I love every fanfiction author on earth !!! Thank you so much for using your own time to provide us with a free(!) story to read that is 10x better than every book I have read put in one!
For long fic writers: Your detailed fics are so amazing and you amaze me every single time with the amount of research and time you have put into your beautiful works! Whether I am looking to kill time or just want something to distract me you have provided me with that, and I am so glad we have writers like you!
For short fic writers: Your fluffy/angsty/smutty/all of the above fics are so nice to read after a long day! When I just need something small because I don’t have the energy for something long, you wrote something for yourself and shared it with us, and I am so glad that we have writers like you!
If you write fluff; Thank you so much! I love reading your self-indulgent fics. They are so sweet and adorable and those characters definitely would do that.
If you write angst; Thank you so much! I love reading your painful fics. I’m always excited to see how it will end and if things will ever get better.
If you write smut; Thank you so much! I love reading your own fantasies(or realities, or just what you chose to write). They make me smile and blush.
If you write romance; Thank you so much! I love reading about my otp falling in love over and over. Even if it is cliché, it’s also unique and I’m still surprised each time.
If you write about platonic relationships; Thank you so much! I love reading about my favorite best friends and siblings. You bring something not often seen and your courage is amazing.
If you write crack; Thank you so much! I love reading your random fics. They make me laugh time and time again and even if they are weird and ooc, they are amazing too.
If you write anything else; THANK YOU SO MUCH! Whatever it is you write, it is amazing and I love it.
I know my singular opinion doesn’t mean much when there are millions of people on this earth, but I want it to be heard!
I LOVE FANFICION WRITERS. YA’LL ARE THE REAL MVPS.
Cat Grant and her companion Kara Danvers are scientists stationed deep beneath the barren surface of Saturn’s third moon, Titan. Their perfect world is interrupted when Maxwell Lord arrives with his strange red helper robot. The man’s fascination with the women spirals out of control just as Saturn goes into eclipse and cuts off communication with the rest of the solar system. Cat and Kara must fight the insane Lord and his killer robot running amok.
Based on Saturn 3 (1980). Max and his robot blow up. Cat takes Kara to Earth. They live happily ever after and do more crazy science.
I’ve seen five different authors take down, or prepare to take down, their posted works on Ao3 this week. At the same time, I’ve seen several people wishing there was more new content to read. I’ve also seen countless posts by authors begging for people to leave comments and kudos.
People tell me I am a big name fan in my chosen fandom. I don’t quite get that but for the purposes of this post, let’s roll with it. On my latest one shot, less than 18% of the people who read it bothered to hit the kudos button. Sure, okay, maybe that one sort of sucked. Let’s look at the one shot posted before that – less than 16% left kudos. Before that – 10%, and then 16%. I’m not even going to get into the comments. Let’s just say the numbers drop a lot. I’m just looking at one shots here so we don’t have to worry about multiple hits from multiple chapters, people reading previous chapters over, etc. And if I am a BNF, that means other people are getting significantly less kudos and comments.
Fandom is withering away because it feels like people don’t care about the works that are posted. Why should I go to the trouble of posting my stories if no one reads them, and of the people who do read them, less than a fifth like them? Even if you are not a huge fan of the story, if it kept your attention long enough for you to get to the bottom, go ahead and mash that kudos button. It’s a drop of encouragement in a big desert.
TL;DR: Passively devouring content is killing fandom.
Reblogging again
So much this
You know, kudos and comments are much beloved by all esp. yrs truly, but I have to say: I’ve been posting fic for 20 years, and I have never in my entire life had a story stay above a 1:9 kudos to hits ratio (or comments to hits, back when kudo wasn’t an option). Usually they don’t stay above 1:10, once they’ve been around for a few weeks.
