Leaderboard

The wee corgi is home! She’s a little bit stoned on meds, but she’s home, and I’m so glad to have her here!

Assuming I edit the links right, for the past three years: Halloween 2015 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600107953 Christmas 2015 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108028 Halloween 2016 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108385 Christmas 2016 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108443 Halloween 2017 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108780 Christmas 2017 http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108835

Reviews can be a love note too, even if it’s an old story, they’re definitely nice to have. Heck, on my old potter fic, a good review could stir me to actually *finish* it, it’s been on hiatus for years now (started 15 years ago). Constructive criticism, points of like/dislike are nice, but at the end, even a simple “I like this” review goes a long way to stoking the ego.

Dunno, it’d be different to read ‘em out loud on a crowded train/bus

I don’t think there’s really a correlation between hits (dragon prints) and reviews. A lot of it is based purely on the fandom—the more active a fandom’s reader base, the more likely you’ll get a review, even if it’s someone questioning your sanity and parentage for not writing their particular OTP. I tend to write fan fiction for more obscure fandoms, and I don’t expect reviews, so any I get are exciting. The only reason my Dragon Age story got reviews like it did is that it began as a series of responses to the weekly Dribs, Drabs and Doggy Tales challenge prompts. (The Quarter of Insanely Obnoxious Words was particularly challenging, but I am proud to say @JayDee and I both managed every single word.) Certain tags draw readers as well. If the reader has an incest fetish, they will look for that tag, for example. But tags are vital, and we mods do monitor them closely, because some things are highly triggering, like rape, incest, and Minor1/Minor2 content. We get emails from readers who were sandbagged by content they didn’t expect to see, and some of them, quite frankly, are heartbreaking to read. Real life can be ugly, and maybe that’s why some of us write, but our readers deserve forewarning of even the most dubious content. I used the Rape tag on a oneshot with an offstage, not very graphic mention of rape just to be safe. As far as published work, my publisher has exceedingly narrow parameters for even mentioning rape. One way to try and gain a bit of visibility for a story is to use the Promote A Story thread. @Desiderius Price does use it, which I’m sure helps readers find his work. You can post for each new chapter for a multi-chapter work, and readers who are forum members can follow your post, giving them an email notification every time you post about a new chapter. Very useful, in lieu of a formal “follow this story” feature. And to sort of finish up for this post, at any rate, I will confess to not being as good about reviewing as I’d like to be. As a moderator, I read new chapters and new stories weekly in an ever rotating set of subdomains, checking for Terms of Service compliance. In that capacity, I only review if I find a disclaimer issue, or have had to hide a story. Sometimes I read something, and I want to go back later and review it in my own pen name, but real life sidetracks me, and I’m always bothered by that. I read it, enjoyed it, and want to comment. But as a further confession (and this is where tags come back into the conversation) when I read for pure enjoyment, I do avoid certain content. It’s not appealing to me, and if I don’t have to read it for moderating purposes, I’d rather not encounter it. So, that’s a partial mea culpa for not reading/reviewing certain things even if written by an author I like, who’s a good writer with an engaging style.

I’m less of a reader these days, so that’s not always guaranteed, I came to AFF because I wanted to post what I was writing, explored the TOS carefully before I signed up. However, when I do read a story, I try to make a point of dropping a review on it. I use the “promote a story” to make people aware of my stories. And I also made a conscious decision a while ago to become more active on the forums so people know I exist around here. This all also helps with some social anxieties that I have, which included getting over the hesitation to talk about my own stories when it seems germane and relevant to the topic at hand (I still fight that hesitation, but the bar is now lower than it used to be).

