#writing musings
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i wonder sometimes if people who don't write fics realize just how big a labour of love it is. and TIME. god the time you spend writing, thinking, changing stuff, coming up with better ideas, writing again... it makes zero sense as a hobby And Yet.
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I’m really in a mode of I LOVE WRITING, CHARLIE! I LOVE WRITINGGGG today lol
There’s some days where I miss the brainrot of a fandom/posting to AO3, but coming up with an original antagonist’s most devastating line, the poetry for the characters’ journals, arcs that come together so wonderfully, getting actual professionals to tear up over original content???? That my brain made????
It’s unmatched to what I know I’m capable of doing with my thoughts, emotions, and words ❤️
#I know I say it often but I honestly can’t wait to share these things one day#I’m like that hyperactive little kid again just enamored with life and creation through storytelling#I’m glad precipice is my magnum opus to end fandom writings#it’s the perfect story to end on as I transition to original works moving forward#and I love my brain even if I hated it for a while#my shortcomings are my strengths and it took me way too long to figure that out#there’s a power in knowing I’m breaking trauma patterns and moving forward in such a powerful and important way#anyway I wish all of this upon all of you#it gets better absolutely ❤️#Erin writes a book#writing musings
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Hi!!! Long time fan of your stony works and I see that you’re a fan of spuffy like I am, so I’m curious if you have any fic ideas you’re contemplating writing?
Hope you’re well!! 🥰
fun fact! i do. i am currently writing something for spuffy lol. it’s a simple missing scene set in s7, nothing complicated, but i’m very happy i’m writing it at all.
it’s been very long since the last time i wrote fic. i confess i had stopped writing and didn’t really want to do it anymore. (i’ll post about it and explain more in depth maybe). but i’m writing again and it will take some time for the story to be ready but It Will Be Ready. at some point in the future.
i’m also reorganizing my notes for the slowest runner series. they’re a mess and i still need to figure out how to connect a few things but you know. it will happen.
like. it’s not a never anymore, you know?
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had a jackles fic idea jus now but i'm afraid to write it bc when i'm brainrotting w things it always RUNS OUT and then i ABANDON things KERFDLDDJERHTGFJKJHfjkj
#──★ ˙🎀 xox dahlia#──★ ˙🎀fic musings#writing musings#jackles#jensen ackles#LIKE brainrot is such a blessing and a curse
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Fun fact: I adore writing teens. Especially in current settings, though, once you move past that life stage yourself, it becomes a bit tricky. You will get your tone off, unless you keep up. My sister is ten years younger than me and we get along well, so for the longest time, I had a link. But she's full in her twenties now, and frankly, I think I'm just going to wait and hope my kids don't hate me as teens, because I need their intel.
Disclaimer: I would never write characters that resemble my kids, unless I wrote the story while they read along and approved. It's just intel. Language. Habits. etc. Which are already different in Belgium versus English speaking countries. You get a bit of slack, writing historical. You don't get that in temporary writing. What you do get, are tiktokkers or snapchatters ready to tell you WE DO NOT SOUND LIKE THIS.*
*This didn't actually happen to me yet, but it is a genuine fear.
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Am I now a multishipper?
I genuinely can’t decide if I have an OtP…
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It's been a while since I read unexpected scent but I got to thinking about Gojo's pups again. What happened to them? Did they live happy lives? Do you think that Gojo will ever meet them again? Maybe one day Yuuji could meet them and make friends with them. It just makes me so sad to think of that loss 😢😢. Poor babies. I think it's really cool the way you pepper in little bits of lore that imply but don't fully show a whole extra story going on just barely in the peripheral of the main plot of your fics it makes the world feel a little more alive. Like Yuuji and Sukuna are the main characters of the story but that's only because we're viewing the world from their eyes if we looked at things from a different angle we'd find everyone else also living their own crazy stories. Here's just a hit of Gojo tragedy to spice up the fic. It's a good bit of contrast.
I always felt the stories I liked best were those where the world felt bigger because you could tell so much more was going on. That each side -character you see is actually the main character in a story that is moving at the same time!
Gojo and his pups and knowing about that serves as motivation for how he works his way into helping the characters in their plight, but also I like to leave it to the readers to imagine the story c: After all, part of the fun of reading a story (at least for me haha) is being able to speculate and write my own headcanons and ideas to fill in those nice little spots.