I also have a working background in online marketing. In social media 1:10 is what you would call a solid engagement score, when people actually care about your product (as opposed to “liking” your Facebook page so they could join a contest or whatever). If BNFs are getting 1:5 – and I do sometimes see it – that is sky-high engagement. Take any celebrity; take Harry Styles, who has just under 30M followers and doesn’t tweet all that often. He regularly gets 3-400K likes, 1-200K retweets. I’ve seen him get up to just under 1M likes on a tweet. That’s a 1:30 engagement ratio, for Harry Styles, and though some of you guys enjoy my fics and have said so, I don’t think you have as lasting a relationship with my stories as Harry Styles’s fans do with him. XD;
Again, this is not to say we, as readers, should all go home and not bother to kudo or comment or engage with fic writers. That definitely is a recipe for discouraging what you want to see in future. But this is not the first post I’ve seen that suggests a 20% kudo ratio is the equivalent of yelling into the void, and I’m worried that we as writers are discouraging ourselves because our expectations are out of whack.
I think about this a lot, because it’s important to know what a realistic goal to expect from an audience is, even though I admit it definitely is kind of depressing when you look at the numbers. I was doing reading on what sort of money you can expect to make from a successful webcomic, and the general rule of thumb seems to be that if your merchandising is meshing well with your audience, about 1% will give you merch. I imagine ‘subscribe to patreon’ also falls in this general range.
Stuff that is ONLY available for dollars are obviously going to have a different way of measuring this, but when it comes to ‘If people can consume something without engaging back in any fashion (hitting a like button, buying something, leaving a comment)’ the vast majority will.
And as a creator that is frustrating but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to see how it happens. I have gotten steadily worse at even liking posts, much less leaving comments on ones I enjoy, since I started using tumblr. It’s very difficult to engage consistently. I always kudo on any fanfic I read and comment on the vast majority, but then again I don’t read a lot of fanfic, if you are someone who browses AO3 constantly/regularly for months or years, I could see how it’s easy to stop engaging. I don’t remember to like every YT video or tumblr fanart I see, much less comment on them.
When we are constantly consuming free content it’s hard to remember to engage with it or what that engagement means to the creators. And lol, honestly that sucks. Certainly as consumers we should be better about it. But also like, as a creator be kinder to yourself by setting a realistic bar of what you can achieve.
And IMO, if numbers matter to you (kudos, comments, etc) be honest about the fact that you CAN improve those things by marketing yourself better. The ‘I just produced my art and put it out there and got insanely popular because it was just so brilliant’ is less than a one a million chance. Lots of amazing content is overlooked every day because there is a lot of good content and a metric fuckton of mediocre to bad content. You can only SORT of judge the quality of your work based on the audience it generates, but if what you WANT is an audience there is way, way, WAY more you can be doing than simply producing whatever you immediately feel like. Marketing yourself is a skill and if you want the benefits of it you have to practice it.
I have a professional background in internet marketing as my day job and a moderate hobby business. My definition for “moderate” is “it pays for itself, keeps me in product, and occasionally buys groceries.”
In the day job, which is for an extremely large global company, there are entire teams of people whose entire purpose of employment is to ensure a 3% conversion rate. That’s it. That is for a Fortune 100 company: the success metric is for 3% of all visitors to a marketing web site to click the “send me more info” link.
My moderate business that pays for itself has a 0.94% conversion rate of views to orders. Less than 1%, and it’s still worth its time – and this is without me bothering to do any marketing beyond instagram and tumblr posts with new product.
I know it feels like no one is paying attention to you and you’re wasting your time if you don’t get everyone clicking kudos or commenting but I promise, I PROMISE, you are doing fantastically, amazingly well with your 10% rate. You probably aren’t going to go viral AND THAT’S FINE. You’re only hurting yourself if you’re expecting a greater return – don’t call yourself a failure, because you’re NOT. You’re just looking at it the wrong way. I promise, you’re lovely just the way you are.
This is actually really good to know – helpful.
