#i also have 127 comments i havent replied to....

[woollenpharaohs]

woollen_pharaohs’s AO3 rundown So i’ve hit the coveted 1 million wordcount marker on AO3 and on top of that it is coincidentally now over 10 years since i signed up with AO3! No better time to analyse the stats page and talk about my progress as a writer over the last decade. 

I joined AO3 on 14th December 2012 and have published 115 works since then. Here are the main stats as of 1/1/23:

Word counts My longest fic, at 179,562 words is Salvation (A Discography), a Daredevil fic in which the characters assume dual roles as their Daredevil components as well as being musicians heavily based on the real lives of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club band members. It was an ambitous, lengthy work which remains unfinished to this day. It was also the first and only fic I’ve ever had beta read - thank you to wtchcool for all your hard work. The best advice i got from her was to keep chapters short which is something i definitely did not do for this fic, but have taken on board since. 

The fandom i wrote the most words for, other than the Daredevil fandom which totalled 257,093 words laregely dominated by the sheer length of Salvation, was It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (IASIAP). I wrote a total of 11 fics for the fandom totalling 242,520 words, including a 2 part vampire epic. Written in a similar vein as Salvation, it was a crossover of the IASIP and Fargo (TV) worlds (because both shows starred the same actors) in an attempt to fill in gaps between both narratives and also because vampires are cool. Finishing Murmurations, at 193,299 words across 2.5 parts (.5 being a primer), was a massive personal feat for me. It proved to me that i could write a multi-chapter novel length fic and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. It gave me the courage to start writing my original novel not long after. 

Hits The total amount of hits I have as of today are 201,896. 

My top 5 most popular fics are:

Play Your Cards Close To Your Chest (Daredevil) with 13,453 hits 

Stillness In Time (Bob’s Burgers/Teen Wolf crossover WIP) with 12,911 hits

Two Sane Guys Doing Normal Things (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency) with 12,118 hits

Heartbeats (Daredevil) with 9,958 hits

Kiss and Tell (Letterkenny) with 7,474 hits

The popularity of Play Your Cards amuses me. I tried to do a 5+1 thing but couldn’t think up of enough pranks. Some of them are based on real things that happened to me and the rest on google lol. I am not too proud of the prose and am consistently surprised when i get kudos for this fic. One thing i did really enjoy about writing and posting this fic was the amount of support i was getting from the Daredevil fandom. It’s got to be one of the best fandoms i’ve ever written for. 

Stillness in Time also cracks me up. I swear the hits must be as high as they are because of the fandom crossover is fucking bonkers. Literally don’t know what I was thinking. I definitely had not end in mind for that fic so it will remain a WIP forever. Sometimes i want to orphan this fic but it’s just too funny not to have attached to my username. 

Two Sane Guys - genuinely proud of this fic. Likewise with Hearbeats. Kiss and Tell though? Don’t even fucken remember what that’s about. 

Most prolific year I’ve published at least one fic every year since 2012 when I made my account. I also back-dated a fic i published on fanfic.net from 2009. 

In 2017 I wrote a total of 25 fics for a total of 126,369 words. I wrote for 12 different fandoms, the most being 6 for IASIP and 5 for Letterkenny. 2017 was probably my best year for writing and creativity. Some of my favourite fics i have ever written are from 2017, such as: 

Television Blues (As You Are (film)) - An alternative, happy ending to the film. 

The Burning House (IASIP) - a short fic where Mrs Mac and Bonnie Kelly are kind of in love but also want to murder each other. 

The Edge of The World Pt. 1 (Pond (band)) - I had just come back from a creative writing workshop at uni and poured all of my creative energy into this piece. I think it’s probably the best thing i’ve ever written though it probably doesn’t make any sense to non-australians. 

2017 also saw me writing for a variety of rarepairs, rare fandoms, new kinks and was the year i started writing Murmurations. That being said, it’s also the year where i wrote a bunch of fics i can’t even remember. Like all those Letterkenny and Rhett & Link ones? Completely wiped from my brain. Looks like my writing but did I write it? who knows. 