This is where I really appreciate the first amendment in the US, and it’s one the supreme court holds pretty dear to its heart. It may not be perfectly upheld, corporations try to sway it, but, AFAICT, the strongest protection to free speech on the planet. And, the whole concept of ruling a law as unconstitutional *isn’t* explicitly stated in the constitution either, that has a history too (Mauberry vs Madison is the case that established the court’s authority to rule as such). I just hope the current prez’s attempt to demonize free press doesn’t bear fruit. That said, a little tinkering for the purposes of tackling “anchor babies” in the US (ie, the birthright citizenship), or to allow prayer in school (religious right), to the fourteenth amendment (that’s what carries the first amendment protections down to the other levels of government AND grants birthright citizenship), and a nasty war or two with some Muslim countries and/or Russia and/or China (all very real possibilities), and we could have the universe that *my* stories are portraying, where a resurgence in the religious right means that the government now has a duty to see that promote every person’s spiritual well being, and we get… Yep, and it starts off with an eight year old boy “Jeff” who goes from taking a bath to finding himself in a nudist camp, which lets me explore a group who doesn’t appreciate the government trying to promote their spiritual well being and the implications of that. My universe here is hard-sci-fi, which means any tech has to be plausible/buildable with today’s general understanding of the world; and with the general setup, there’s an implied suppression of the creative talent who’d be advancing the state ofthe art as “promoting the devil”. True, future doesn’t have to be “sci-fi”, though it generally is. I’ve been listing some of mine under Originals/Misc because its sufficiently non-tech enough that sci-fi may or may not be appropriate, despite being in the future and having some elements of tech. Heck, a recent episode I wrote involved Amish, and while they had a tablet computer at their market for scanning/adding prices, that was the only real tech they had. I do make the tablet a ubiquitous item in my worlds, because I figure that’s the form factor that today’s laptops will go to for the general user; iPads for normal work (editing documents, watching shows), and smart phones; but even that line is blurring today. Wireless keyboards might still be a thing for a power user. With how I’ve setup my universe, as the religious right resurges in the US, and across the globe, with the US government’s “Department of Homeland Morality”, people who disagree with this, people who wish to value their freedom to think independently, tend not to have to worry about it for too long as they get weeded out. Thus, to show the interesting stories are with the young adults, the teenagers, so that’s where I tend to pick up those minor1/minor2 tags. When in doubt, keep it in. Now, you do have flexibility to where you put the warnings tags, your options are 1) summary, 2) top of the story, and/or 3) top of the relevant chapter. I tend to avoid #3, because that’s too much of a spoiler, I prefer “somewhere in the story” vs “in this chapter”, unless it’s a series of oneshots at which point, top of the chapter is better. So more recently, I’ve been putting major/significant tags to the summary, and ALL tags at the top of the story; this warns the reader without cluttering up the summary. So, if the story is ten chapters describing a lick by lick on a blowjob, then [oral] would be advertised in the summary, but if its a half line of “sucked his cock”, one of a handful throughout a M/M or M/F story, and none really significant to the plot other than “built a little bit onto the relationship”, it’d be at the top of the story. Now, [rape] is more of a general trigger tag, like Minor1 or Minor2, and I tend to suggest keeping those in the summary. Lots of shades here.

I need to mention the other reason for tags, it can be illegal to access certain materials on this website from other countries. Minor1/2 are such tags, JayDee could elaborate on this.

Depends on the original. Male Male with a vampire, werewolf or real estate agent you’re probably good to go.

The mods definitely appreciate you fixing it before they notice it. I’ve been mulling over the best way to balance disclosure vs advertising vs not-spoiling the story for ages on this, because the reader must be warned before they encounter (say [xeno]). If, for instance, a small section, one scene for a 500+kword story, well that [xeno] tag might be disappointing to a reader expecting it, and it’s a bit of a spoiler if you weren’t wanting to disclose that there were indeed aliens showing up in the story. But the good rule of thumb, around here, is when in doubt, tag it in, because they are first and foremost, a warning. At the top of my stories, I will qualify if the tag is an incidental or questionable (ie, I’ll list minor1 if an underage kid is merely naked, regardless of whether he/she is sexual or not, it’s enough of a trigger).

If you do a statistical analysis comparing views:reviews by author, cross-referencing genre, sub domain, and tags, that would be worthy of a PowerPoint presentation, or a leaderboard. I am going on a review campaign. 10K views deserves reviews.

Ha, I was trying to figure out how the tags worked since it is the first time I have posted anything. I found this forum very helpful and I had to go back and fix the archive submission after I understood it better. I honestly don’t want higher views because people think there is rape in it. I tried to be as accurate as possible with the tags given. There is a thread about this, I saw, so I might ask more questions over there.