Not every question needs answered, not every path needs revealed, just enough to engage the curious thoughts and show the world is a much larger and complex place!
#maca answers asks#writing musings#Every fic I write has little side plots hehe#I just find it fun <3
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You know there's a definite balance I need to strike in this fic between the really solid emotional intelligence I like writing young Jason with and just...buried primal rage.
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Jeremy wakes up after the gods wrath and learns that terra's rulers are children.
Proceeds to kidnap them all as a whim.
They glare at him and declares that Jeremy is making a mistake by kidnapping royalties and he will pay.
Jerremi *with big sad eyes*: oh my god these are babies! Why are they in charge?!
Said children doesn't react well to the comment and tries to bodily harm Jeremy who just dodges and internally screams that this is a sign that he should fasg track his plans to take over all the kingdom and rule over all. He says this to them and the kids efforts to kick their kidnapper butt doubles. The baby kings and queens exhausts themselves and Jeremy brings them back home and tucks them to bed, their equally baby retainers frets on the side not knowing what to make of the mask stranger.
The next day Jeremy goes around each kingdom offering help to the kids who are annoyed by the man and is promptly kicked out by the raitainers and guards but he keeps returning until they gradually warm up to him.
All of them grows up to how they are in the show but they are closer with each other as they had the common headache that help half raise them to the ruler they are now. Racles is still an ass but not as bad as he's in the show since in he has a pseudo guardian webbing him to objects whenever he acts like a dick.
Jeremy picks up Gira when he found him reading one of his stories to God Tarantula when he left it at the town center when he was visiting shugodam and heard the boy call the shugod by a cute little nickname.
The kings are exasperated when their weird adopted whatever guardian menace brought a new kid but grew fond of Gira when the boy became the favorite person of the children residing in each kingdom and their own shugods. They try to 'kidnapv him on a daily from the orphanage.
They learned he's Racles' long lost brother when he commented that the food Kaguragi served was good but not as good as rainbow jururira from his childhood, which they knew because only Racles knew how to make it and they had it once before.
They all face-palmed when Jeremy pointed out that it took them that long to figure it out. Missing prince + an amnesiac orphan both who shares the same name and age as the missing prince.
Racles is a tsundere about Gira. He gives Gira his old room and says so that the other Kings would stop intruding in his kingdom to try and offer Gira room in their respective domain. But Jeremy knows that the older man passes by his brothers door every night to check on him.
Gira takes to following Racles around after the man left a cup of rainbow jururira on his desk causing the man to be more tsun-tsun and Jeremy teases him for it.
The other kings still want to take Gira back to their kingdom. Racles has to theaten to break their alliance on the if the four kings keeps trying to steal his brother.
Meanwhile as the five kings argue all over again, Jeremy steals Gira away back to the orphanage for story time with the kids.
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An idea for a Peña angsty little fic hit me like a sledgehammer yesterday... so I guess I'm writing that now.
But oh boy!! It's going to start so fluffy and cute... and then destroy. 😁
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You ever giggle at that feeling when you had intended to write some hardcore smut, but instead ended up writing something sort soft and romantic. Oops? Sorry not sorry, I guess? This is definitely better than actually working.
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I’ve been playing with more poetic prose lately for short stories, and it’s been so cathartic depending on the theme 💖
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Describe the dream fics you aren’t writing and/or probably never will for whatever reason (no spoons, no longer in hat fandom headspace, to long, to much research, etc) for:
Steve/Tony
Spuffy
or Dean/Cas?
i think for stevetony i have two answers, one for mcu and one for 616.
616 is this one, which is an idea i never got around to write and now probably never will. but i'm very fond of it and i think it could have been great.
for mcu, it's a story titled "the hardest story that i've ever told" (from mika's song happy ending). it's a post endgame story that i literally thought up while i was in the car driving home from watching the movie at the cinema. i was alone and i stopped on the motorway at night to record a voice memo on my phone with the basic idea. i've written two versions of it, both are almost finished but not quite. i've reread it recently and i want to rewrite it a third time. who knows, if i manage to do it maybe third time will be the charm. i can't say much about the story itself because even the premise spoils the whole thing. just imagine that the title is something steve tells tony.