I keep track of what stories are doing well based on the reading to kudos ratio. I aim for close to 10%…and a story that hits between 5% and 10% kudos, to me, is considered a success. That means 10% of all readers liked the story enough to slap the kudos button. For me – that’s a big deal. Enough to struggle with writers block, re-writes, edits, writing when I’m tired, etc etc etc.
A story with a low kudos ration may get taken down as a “not enough liked it to deal with the stress of writing it.”
I just got some people interested in a story I haven’t touched in 2 years. I checked its kudos ration. It’s almost 7% on a self-insert. Damn. I should work on that story. See?
And oddly enough – sometimes I look not at total hits or kudos, but a kudo ratio to see if a long story is worth trying out. Because you may have low numbers, but if you’re hitting close to 10%…I’mma give that story a solid chance and 99% of the time add to that kudos ratio because that means 10% of the readership loved it.
I think…no, I know that I don’t understand marketing numbers well. I know that 10% kudos ratio seems low. Especially since hitting that kudos button is so easy. But then I think about stories I’ve read where I haven’t hit the kudos button and yeah…ok…I get it. I’m guilty of it too. We all are.
So hey – kudos to the people who leave me kudos.
CAKE to the people who leave me a comment. Even if it’s just a whole bunch of ❤ ❤ ❤ <3.
I love you too!
Reblogging for all the comments about reasonable expectations. I’ve been taught that for social media, you can divide your followers into three groups: 90-9-1.
1 % are very active. They are the fans. They create their own content (hello, fanfic!), they cheer you on, they protest.
9 % may respond when you ask them to do something, but they will not take initiative. And they will not engage every time.
90 % will never engage, whatever you do.
But the 90 % may enjoy your content just as much as the 1 %. They just don’t want to engage in that way.
So, don’t set your expectations too high! Reality will never deliver.
Man, I really, really needed to read this today. Thank you.
And as always, even with single-chapter works, it’s also important to remember that one hit doesn’t equal one reader. There are still bots that might be accessing a work, or someone might have it open in a tab that keeps getting refreshed (e.g. due to restarting their browser).
All of this is important, because if you are only writing for eh potential feedback? You will be disappointed EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Fandom: Supergirl Rating: K Summary: As Alex and Kara help Eliza prepare for a garage sale, a shocking secret is revealed! A/N: *wants to tell a single joke about dragons on Krypton* *ends up writing thirteen pages of what is probably incoherent nonsense*
…
Spring
in Midvale is…a bit tempestuous, to say the least.
Cat counts the seconds between Supergirl’s vertical departure and a slightly flustered Kara running out onto the balcony.
“Keira,” she says, just once more for old time’s sake. “Thank you for making the last of the arrangements. I’m not sure that girl is competent, but she’ll be Olsen’s problem from now on.”
“I didn’t,” Kara replies, bracing herself like she’s not bulletproof.
“Didn’t what?”
“Didn’t make the arrangements. I didn’t issue the press release, I didn’t cancel your car service, I didn’t notify all department heads of the change in command.”
“Then…” Cat is at a loss. This disobedience is the last thing she expected. “What exactly did you do?”
Billy Graham-Washington was a nightmare she thought she’d
left behind in middle school.
He had been tall, sharp-jawed, and part of the school field
hockey team. More than that, his father was a senator and his mother a QVC heiress.
He wore the right clothes, had the right smile, and said the right things. And
she hated him, mostly because her mother had been so certain they were going to
get married by the end of high school. Not used to the word ‘no,’ he’d gotten
more than a little handsy with her, and by the end of eighth grade, the sight
of him was near enough to bring on an anxiety attack.
However, all that was supposed to be safely in the past. He’d
gotten married to the head cheerleader just before graduation, a month before
the birth of their first child, and she’d gone on to rule her media empire. Her
life had been perfectly Billy Graham-Washington free, until ten minutes ago
when he entered her building, rode her damn elevator to the fortieth floor, and
started chatting up her secretary.
