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I’m new here and have only one story up that’s a work in progress. I notice that unlike many other sites, there’s no like or dislike buttons, no subscribing to an author, just reviews. And those reviews are pretty rare. The only thing we really have to go on is dragon prints. In that respect, my story seems to be doing moderately well, gaining about 40 dragon prints per day, which seems to be a higher rate than other stories in the “games” category where the story resides. But all dragon prints tell you is who has clicked on the story, not if they actually read it and enjoyed it. So I guess my question is, if I’m maintaining a somewhat higher level of daily dragon prints than other newly updated stories in my category, does that mean I’m doing well? Or is that a completely meaningless measure?

I just assume they don’t like my stories! But, seriously, dragon prints can be a reasonable guide, especially if they keep going up loads on new parts.

That’s the million dollar question, as your only metrics you have are dragon prints & reviews. (There used to be “ratings” but that got abused by trolls.) What I do is I record my dragon prints, daily, and plot them in a spreadsheet; I do this with all my AFF & AO3 stories, and it lets me know which stories gain X number of hits after a chapter post, that’s about the only way to measure interest. Now, the other thing you can do is to read stories, drop reviews, and hope the karma comes back to you. After all, a review is golden.

One thing that make dragon prints a measure a bit tricky is that a large number of chapters in the story raises the effort to read it all. This mean that each time you post a new chapter you can expect a number of people checking the beginning out but not becoming fans so they drop out. The increased perceived effort to read the chapters will mean these random visitors lessens over time. In essence you can a growing number of regulars that read everything, but having a dragon print that is falling as fewer random visitors visit the story. If you keep a steady beat of dragon hints as chapters grow in number I would say it signals you are doing great. From another perspective, exchanging reviews with other authors is a great way to making it more likely new people will check you story. If I have to choose between reading two stories and one of them has a review I will most only choosing the 0 review one when doing community-service-style-reading. Stories with reviews are generally a better read. The thing lacking at AFF today is we don’t get dragon prints for the individual chapters. If we had those we could tell how many that read to the end. The tricky thing is that adding such feature afterward would imply that later chapters of all existing chapters has no dragon prints even while they could have been visited by loads of people.

I laughed at that, because That being said, I had considered some characters in future either spending a lot of time wandering the dead city before they’re found, or people from the Bunker willingly going and staying outside for long periods of time for whatever reason. Was never really sure where it could go, though, aside from them just eventually returning. What do you think?