for spuffy — i guess i'll do this in reverse, because i have actually finally managed to write the story i thought about when i finished watching the show back when it first aired. 20+ years in the making, lol. i need to find someone to beta read it and it's not easy, mostly because that's my excuse to postpone sharing it. I haven't posted in a long time, spuffy is a new fandom for me and i'm. scared. so i'm waiting for the moment where i'll be less scared.
i'm also currently writing another spuffy story. i got stuck on a thing for a bit and i literally just got unstuck like ten minutes ago. it's a darker story, though, so i'm even more scared about potentially sharing it when it's done. (and how sad is that? why has fandom turned into this hostile place?)
for deancas — i think deancas is, hands down, the ship about which i've read most fics. as in, the highest number. but i never really wrote it, idk why. i didn't have the skills back then, or the courage. i felt okay just reading other people's stuff, so i never really entertained any particular fic ideas. you know how it is, some ships are just like that, and they don't mean less to you because of it. it's just the way things are sometimes.
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Music While Writing
Does anyone else listen to the most random shit while writing a book? Like the mood does not correspond whatsoever and I'm not talking like Amazing Spiderman fighting while classical music plays. I mean like I'm writing a battle scene set in the Arthurian Mythos and I'm listening to "If You Leave Me Now" by Chicago. It does not fit the vibe but for some reason, it works.
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[LET'S TALK WRITING!] - FANFICTION STATS
My friends, I hope you’re all doing well. Let me tell you that when I say I’ve been meaning to write this article for months, I mean months. Maybe years, actually.
One thing about me that you might not know, is that I love stats. I love data. This is applicable to most areas of my life, but of course translates into my fanfiction habit. I want to know how many readers I have, where do they come from, etc. And, ever since I came back into fandom in 2020, I’ve noticed that other people do, too. Just have a quick look at the r/fanfiction subreddit. It’s cluttered with readers asking what fanfiction stats look like on the author's side, or writers asking: is [x] number of hits enough? is my fic doing well? what’s a good hits/kudos ratio? etc. I hope that this article will help you answer some (if not all) of these questions.
General disclaimer: Of course, I don’t pretend to be an expert in the field. I also don’t pretend to be anywhere close to the success the BNFs in my fandom are getting (nor do I, frankly, aspire to such an audience - it’s terrifying). But, as someone who has been writing fanfiction in different fandoms for over fifteen years, who likes data, and who also makes her own stats for my personal use, I thought it might be interesting for people to see what stats look like, what information we, writers, get from the various websites, and what we can learn from it/consider. I hope this article will help newer writers with understanding their stats better, but also make it clear that stats are not everything. Because, paradoxically maybe, while I do think stats are interesting, they are definitely not the reason I write. I seek to demystify some of this information, educate, and help both readers and writers understand audiences better. And, while I will be taking my own fics and readership as an example, I also hope this will allow other authors to use this method/information to look at their own data, and maybe look at their numbers in a different way. Lastly, please believe me when I say that my intent with taking my own data is not at all to either brag, nor whine about my own numbers. It is to 1) be transparent with my readers/other authors and 2) analyse the sample set that I happen to have access to. I’m also lucky enough that I feel rather neutral about my own stats and don’t really care that much, so I don’t really mind looking at my own AO3 account as a lab rat, here, haha.
Also, please note that I don’t use Wattpad. I don’t know what stats look like over there and have no data for that platform.
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GENERAL OVERVIEW:
As of the day of writing, 25 January 2023, here are my general stats as they are made available to me by AO3.
If you’re not sure what any of these numbers mean, AO3 has a very handy explanation available on their website, which should clarify. For the purposes of this post, I think a couple things are of note:
first, I have written (on AO3 - as I will explain later, I also have an FFN account with different stories) 444,008 words in sixteen years. That’s almost 9 novels, if NaNoWriMo is anything to go by. That is… terrifying, and mildly worrying, lol.
second, I find my subscriber count (note that “user subscriptions” is the number of people subscribed to you; “subscriptions” is the number of people who have subscribed to one or more of your individual works) rather low (compared to other stats I’ll talk about in a bit). I think this might be due to a number of factors, including the fact that I post on multiple fandoms (thus, people don’t subscribe to me as an author because they feel “spammed” when I post content outside of their preferred fandom - I posted The Good Wife content over the summer and lost two subscribers because of it, which was a bit funny), and the fact that many people seem to not know that when you click “subscribe” on a fic, you subscribe to that fic, and not the author themselves. I have a few one-shots that have loads of subscribers, which I can only explain that way. That’s something you might want to take into account if you feel like your subs number is also “low”. Personally, I have to say that this “low” number helps when I feel overwhelmed. There’s something comforting in the fact that “only” seventy-five people will get notified if I post something random.
