have for a general idea of how many folks are bothering the look at an installment. I don't doubt that it's badly suited for that purpose but it's what I have

 

To my experience, stories that fulfill fantasies and have many branches to interact with are popular. I've seen very good writings in stories that have way less views, primarily because they lack interactive choices or straight up has fetishes that are repulsive to some people.

Moreover, you want to tag your chapters properly. Readers search genres they want to read such as "gangbang" or "medieval". If you want your target audience to see your work, make sure you input the correct tags so your story can show up in the search results.

 

Additionally, sometimes you may wish to put your title in the tags, if your title has some aspect of the genre, theme or fetish in it (e.g. Lesbian Orc Wrestling). The search function is imperfect when searching for title matches.

 

Seeing a steep falloff of view counts over the chapters of a linear story is guaranteed.

The intro chapter gets a ton on hits, but assume most of those are people wanting a better look at the thumbnail or just wanting to the “about” in the sidebar to get a better synopsis.

I have a very small number of stories that I will rush to read the latest chapters immediately. (Like yours!)

More often I am grazing on multiple stories, sometimes forgetting which ones I am behind on. So there is a long lag for interested readers to ever catch up.

View counts are a little more useful in judging which story branches are getting explored more than others.

 

Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of views. I've noticed the initial drop off in all three of my stories. In my fantasy story, the intro currently stands at 1,132, while the second chapter drops to 401 views, for a difference of 731.
In my sci-fi story, the first chapter has 1,224 views so far, and the second chapter has 602 for a drop off of 622.
The third story, which is far more sex orientated and fetish fuel, like @Gambio mentioned, has initial views of 4, 828, but it immediately branches. One branch got 2,115 in the second chapter, and the other got 973. Added together and subtracted from the first chapter, that's a loss of 1740 readers. By pure numbers alone, the third story would be the one people keep up with the least, despite it having way more likes and favorites than the other two.
But there's also other things to consider, like the fact that the fantasy story has a prologue and the sci-fi story jumps straight in.

So it's all very difficult to assess and I largely try to ignore the views, especially since my stories have been up less than a week. Doesn't stop me from thinking that if the story was compelling they'd at least be motivated to check out chapter 2, but I try to ignore that voice.

 

I wouldn't put too much stock in views since you don't actually know what they are telling you. Some of the views are just people clicking through the chapters, they might not actually be reading them. Say for example someone doesn't have an account and can't use the story map feature. To get an idea of where the story is going they might just click the options and to get an idea of where the story is going. OR maybe they've already read parts of the story and are back but can't jump back to where they left off. Otherwise, perhaps people are just clicking back to skim chapters they've already read to remind themselves of what was going on. Still more might just have a certain page open on their 50th tap and it keeps refreshing itself when they click back or something.

I'd assume that a large chunk of the views are just meaningless numbers that don't have a lot of feeling behind them. Besides, just because someone clicks the chapter to get an intro but don't read on, it doesn't need to mean that they didn't like the intro (if they even read it). IT could just be that they don't feel like they have the time to invest in reading the story especially if it requires them to invest emotionally, or that they aren't in the mood to read that type of story just then but have scouted it out for potential future reading.

Although there are plenty of appreciative readers out there a majority are probably only there as consumers and don't put any thought into how much their trace presence means to us authors. That's just how it is, all we can do as a community is to work to draw in more people and help them realise that whether writing mediocre smut or giving feedback in the way of reading to the very end and leaving a like, it's a labour of love and not factory produced chips made by a system that can't give a shit about humanity.

 

What I wrote in an older thread:

This can cause additional views on the introduction chapter as well but it doesn't mean that the user hasn't read the story.

I think this can be expected but the view count will most likely go down from chapter by chapter even if every human reader would continue until reaching the end.
In my story AW, the views drop by 84% from chapter 2 to 14 while the likes go down by just 13%. (Both aren't sex chapters.)
The last chapter has 4 comments and about 40 views more than the second last chapter that has only 2 comments.

 

I've not been doing this for long, but I've noticed (both here and on other sites) that the 2nd chapter sees a sharp drop off, the third a further sharp drop off, and then it sort of stabilises.

 

well, my stories aren't too popular, but I'll take a guess:
1) Genre
2) Sex scenes

 

So here is something funny i realized

Two days ago i released two chapters at once. They go in order, so first you should read Chapter A and then Chapter B


And yet Chapter B has about 12% more views.

Why? Because its title is written in all caps. Its the only chapter in the entire story that does this, so its bound to stand out.


The chapter also is very short and should leave the reader with a WTF? kind of feeling that hopefully will make him curious enough to go back and read from the start.

I am sure there is quite a sizable group of people who just open the storymap and click on a chapter that sound's intriguing to them. Either because they want to skip the boring stuff or because they just want to fap.

I'm not sure how feasible it is, but i like to try and go after that demographic.