Hmmm… sounds like a challenge, might do that if I get a chance to look at the site code… Though I’d probably conclude that there is no real correlation. And sometimes, it’s a round robin halloween/holiday stories, and I will try to review each one of those. Rape is one of those trigger tags, stands out like Minor1. Having a shit ton of tags can be a detractor, so I’ve been shifting most of my tags into the top of the story, keeping the major/advertising types (+other) in the summary. The distinction helps those searching for tags they want to read vs those they just need to know are incidentals (ie isolated handjobs), I’ll even qualify those incidentals if warranted (ie, why a tag is being applied if its kinda iffy or even “maybe/anticipated”).

At least if you have a review thread linked on the story people who do leave a review know where to look for a reply. In Mal’s case noted earlier in the thread he gets considerably more reader interaction in the thread than he does from reviews left on the archive. I appreciate anyone looking at my stories who wants too, but – and this isn’t me fishing for compliments or being self-depreciating – there’s some nasty shit there, both in terms of quality and content. You make a pretty food contribution to the topic here – I was suggesting earlier that with older oneshots the actual age can put people off leaving a review and here you’re confirming it in your case! I don’t see a whole lot of a way around this from a writer’s perspective. On my author profile I put a note asking people to review no matter the age, but a lot of readers won’t necessarily see the profile doing general searches or topic checks. Only thing that might work for writers with less stories would be to go through each story every few months and put a note at the bottom like “Hey, I am still awaiting any reviews you have as of July 8th in the year 5.5/apple/26 “ or whatever but once you get into double figures it’d be too hard as with keeping abreast of changes to story codes. Ha, the Spyro story… I played some of the games years ago at least. Couldn’t remember much now. There was a user on another forum with a Spyro snuff fantasy. I did a few sub-flashfic length scenes for ‘em as well as the long one as story exchanges. Weirdly I’ve just checked and it was the same user who requested the Dragon Ball GT story I am polishing up to repost now. It just looks prolific because I’ve been writing as JayDee since 2005 (none dated before 2007 on archive due to taking some down and re-posting), and did 52 prompts in one year at one point, of which around 40-45 were seperate flashfics. In the last two years I think I finished two stories. Thank you for the compliments and the feedback, and all I’ll say is that if you like writing and keep at it it can be fun and rewarding and also a life stealing demon muse. Keep on keeping on! From what I read earlier you’re nailing the erotica and the non-sex stuff flowed fine. This too! Even a “Hey, I liked this.” is nice to get. As nice as they are, a 20000 word dissertation on the the intertextual meanings between the alternating placings of the money shots isn’t required

The main story jams over the last couple of years were Christmas and Halloween, where users would write a story with some connection to the event. There may have been others. I don’t think they actually called them story jams on AFF but the correct terminology has slipped my mind. Anyway some very good writers contributed some great stories. Most of the unreviewed games stories are really undeservedly so, and please, don’t feel you need to go fill in games. There’s other writers and other stories that’d be better uses of your time! I’d rather say some of the writing I am genuinely proud of is in games too – in parts of Ending the Fan, Shokan Lust and pretty much all of the sex and violence free Friendship’s Gift – though they all have reviews.

I’ll have to check out your Games section more thoroughly to close some gaps. Oh goodness I am under no illusions about your content. I wish I had more to say, but I haven’t been a part of this community long enough to know what the jams and challenges are all about. You are leading me down the garden path of your parody story arcs.

Thanks, I might make a review thread but I wasn't actually expecting reviews. I noticed most of the Pokemon fiction have very little feedback. I originally planned on putting it on ff.net but saw they did not accept “MA”, so came here. Reviewing seems more popular there. I’ll get to more of your stories later this week when I have more time, as well as @Desiderius Price stories (sci-fi as a vehicle for socio-political commentary is the only way to go). Hahaha, I got pretty nauseous with Spoiled Meat. It was also funny, though. I did not leave a review for it because 1) it was very old, 2) I did not have anything valuable to say. I wouldn’t wish you to read mine if you didn’t care about it. I don’t know much about the majority of fandoms you’ve written about (although I saw you have a Spyro Challenge in there, which is absurd ). That is the catch with “finding your audience”, I suppose. You are a great writer and much more prolific. I don’t have much experience writing erotica (or writing), and have never had feedback on my writing, so your input would be informative. I apologize I took this a bit off topic! But, maybe this thread is a good way for authors to actually get some reviews haha.