As of the day of writing, 25 January 2022, here are my general stats as they are made available to me by FFN.
FFN has a different system where you can “like” an author (i.e. “favourite”) without subscribing to them. Don’t ask me why, it’s a hellsite. I find it interesting that more people subscribe to me than favourite me, I wonder what to make of it. I think relatively, I’ve submitted very few reviews on FFN, but I believe that is because I made the switch to AO3 relatively early (2013/2014-ish), and thus stopped using FFN to read/review fics.
I have more wordcount on FFN, which is down to 1) the fact that they count your A/Ns as words and 2) that I have some older stories on there I didn’t transfer to AO3 when I switched. I also stopped crossposting sometime last year (with the exception of Castles), so most of what I’ve published in late 2021-2023 isn’t on there. I could add up the wordcount of all my published works to know what the precise wordcount is, but I can’t be bothered.
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GETTING THE FFN STATS OUT OF THE WAY
I think we can all agree that AO3 has now surpassed FFN as a website (though I do have issues with AO3, I won’t lie), so I will focus most of this post on AO3 stats and beyond. However, I will say that as a platform, FFN provides authors with much better statistics than AO3 does. That is because they’ve fallen into a capitalist hellscape and probably sell all of our data to advertisers but … you know. As such, while I don’t want to spend too much time on these, I still think there are a few things we can learn.
I will go into my top fics on FFN v. top fics on AO3 and why I think they differ in a later section. But at this point, I’d like to focus on two things:
The Country Breakdown:
Facts: To me, this is the most interesting feature on FFN, that you don’t get on AO3. Unfortunately, it only gives you this information on a monthly basis (you can’t look up top countries of all time), but I’m taking the current month (January 2023) here, which is a pretty representative example of my typical country breakdown.
(views are blue, visitors are yellow. for an explanation on the difference between views and visitors, see here. this is cumulative of all fics i have published, but ffn gives you the ability to break it down per fic if you’d like)
Consistently, my top two countries are the US and the UK. The US being the top by a significant margin. Canada and Australia are frequent top five features, as well as India. Chile is a bit of an interesting outlier here.
Thoughts: I think that unless you are operating in a fandom that’s very country specific (say, you’re writing in Polish about a show set in Poland), you can generally assume your figures would be roughly similar. Only when I was posting fic for small British shows (Silk or Spooks) was my majority reading pool from the UK, rather than from the US. This makes strikingly evident the hegemony of the US in reading fanfiction, which is something you might want to keep in mind when writing content, especially if you’re from elsewhere. One way I take this into consideration as a European is that I try to sometimes explain, either in-text or in A/Ns, things that might not be obvious to American readers, either culturally, or linguistically. You are also totally allowed to ignore this (Google is everyone’s friend), but if you’re not American and want to make your fics more accessible, that’s something you might want to keep in mind.
Additionally, as an ESL speaker myself, one thing I find interesting is that for all of my frequent top five countries, English is probably my readers’ first language, or a very fluent second. This means that I can assume my readers’ English language reading comprehension to be pretty high, which is a good thing as a writer, as it requires less explaining/accommodations.
Lastly, historically, France (I am French, which is why I noticed this) always used to be pretty high on the leaderboard, but it no longer is since I started posting for Potter. I used to interact with a lot of French readers as well, in the past. I wonder if this “fall” might be because HP is a fandom where lots of French-language content is available, and thus, that is where the fandom is. I write in English, so perhaps I appeal to my fellow French people less. But, that’s only a guess.
The Chapter by Chapter Breakdown
see below a screenshot of the month of january 2023 for my current WIP, castles.
Now, this - again - is probably one of the best stats features on FFN. Sadly, it is also only available on a monthly basis, but it allows you to see the breakdown of views and visitors per chapter. This is great because it allows you to see the drop off between your first chapter hits (i.e. someone clicks on your fic because they’re intrigued) and the second chapter, which is readers sticking around for the ride.