She rifled through a drawer, found her anti-anxiety
medication, and dry swallowed two pills. Then, she propped her laptop open,
selected a financial document, and set to work pretending like she hadn’t even
noticed him outside. Whatever his business was, she wasn’t going to go out of
her way to interact with him. Of course, when he barged in minutes later, she
was forced to acknowledge his existence.
“Billy.”
He stuck his hand out. “Kitty! It’s been ages! Oh, and it’s
William now.”
susie grits her teeth and grinds her jaw and spends the entire spring of their fourth grade year plotting how to get back at calvin for stealing mr. bun and dropping him in a mud puddle.
(it involves putting hobbes into a dress and taking polaroids; she still has the photos, even thirty years later)
she does her homework. does his homework too, sometimes, because mrs. wormwood gives them different math problems to discourage cheating, and susie likes math. his mom finds out when they’re in sixth grade, and offers her four times the going rate to tutor calvin in math. she agrees, because even at twelve she knows college isn’t cheap (not the ones she’s eyeing, anyway).
she has to learn quickly about superheroes and dinosaurs and aliens, because calvin won’t listen unless there’s at least one. she has her own opinions of aliens (real, but not the tentacled fanged monsters calvin draws in the margins; her aliens are gorgeously strange monsters, elegant, like a degas painting reflected in rainy puddles, glittering in distorted neon), and dinosaurs are cool, but they’re a boring sort of cool, not black hole kind of cool, so it’s only superheroes she lets him go on about.
this turns out to be a mistake. though he draws aliens and ray guns and flying saucers on the back sides of his homework, he has a whole thing built up around stupendous man. she’s seen the costume, but didn’t know there was lore. she doesn’t want to know the lore.
it’s stupid. no one can just fly. that’s not how the world works. capes are dumb. she can’t believe his mom made him another costume after he hit a growth spurt.
she still tutors him, but they drift apart in high school. calvin and moe somehow become friends, become even bigger assholes together, and susie discovers calculus and girls. she gets into harvard and yale and stanford and others, chooses to go to california. he waves at her from his driveway while she drives away in the moving truck.
“you were never stupid,” she tells him on the phone when they’ve drifted back into each other’s lives her senior year. “you just didn’t care.”
“yeah,” he laughs, and she pretends she can’t hear the desperation in it; his girlfriend kicked him out, he lost his job, and he’s now in the unfortunate position of acknowledging that his father was right and education was important. she has two finals to study for, the nasa interview next week, and a grant application to finish, but he’s had a rough week. she can take an hour to listen.
“the community college isn’t bad,” she suggests, though she knows it sounds patronizing coming from someone set to graduate stanford with honors.
“you mean i can’t just put on my stupendous man costume and live off the media attention?”
susie snorts. “not spaceman spiff? there’s a tv show there, i’m sure.” she’s been watching a lot of star trek in what little spare time she has.
“nah,” he says, “spiff’s always been your territory.”
they drift apart again, she goes to houston and he goes to art school. she loses track of him entirely right around curiosity’s landing. she skips their twenty-year reunion; she’s in the middle of a move down to chile for a three-year stint at atacama.
a package arrives the middle of her second year in the desert.
it’s a comic book. spaceman spiff, volume one. hardcover, full color. one of his signature tentacled fanged aliens takes up most of the entire cover, while a small astronaut with a ray gun hides behind a rock. he’s gotten much better, but it’s still unmistakably calvin’s art.
except – she squints at the astronaut. she flips open the book, thumbs through a few pages.
spiff isn’t the calvin-insert she remembers from their youth.
it’s her.
mousy brown hair, button nose, mr. bun tucked away in the back of her rocket ship.
It’s the only place where being gay is normal. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen a girl flirt with another girl only seconds after meeting one another. Where gay people aren’t terrified of being seen as predators or as gross. Being gay… it’s normal.
And that’s something I dream of and that’s why I love fandom. That’s why I love ships and fanfiction.
Because it’s an escape from a world that at best thinks I’m a joke, and at worst is disgusted and afraid of me.
Question of Smoke 