Oh, yeah, and it’s not been explored elsewhere in the thread but – sometimes if you review other peoples stories, they’ll review one or more of yours, maybe even your unreviewed ones, even if you say “I am not review whoring” because they just quote Neil Gaiman and say ha “writers are liars, my dear”. I think an element of this – and it is absolutely not one that always applies – is that if, eg, you write futa stories and you review someone else’s futa stories, that might make them aware you’re writing in the same theme and be interested because of their existing tastes and so read and review your stories. And then there was the time I left a rave review on a beautiful non-porny but erotic waffy story, not expecting any kind of reply back, and the writer responded to say they’d looked at my work and the nausia was finally starting to pass. Just a passing semi-coherent brain wave I suppose.

It was definitely for the best for Spoiled Meat to have a Rape tag, or whatever AFF had at the time instead of Rape. I believe the tag evolved something like NC to RapeFic to current Rape and was updated each time on stories because of the importance of warning tags. There’s arguments that can be made that some of my older stories are undertagged, or tagged in ways that they wouldn’t be today but this is because over the last ten years some tags have been added/changed or even removed since then and it’s too big a job to keep lesser story tags all updated. On Spoiled Meat, for example, the more recent Hum tag suits better than Xeno, given he’s ultimately a man with a mutation-like skin condition. Ultimately the relevence to the topic before we get too far afield is that some tags will bring in readers, some will repel readers and some will bring in readers but not make them want to leave positive reviews to associate them with the content. No problem! It will be later today so I don’t have half a dozen things distracting me as I read, and of course if you want you can start a review reply thread and link it in your story for other reviewers (like Mine for my original stories, here have replied to your review and thank you!), s’what a lot of us do so reviewers can see replies

I read Spoiled Meat and I think I am pretty tame. Thank you for offering to read/review.

Not really any need to elabroate, you’ve pretty much covered it! In some jurisdictions Minor1 and other concent is illegal to view even in text or drawn form so it is very useful to have the tags to avoid legal trouble aside from tigger factors [Edit: Trigger factors. Typo, not a Winnie the Pooh ref.] or personal ickyness factors. It’s also why I raised picture hotlinks appearing in the forum – I think I suggested that they should instead just have a link to content with description, and the forum adapted the current policy as the most workable. Sci-fi doesn’t have to be in the future though, It really depends which elements you include. Same as fantasy doesn’t have to be in the past with a map and such. All you need is a Gorgon trying to get her hair tamed in time for the commuter train into the city. “Yeah, I had another groper today. My bush bit him right on the fingers.” I had a quick scan through and that’s… that's probably for the best. I’ll do a full read/review later.

Thank you for the info. I added some additional warnings and put the rape tag back in, just to cover the bases. I don’t think I went terribly over a line for the context but you never know. Like you say, it is a tough balance when you could potentially mislead people in different directions, either false advertising or not warning them enough. Is your 10K one Jefferey? That one did catch my eye because you seemed to be very happy with it in your Promote thread. Sci-Fi is one of my favorite genres so I will read a few others, too.

Whereas, I’m doing sci-fi… well, in the near future, close enough that I don’t always categorize it in sci-fi. And I’ve got that pesky minor1 tag, keeps creeping in, which I realized was unavoidable once I go “nudist camp/colony” with families.

Do that. My best story is nearing 10k… fingers crossed, should be there before the end of the month. As mine are in originals, that’s a double whammy because originals are under-read compared to some of the other genres.