Generally and historically, my retention rate is about a third (with two-thirds of readers dropping off before chapter 2). January was obviously a bit lower, but I attribute this to the fact that I published a new chapter, meaning that some of the people are opening the fic on chapter 1, then probably heading straight to chapter 13. What’s interesting to me is that while the figures are much lower (as the fandom itself is much smaller), my drop off rate is about the same for my other long work. So, again, pretty consistent retention rate.
Additionally, interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any other significant drops that I can see. Without the figures, I would have assumed that people might drop off after chapter 3 (the main characters break up) or chapter 8 (very angsty), but actually, the numbers look rather stable, after the initial cliff. I think that’s a pretty good thing. It means that once people have genuinely started the fic, they tend to stick around.
Overall, I’m rather satisfied with my retention rate. I don’t mind people dropping off, my writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. I do assume (though I have no numerical basis for this) that it is lower on AO3, because AO3 allows more specific tagging than FFN. I guess that this system does a better job filtering out people who just wouldn’t be interested in the fic because of the themes, setting, etc. On FFN, they are forced to click in + read a bit before figuring out it’s not for them, whereas on AO3, they can for instance see the “unreliable narrator” tag or the “non-con” tage and if they don’t like that, they’ll not even come in. FFN has always been better at getting people through the door in that way, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily profitable to authors in general. I don’t necessarily care about hits, if they’re not actual readers (but, I’ll come back to this later).
CONCLUSION: In my opinion, that’s kind of all you can get from FFN, in terms of interesting stats. They also show you your subs, favourites (which are similar to bookmarks/kudos), etc. but I don’t really care about those figures anymore as FFN is a hellsite, and I only post there out of a bizarre sense of nostalgia. I’ll now move on to AO3.
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MOVING ON TO AO3
Now, I know this is something I’ve seen readers ask about before: what does it look like on the author's side? What do you have access to?
Let me put it into one word: nothing. We have very little data you don’t have. I will show you below but building on my previous content warning, there is one thing I want to acknowledge.
The figures on these, and specifically on my current WIP, are mental. In a way that frankly, as someone who grew up in fandoms where the most popular fics by the biggest BNFs have a few hundred kudos at most, moving to the HP fandom at age 27 was a shock, to say the least. I know that these figures are a fraction of what big-name authors/fics like All the Young Dudes get, and yet I cannot possibly fathom the numbers on some of my fics. This is of course a way to say thank you to all of my lovely readers, but also to say: please don’t compare yourself to this, especially if you’re into a smaller niche/fandom than I am in. This is ridiculous and shouldn’t be the way you evaluate the worth of your work (again, more on this below).
This being said, here is a screenshot for my Potter fics:
And, more reasonably, here is a screenshot for my The Good Wife fics.
note that i have also written in other fandoms, but i don’t want to go into detail about everything or else this post will be ten thousand words. this is just to compare what i consider normal, versus the hp insanity.
As you can see above, we don’t have much more information, as authors, than our readers have. Hits, and kudos are publicly available. Bookmarks are the publicly available number + private bookmarks, which is nice-to-know, though not life-changing. You also get graphs showing these numbers and ranking fics, but nothing you couldn’t make yourself if you wanted to. Subs are just ours to see (these are subscriptions to the fic itself, rather than to us as authors), so are comment threads. The latter are maybe the only interesting piece of information that AO3 gives us - they are the number of comments minus our responses (and the responses of other users to those comments, but in my experience, those are rare).
I’m not someone who really cares about comment numbers, I care about their content, but I hate that AO3 has those numbers, and still prefers to go by full comment count in public. I feel like the way AO3 also includes our responses and thank you-s dissuades a lot of writers from engaging with their readers/responding because they are seen to be artificially inflating the comment count. As AO3 has those figures, it is beyond me that those are not the one they make public. Let us interact and thank our readers without being penalised, thanks!
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A note on the kudos/hits ratio extension: this is not a figure that AO3 gives us, it’s the result of a handy Chrome extension that I’ve installed, which tells you the ratio between the number of hits, and the number of kudos left. It’s started malfunctioning on the author stats page on some fics for mysterious reasons, so I’ve played with the image to show you the actual count. I’ve seen newer writers on reddit seem to be very preoccupied by this as a way to tell if their fic is liked/successful, and while I do find this interesting, I want to warn against the danger of this overall.
