Desiderius Price

I’m one who was attacked by a rating bomb, the downvote would come in immediately after a chapter post, too short to actually read it. Lemme tell you, it was very discouraging to keep posting. (And this was in ORIGINAL fiction, where there wasn’t any “one-true-pairing” shipping nonsense – could’ve been a story-tag thing, but never really know why they attacked.) Sure, a like button is open to some abuse, but any author who bots it will lose the reason it’d exist, to know how many people truly like their story – less of a downside than a dislike button. Now back to this Hermione incest scene….

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It’s the age old question, whether people are enjoying the story. True, I’m writing for personal enjoyment, but there’s an extra level of effort required for polishing & posting (or publishing) a story; thus, some positive feedback is appreciated (& constructive criticism). TV producers have the Nielsen Ratings, publishers have sales numbers, and we have dragon prints (other archives have hit-counter equivalents). Discerning whether a dragon print is a hit-through, a random check, or a devoted reader is tough to do; similarly, book publishers don’t know from the sales figures, how many physical books are actually read vs those that are shelved away for “later” vs those that are burned or used to level furniture. Now, AO3 also has kudos (likes), bookmark counts, & subscriptions – this tells a bit more to the general enjoyment. FFN does have that per-chapter hit numbers, and they do show that there’s a lot who’ll click because it’s on the “updated” list but don’t click through to the freshly posted chapter. (However, FFN’s numbers are now getting drowned out by bots...another topic for another time.) In the end, for AFF, the best metric is recording the dragon prints, and relish when that occasional review comes through.

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.

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