Desiderius Price

Guess “appreciated” the effort I put in, is closer to the mark than “rave/love” it, and the gist is how to tease this out from the information at hand. A review/comment is definitely the gold star here, presumably they’ve read the material (aside from the flaming trolls). AO3’s kudos are an easy “like it” for the readers. Subscriptions/alerts hint they’re interested in the next installment. A public bookmark/favorite is an endorsement IMO. Even a private bookmark means they’re wanting to find it again (only AO3 seems to count those). Tallying dragon prints & hits is a last resort hint, because my stories don’t attract reviews.

Once you said “three chapters of flashbacks”… sounded like a backstory spin-off was a good idea. And might still be... even if only to help with writing the flashback scenes. (Also means you don’t need a complete story in the flashbacks either… the reader can go off and enjoy those backstories too.) However, the flashback format can be good when you’ve got a character reflecting on their emotional state at the time, and the implications to the present – which I did for that holiday story. Not saying do “X” or do “Y’, simply food for thought.

In my original story, I didn’t quote, so less apparent. And it covered the backstory to the main characters. However, went really fast and skimped greatly. Thus it became *way* better to spin it off into separate stories. As I was in fact doing several “flashbacks” to a lot of the characters, I realized spinning them off, make each character’s (or small group) backstory a separate story would do the whole thing justice. However, you’re right, doesn’t always work out that way. Now, you *could* still do the above as a separate backstory, in full. So, when the character needs to talk about themselves, you can cut it down to the essentials, or the like. Alternatively, a take I use in my potter fanfic, I basically start off… (small excerpt) Or, in one of my holiday oneshots, I did it as a flashback, the MC discussing a sin of his past to another. So for that, it’s dialogue back and forth as that other person asks questions.

Moving the discussion on flashbacks with @Wilde_Guess here.

Three chapter flashback? I tried doing something similar in my original and got everybody confused (including myself), so I’m still in the process of breaking it apart into multiple back stories (it’s now nearly eight years in the making). A reviewer noted the confusion, and that’s when I realized I’d do better justice breaking the stories apart. Drawback is the main story’s languished since then, because I’ve been busy going down the proverbial plot bunny rabbit hole showing how messed up the society is. Do I regret this choice? No. Each story is pretty strong on its own, though there are characters common to all of them. Some are stories-stories outright, others are episodic serials, and some have become fodder for the Halloween & Holiday oneshots. Though I might’ve crossedthe line when I threw that nun into a woodchipper…. (in one of the backstories, not real life). I tend to not read much anymore, I’m much more of a creator than consumer, feels more fulfilling to me. Though I’ll try to review when I do read.

That’s the question that even published authors have difficulty answering. If you have fans writing wikis and fanfiction based on your stories, then you’ll know you’ve got an audience/fan base (or at least had one before going on homophobic/transphobic rants on twitter). Movie deals help Per chapter & month does help, a bit. Simply cause you know they’re at least hitting “next-chapter” button. My main potter fanfic on FFN, for instance, has 420 views & 39 visitors so far this month. Of that, I see 48 views/29 visitors to the first chapter, while subsequent chapters are 3-8 views/3-5 visitors. The day-day histogram shows that about six bots came through, drowning out the metrics (or humans clicking next-next-next w/o reading or doing very-fast-skimming). I do know, though, many of the “hits” come from people finding a link to the story, maybe from another author’s favorites, and deciding to move on (or bookmarking it for later). AFF & AO3 only have the whole-story hit counters. By recording these daily, I know that a recent post can generate one to two hundred hits/day, but it’ll settle down to the single-digits per day within a week or two. However, as they’re only whole-story, I don’t know if it’s something browsing the first chapter & moving on, vs reading the whole thing & enjoying it. AO3 has Kudos and number of bookmarks/subscriptions available, so that helps measure some level of interest. FFN has the favorites & alerts, also relevant. But, when it comes to knowing that readers enjoy the story, reviews are that golden ticket, the best measure. However, maybe one reader in a hundred will leave a review, if that. (My *HIGHEST* review count here on AFF is NINE, the average is around 2-3 per story. My biggest is that main potter fanfic on FFN, with 180.) Moral of the story, if you want to trend set, try to always review when you read.

“Dragon prints” is basically the “hit count”, to your story. AO3 has the same metric, as “Hits” whole story. However, FF.net does have the per-chapter breakdown, which is more useful (that is until you start deleting chapters...) Not only per chapter, FF.net breaks it down per MONTH, by day within that month, and by (most likely) country of the visitor. FF.net’s breakdown is how I can tell bots are the primary readers of my stories there

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I habitually record my dragon prints, at least daily, so that’s where my 2:36PM EDT estimate came from (& the fact I had to hit refresh after thundercloud’s post to see the issue)… maybe it took time to sweep through the databases? (IIRC, there’s multiple databases.)

It would’ve happened some time between 2:36PM EDT and when Thundercloud first reported it. I can speculate, but that’s not helpful here. Hopefully it’s a simple script with a database backup that can fix it, otherwise it’ll be tedious.

Fixed mine, but yeah, if you log out, log back in, then it’ll hold (barring it happening again).