First, as you can see, the numbers vary greatly depending on fandoms. I don’t think my fics on TGW were that much worse and at the time of posting, they were actually quite successful, for the fandom. It’s just that maybe people kudo less overall, on that fandom, or that because there are less fics, they go back and read old ones they’ve already kudo-ed more. The ratio for most kudo-ed fic for the pairing I used to write is 6.4%, so not much higher.
Second, the longer your fic is, the lowest your ratio will be. Castles and the fault in faulty manufacturing are two fics that were/are incredibly well-received and successful, they just have lower rates because they are long and people come back to them as they can’t read everything in one go. This is especially true for multi-chapters, where readers can famously only kudo once. I think the numbers are more relevant to shorter one-shots, and with those, you can see that my ratio is rather consistent. The two outliers are ce ne sont que des cailloux and the rare firing of wild canons. I attribute the former to the fact that it’s a very niche pairing/main character, thus it doesn’t get that many hits, but the people who are interested are more starved for content and thus more likely to enjoy what’s out there/leave kudos. I attribute the latter to the fact that it’s very angsty and a sort of controversial take. a louisville slugger to both headlights was only posted very recently, so that’s why the numbers are a bit off. I expect the ration to slowly come down.
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MY TOP FICS, AND WHAT THEY CAN TEACH US
Top 5 FFN (per favourites):
these are August 2022’s figures, which is when I took this screenshot. I’ve tried to take a new one but because it’s FFN, the bloody filter doesn’t work anymore lol. I don't think there would be much of a difference though because I rarely ever post on ff anymore.
Top 5 AO3 (per kudos):
note: the fault in faulty manufacturing and watch were only published on AO3. not sure how it would do if i published it on ffn.
Thoughts (excluding castles):
I find it interesting that my TGW fics are still occupying most of the top 5 on FFN, but are not even mentioned on my AO3. I assume this is because they were published first on FFN (at a time where it was still the “lead” platform, and later imported on AO3). But, interestingly, if you compare with the image above, they’ve still got more AO3 kudos than they had faves, which is worth noting.
I also wonder if maybe, on smaller fandoms, people are more likely to check both AO3 and FFN as they are starved for content, thus driving more hits to my TGW fics on FFN.
slipped does better on FFN than it does on AO3. I can’t explain this.
Looking at this (for anyone who’s read my fics), it is clear that: 1) bigger pairings attract more readership and 2) when it comes to canon pairings like Harry/Ginny, people prefer “positive” one-shots, really centred on a couple. I will dig deeper into this in the next section but the prevalence of the wolf’s just a puppy on this list, in my opinion, proves this.
A note on Castles (if you don’t read my fics, skim over this):
I consider castles a bit of an outlier, as it’s the only multi-chaptered fic on this list. Interestingly, while it has a similar number of hits (21.5k on AO3 and 20.4k on FFN), castles does a lot better on AO3 than on FFN, both in terms of faves/kudos (though we can have a debate about whether they are comparable), but also in terms subs. I also now get a lot more engagement on AO3 than I do on FFN. This may however be impacted by the fact that email notifications haven’t worked properly on FFN in over a year, and also to the fact that I’ve expressly stated I don’t respond to FFN comments anymore, so people might just not be bothered.
One thing I will say is that the number of hits, kudos, and subs on this fic is bonkers. In a flattering way. But, to be honest, I generally avoid the stats page on AO3 for castles before I post because if I sat down to write knowing that 200+ people will get a notification every time I post, I would never post again. Regarding hits, if I take the ⅓ retention rate on FFN and transpose it here (even though I suspect, again, that the rate on AO3 might be better), the number of single readers on this fic could be 7,000 which is mental. Even if I decide half of these might be repeats (which is probably a high estimate), that is still in the thousands. I try to remind myself that those numbers are ridiculously low compared to the All the Young Dudes of this world, which sometimes helps calm my nerves.