2022 follows closely having written 22 fics, 3 less than 2017 but with a slightly higher word count at a total of 129,420 words. During 2022 i was mostly writing music RPF and blutchest. I attribute this to being absolutely deranged. 

Comments and Kudos The total number of comment threads I have are 658 with a total of 13,665 kudos!!! Amazing. Thank you for anyone who has ever commented/kudosed my fics. The most comments I have received is 71 on the first part of Murmurations, followed by 62 on the second part. I received 31 comments on Salvation and 28 on Play Your Cards. 14 of my 115 fics have not received a comment which is pretty good in the grand scheme of things. 

That being said, I usually don’t pay attention to comment counts. I love getting comments don’t get me wrong but i don’t think comments or hits are a genuinely good representation as to whether my readers actually like the work. Kudos is probably the best way to gauge it.

Top kudos count favours the Daredevil fics I’ve written. 

Top Kudosed fics:

Play Your Cards - 790 kudos

Two Sane Guys - 686 kudos

Spin The Bottle (Daredevil) - 638 kudos

Heartbeats - 636 kudos

White Noise (Daredevil) - 481 kudos

Still amused that Play Your Cards is up there at number 1. Spin The Bottle i assume is up there because it was the first shippy matt/foggy fics to be posted to ao3 when the show was airing on netflix. It’s high kudos count i attribute primarily to thirst of readers at a time when the post-comics Daredevil fic content was a wasteland. People still seem to really like my Daredevil fics given i still get kudos notification emails about them. Maybe one day it will be another fandom. 

Ship categories Looks like my most popular ship category was m/m, with a total of 86 works for that type of ship, followed by 15 for femslash. 

The 2 ‘other’ are used specifically for Ragnarok (TV 2020) because one of the shipped characters is a shapeshifter, able to to shift between boy and girl and even have body parts of both at will. I thought that’s probably an appropriate reason to use the ‘other’ category for lol.

Bookmarks Readers have bookmarked my fics 1,511 times. I usually don’t care about bookmarks either because users can remove bookmarked works. It’s not a permanent stat like a hit or a kudos. What i do love are people who leave comments in the bookmark sections. I don’t mind that some of them are rude, they make me laugh. Here are a few of my favourites over time: 

I got bored of going through all the bookmarks, i’m sure there’s more good nuggets in there. i think my favourite thing about bookmarks is sometimes users forget that it’s actually a publicly viewable feature unless they make it a private bookmark. it’s like a second way to get a comment and i love to see what people write when they think i can’t see it. 

Fandom firsts One thing i enjoy is creating fandom tags by being the first person to post a fic to it (looks at the camera like in The Office). Tags i’ve created are usually for music RPF. Some i’m proud of starting include Soulwax/2manydjs (band), Pond (band), Raised By Wolves (TV), Key & Peele (TV), Kidding (TV), Intergalactic (TV). In temrs of ship firsts, I’ve written for a lot of rarepairs who have never been written about before and probably never will be again so no use tooting my horn about those lmao. 

I used to also keep track of fandoms i had written for where my fic was the most popular in the fandom but usually in the case of Daredevil, IASIP or even Dirk Gently, a fic’s popularity was usually helped if the author had a strong tumblr following which i have never been able to achieve lol... nor do i really want for that matter given the insane shit i write. I’ll top the rare fandoms by default given nobody else writes for them lmao. easy award! 

Fic titles sometimes i have originality okay? Very rarely. Exactly... 55 out of 115 fic titles have I thought of an original name for a fic, i.e. not a song title and not a direct quote from the fandom the fic is written for. 

Conclusion Well, that’s it! it’s been fun to go through my stats page and see what’s been happening. I hope to one day see some of my other fics exceed the popularity of my current most popular fics but given i now tend to mostly write for fandoms of one, i don’t see that that will change in 10 years time lmao.