The ratio of dragon prints to reviews varies massively by author. At one extreme is BronxWench; for most of her stories, the number of dragon prints is in the hundreds or the low thousands, yet virtually all of them have multiple reviews. Just eyeballing it, I would guess that her average ratio of reviews to prints could be as high as 1 to 100. I’m at the other extreme. Most of my stories have print counts in the thousands or tens of thousands. But the absolute number of reviews is relatively low. Again just eyeballing it, I’d say that my average ratio of reviews is probably lower than 1 to 1000. I would also add that for those stories that I post on other sites as well as AFF, they tend get more reviews on sites with smaller readerships. So I have come to conclude that there is actually an inverse correlation between readership size and reviews. My theory is that when readers feel that they are just one of a great many, they are less inclined to leave a review because (1) they don’t feel that it will have much impact on the author and (2) they figure there are plenty of other readers who can leave reviews, so why should they bother? In contrast, readers who feel that they are part of a smaller readership may feel more of a connection with the author, or at least that they are not shouting into the void when they leave a review.

I contribute, partially in the hopes of picking up a new reader or two.

And I think the first chapter of each of the above links has a list of all of the oneshots in them as well, which can give a bit of the flavour of variety on each theme.

Oh, I love to read, but I do find it hard to have the time and even recently getting a new phone AFF stories I’d rather not read on my commute. For reasons. But as noted before I will always try to review what I’ve read unless I can’t think of anything positive (and I mean properly positive not backhanded compliment positive). I like to think every fanfic writer is more likely than average to review what we’ve read because we know what it’s like to get the reviews. Looking back at my unreviewed as well as being oneshots, 6 of the 10 are in games – but then I’ve got 31 stories in games, which is more than twice as many in the next highest of Originals, and 31 is even more than 7 of the other subdomains put together so not a surprise really on a quantity basis.

I think GeorgeGlass’s reply makes sense, there really is huge variation between authors, even within a specific author’s stories. I have a short five part story in originals finished this year which currently has 2080 prints to 19 reviews (many of them repeats from same reviewers on new chapters) but I also have a Harry Potter oneshot story from 2008 with 104777 dragon prints and only 18 reviews, another from 2007 with 75989 dragon prints and 3 reviews. I would hate to be the statistician to try to make sense of this lot! Rape is gonna be one of those tags people search specifically for, I suspect. You take it off, you lose those searches. Incidently, you’ve probably just gained a few more readers as I think that sort of thing is going to lead to an Archive Mod reviewing the tags shortly

Why do I keep envisioning the topic title to be “How long do you prefer c***s?” In the end, it just comes down to preference, I think. Shorter for a faster pace, longer to get more into it, and sometimes, the material calls out the length when a scene makes you feel the chapter’s “just right.” For Jefferey, this means ep. 15 will be just over 1kwords, because though I wanted it longer, the scene was such that any longer would detract from the point of the episode. I could go back, embellish that scene, but it’d be overdoing it.

Has anyone found a ratio of how many “dragon prints” to reviews stories get, on average? It seems very stratified, so maybe that wouldn’t be valuable. I thought it was interesting that I had a rape tag on a fic, but I changed it because it wasn’t really quite the right tag, and noticed the “dragon prints” rate dropped significantly (from about 30 per hour to 30 per 4 or 5 hours). In addition to the popularity of the subdomain and the tags, I would think the more visibility (or at least visibility to a target audience, even if small) the better chance of a review.

I like the 3.5 to 4k length. It’s long enough to get in some action, and not too long to make readers wonder if they’re going to have time to finish.

I’ve been hmm-hawing about chapter lengths for what feels like every moment of my 32 years on this planet. When I was a beginner, I thought longer was better. I also thought long-winded was better. I was not very good at this shit. Then I decided shorter was better. Little bitsized 3kperchappie pieces packed with action and maybe smut. That was better. I do best with fast-paced stuff, I think. Then I thought even that wasn’t bite sized enough because I assumed all readers had gnat-sized attention spans like me. So I cut my average chapter down by 500ish words. It still worked with my style. My latest finished product was all of 50k, with 20ish chapters, and I think it turned out pretty good. But lately I’ve been thinking short isn’t always best, even in this post-vine internet age. Like, I feel like if people are taking the time to read my story, maybe they actually wouldn’t mind a little more story in each bite. It’ll be harder on my betas, sure. I find betas tend to get less excited when chapters get more than 2.5k and backlogs start to happen. But I’ve been trying to decide on a larger number anyway. Like maybe 3.5 to 4k. It’s still short by the standards of some writers on here, but I don’t think longer than that would work with my particular style. Or maybe it would. Obviously, I’m still not sure what to do.