However, I did find out something recently, that is sort of worth noting. I’m not sure what you make of it but if you search for: Harry/Ginny, canon compliant, post-war fics excluding fluff (if you’ve read castles, this selection will make sense), castles is the 4th most kudo-ed fic in the list. If you search for all of these, minus the Hinny pairing, it is on the second page (so’s the wolf’s just a puppy). That is including finished, and unfinished works, which is wild. This being said, that’s also “only” 333 fics, which is surprisingly… low? I would have thought that post-war & canon-compliant was a bit more popular as genre than this. I suppose loads of authors don’t tag their fics as such - I don’t know.
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NOW, ONTO THE HOMEMADE GOOGLE SHEET
As mentioned in the introduction, given the scarcity of stats (especially when it comes to AO3), I’ve created my own Google sheet to track information I’m interested in. Since 2021, this sheet tracks:
my monthly number of kudos, per fic and in total
my monthly number of new readers, per fic and in total
The point of the first prong is to know, generally, how many kudos I get each month, and which fics are the most “successful”. It doesn’t really dictate what I write, but it’s nice to know and relatively easy to track. You might not know this (if you’re not a writer) but AO3 (by default - you can opt out), sends you daily emails with a summary, per fic, of the kudos you got in the last 24 hours. The email looks like this:
name of the user(s) blacked out here for obvious privacy reasons
As I don’t delete those emails, all I have to do at the end of the month is to go through my emails and count all the kudos I got, enter the data, per fic, in The Sheet. This is how I know, for instance, that between 1st December and 31st December 2022, Castles got 28 kudos. That’s easy enough.
This, at the end of the year, produces a graph like this:
First of all, I would like to highlight the fact that I am SO THANKFUL that I am in position where pretty much since May 2021, bar a few rare exceptions, I get one of those email every day. This is not standard nor something you should compare yourself to. But it is oh-so-lovely and I am thankful to everyone who leaves kudos on my work, in general.
(you might also be wondering wtf happened in May 2021, but I will get back to this in a bit)
All of this being said, this is not, to me, the most interesting aspect of this sheet. To tell you the truth, I started this count, sometime last year, to verify a gut feeling I had on something else. I wanted to know which of my fics people found first. I wanted to know which brought me the most new readers. I think this is interesting and helps me figure out where my readers come from, what their tastes are, and prove my theory that long works aren’t necessarily the best investment, in terms of expanding your readership. I will come back to the fic-by-fic analysis later on, but let me tell you that that last assumption was definitely correct.
Methodology: the way I count “new” readers is by having a separate count of the first kudo left on one of my fics by a certain account. Say, user “12345” leaves a kudo on 1 August 2022 on castles, then they leave another kudo on 15 August 2022 on the wolf’s just a puppy. Their 1 August kudo will count as a “new reader” kudo, and be added to castles’ number. Their 15 August kudo will still be counted (in the monthly kudos tally - first prong) but not as a “new” kudo. In concrete terms, the way I track this is that each time I get a kudo, I copy the user’s username into my email and see if they’ve left kudos before. If they have, they’re a “returning” reader. If they haven’t, they’re new.
Having said that, please know that I know this method is inherently flawed. Firstly, because user “12345” might leave multiple kudos on different fics on the same day, which means that I can’t know which one is the one they found/read first. My understanding is that there’s no specific order in which AO3 lists the fics and the kudos in the email we get. I cope with this by adding a new reader “point” to all the fics they kudo-ed that day. I don’t know which one came first, so I consider they all did.
Additionally, guest kudos are an obvious problem. “Guests” are users who don’t have an AO3 account/aren’t logged in. They appear as “guest” in the emails sent by AO3. Because of this, I can’t know who they are, and more importantly, if they’ve been here before, when, on what fic, etc. I also know that apparently, for fics they really like, people will log out of their accounts to give the author extra kudos on different chapters, which would explain why Castles gets so many guest kudos (more on that below). The way I cope with this is that I count all guest kudos as “returning” users. They never count as “new” readers, because I can never be sure that they are.
Lastly, the fact that a user leaves a kudo on a given fic doesn’t mean that’s the first one they read. I’ve recently had a user who I know for a fact has been following me for months (leaving comments, chatting on tumblr, and all) leave their first kudo on a random fic. I counted it as a “new reader” because I had to stick to the method but frankly, I don’t actually know how they found me.
