sp8sexual:
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genufa:
hannibalsbattlebot:
shellbacker:
saucywenchwritingblog:
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.
Reblogging this bc it is a take on fan engagement at AO3 that I haven’t seen before, and as a writer I find it helpful to have this reality check. Also I wonder which came first: the overall low engagement rates in internet commerce, or the freaking shit-ton of unwanted spam and advertising we’re constantly bombarded with?
I think as writers our assumption (my assumption anyway) is that the portion of hits that don’t convert to kudos equals the portion of readers who looked at your fic, didn’t like it, and never finished it. But it would seem that is an overly pessimistic assumption.
I should know this, because I ‘like’ very sparingly here and reblog only less sparingly, and yet I read and enjoy a lot of posts I don’t like or reblog.
#also something that is really obvious that none of this points out#(probably someone did somewhere in the notes but I do have a life)#your hit count will go up by virtue of PEOPLE REREADING YOUR FIC#a hit count disproportionate to kudos/comments#which are things that are only really done once #is INEVITABLE#and a GOOD thing #people rereading your fic is a good thing
Also, while I will always defend people’s right to take down their work if they want to, I will point out that taking your work down simply because you think it didn’t get enough engagement prevents you from having the experience of seeing it slowly grow over time. You’re doing the equivalent of cancelling a TV show that doesn’t have an amazingly successful pilot episode, without waiting to see if it gains a devoted following by mid-season. It’s short-sighted. It means you’re not going to potentially have the pleasure of someone commenting on it 5 or 10 years later to explain that it was their favourite story, that they re-read it 20 times, that they shared it with their friends, or even just that they’re so glad they found it on that specific day, years after you posted it. You might not even have the pleasure of going back to re-read it yourself and see how you’ve progressed as a writer.
AO3 is an archive – it’s there to preserve fanfic. It has longevity, and if you leave your works there, they can have longevity too. And you never know when something is going to be rediscovered, or who it might mean something to (including yourself).
It’s also important to remember that your numbers/ratios are also affected by factors like which fandom/ship you’re writing for and the rating of your fic. There’s different fic-interaction cultures in every fandom (for example, in some fandoms, there might be a stronger comments culture, which leads to a higher average of a comments to fics ratio than another fandom). Smut fics always have a lower kudos to hits ratio. If you’re a writer trying to evaluate how your fics are doing, base it off of the numbers on fics in the same fandom/ship (and rating), not your previous works or your own expectations. You’ll find you’re doing much better than you think.
I have a couple of observations that I want to make here, and I say that as an author that feels incredibly, incredibly, incredibly privileged by the level of engagement I get on AO3 (although I also admit I’ve never looked at my ratio numbers, so I honestly have no idea what they may be). But I’ve been thinking about how fandom feels different in the 15 or so years I’ve been writing fic, so I’ve got two observations, which are going to be gross overgeneralizations based on the LJ (or earlier) natives and the post-LJ world:
(1) I think that engagement on AO3 feels different from the writer vs. consumer perspective for a couple of reasons. Writers who write on AO3 are doing it for free, so we’re not getting any money, so we feel like we’re getting “paid” in the engagement. That’s a bad analogy, because I don’t think engagement = money, but you see what I mean. The engagement means more to us because we can’t comfort ourselves with a royalty check, however measly. Now I am not saying we should be paid, I’m very happy with my choice to put my fic up for free, but I do think it skews us to want more engagement, because arguably that is the entire reason we put it up there. That’s different for published writers (which I am also one of). People buy my books, and I think they like them? But I seldom hear from them, and that’s okay: they’ve bought my books, they paid for them, it’s cool, our transaction is completed. Honestly, my books feels so disconnected from me as a person for that reason. And I think sometimes from a reader’s perspective, it can be hard to remember to engage, because our capitalist society has conditioned us to be passive consumers, and the only engagement expected of us is the money we’ve paid. In a situation where we didn’t pay any money, it’s worthwhile to think about “paying” in “engagement” instead – but our society doesn’t “train” us in that, so to speak.
(2) It’s even easier to see ourselves as passive consumers who don’t feel compelled to engage when the platform where we share fic is no longer the same place we share the rest of our lives. I know everyone post-LJ is probably sick to death of hearing about LJ, but it was really hard to read fic on LJ without commenting because you *knew* these people. You knew about their pets and their jobs and their homework assignments. If they posted they were having a bad day, you left a comment. If they posted a fic, you left a comment. LJ, unlike AO3, was a place where communication and interaction was so habitual that you really would seldom think of reading a fic without leaving a comment. LJ didn’t really do stats, but I suspect my readership on LJ was much, much, much lower than my readership on AO3 – but I also suspect that the number of comments I got on a chapter was about the same (and probably higher than I get on FOB stuff, let’s be honest, which is *fine,* but I’m just stating a fact). I’m sure someone smart who’s not me has done a statistical analysis of this, but anyway, that’s what I suspect. I know I’ve been to academic presentations on the way fandom shifted when you separated the fic place from the life place, and I think this is one aspect of that: it makes the fic feel more impersonal, like any other commodity you interact with on a daily basis and treat like a big corporation is behind it who doesn’t care one way or the other.
Also, I’ve decided I have a (3) observation:
(3) I think the thing I miss most about the LJ era was the writing-class feel of it. Which wasn’t to say that we were doing homework assignments or anything, but just that writing felt like a true community experience on LJ. I learned *so much* about how to be a good writer on LJ. I met my betas on LJ, and I beta’d for other people, and in the process I just learned *so much.* Also, LJ would have writing memes go through every so often, where you would do things like “tell a scene you wrote from a different perspective” or “write the scene before the one that starts your story” or “do a DVD commentary on this scene.” These are writing exercises! They’re so helpful! And I never see those go around Tumblr or AO3. But you learn so much from doing that kind of thing (that’s why they do them in creative writing courses!). And you learn so much from watching other people do them. DVD commentaries on writing were invaluable in letting me see the way other writers achieved things that I wanted to improve in my own writing. We just don’t *do* that stuff anymore, it seems. Or maybe we do. Maybe it’s all on Discord and I just am too old to understand Discord. But I just want to say, the older fans and the younger fans feel so separated out these days, and it was never like that on LJ, I had friends much younger than me, I had friends much older than me, and I think that’s because we were all interacting and writing *together.* And instead what seems to happen now is a new writer puts a fic up, and they’re young and could probably use a beta and a little bit of polish, and instead of the kind of interaction that used to happen, they get three kudos and a comment and get discouraged. And that makes me incredibly sad, Idk.
Leave comments if you can. They’re so helpful to the writer, you can’t imagine. It’s okay, not everyone has to, but it really does help writers learn to get feedback. Not mean stuff! Just “this is my favorite sentence,” or “I love this scene,” or “Character A <3″ like, seriously, anything is helpful in guiding a writer to learn whether or not they’re achieving with their words what they want to achieve. And it feels increasingly like comments are the only way any of us are interacting with each other anymore.
I joined fandom because it was the only place I entered as a writer where other people wanted to talk about writing and do fun things writing and play around with creativity. It was the only place I found people who *loved writing,* and I found people who would happily talk about *each other’s writing.* It’s still the only place I’ve found where that happens, and it would be a shame to lose that. Because publishing is just…no place to have fun. And writing without fun is so sad.
/end of “I am the oldest fan in the world” discourse
Crack Ship Space 