Thus, this methodology is inherently faulty, and that’s not even accounting for human error, because obviously, I count all of this manually, sometimes months later (I don’t actually do this once a month, I do it whenever I have time) so I can’t promise all of my numbers are exact. But, it does give me some sense of the information I’m trying to gather. It may not be super accurate on a granular level but generally, I reckon the picture it paints is pretty accurate.
AVAILABLE GRAPHS AND THOUGHTS
1. ONE-SHOTS PUBLISHED AS PART OF FESTS/CHALLENGES ACCOUNT FOR OVER A THIRD OF HOW PEOPLE FIND ME
There seems to be, around the fanfic community (especially on HP), this assumption that long works attract more readers, but in my experience, what attracts new readers are actually fests. In 2021, the wolf’s just a puppy, the rare firing of wild canons and pick me, choose me, love me represent a very large chunk of how people found me. In 2022, add to that the fault in faulty manufacturing which is the fic that brought me the most new readers. You would think Seamus/Dean was pretty niche, but it’s not the pairing that brings you traffic, it’s the fest. This is the only reason (imo) that the fault in faulty manufacturing did so well compared to ce ne sont que des cailloux. A 27,000 words fic about Seamus Finnigan could never had done this well without the fest it was part of. People will participate in fests, look through collections, read everything in there. It’s easier for them to find fic that way than to actually go through endless tag searches.
Coincidentally, this is actually the explanation behind the huge increase in readership I experienced in May 2021. I published two fics (the wolf is just a puppy and the rare firing of wild canons) for the Hinny fic fest, which were rather successful, and caused me to be found by a lot of people who wouldn't have otherwise found my fics. I also do think this was helped by the fact that in June, I published chapter 8 of castles, and the controversy inherent to that boosted my visibility, but at the core, it was all that one fic fest.
So, the first thing we learn from this is: fests are cool! If you want to grow your readership, participate! They are also a great way to engage with fandom and the community in general, and to make new friends. I want to try to do one once a year from now on.
2. PEOPLE DO FIND YOU OFF THE FRONT PAGE
When I say this re:HP, people usually think I’m insane, but I swear, the front page matters. If you want to know when I posted last year, just look at this graph.
I posted:
the fault in faulty manufacturing in March
castles in: July, August, October, and December
Now, of course, this isn’t a perfect science. The January peak makes no sense to me. The April peak seems to be delayed from the March posting, which is a bit bizarre. October doesn’t have much of a peak, which I think is because I posted on the 29th, which means the new readers actually spread out between October and November. But, generally speaking, while I am at a level where readers will just find my fics on their own through a steady stream of recommendations, etc., most of my “peaks” actually still come from posting. If the front page (and, the multiple, front pages for big tags - you might not stay on the overall HP front page for long, but the ship-specific ones are a bit slower to kick you out, etc. The more niche your fic is, the longer you’ll stay on the front page of that tag) wasn’t bringing me any readers, there would be no correlation between me posting and the peaks at all. I think it debunks the idea that people only find their content on rec lists, these days. They do by looking at the first fics are on the front page of the tags they’re filtering.
3. BAD FICS DON’T DO WELL, REGARDLESS OF HOW SHIPPY OR FLUFFY THEY ARE
Now, this is entirely subjective but there is one fic I have written in the past two years, and think is bad, and that’s pick me, choose me, love me. And, it’s kind of reassuring to know that it’s one of the least kudo-ed fics I’ve published, on a pretty consistent basis (see the highlighted blue line in this graph).
That fic should have everything you could consider relevant to make it a hit: it’s super fluffy, it’s shippy, it’s short, etc. But it flops compared to the others. ‘Cause it’s bad (lol, I’m allowed to say it). So, I guess one of the things we can learn from this is that there is no use in me trying to please people’s brain algorithm. I am incapable of it and I do much better when I write what I want to write and what people actually follow me for (which is deep shit).
4. LONG FICS ATTRACT A LOT OF GUESTS
I think this becomes particularly clear when you compare these two charts.
Castles (my long WIP) is only my third most popular fic, when you look at how many new unique readers it brings me. The fault in faulty manufacturing does better than Castles lmao. However, it is my biggest share in terms of total kudos, which includes guests. I don’t have specific statistics on that, but I would say that approximately 2/3rds of my kudos on Castles are guests.
Again, I don’t know if these are people logging out to give me extra kudos on specific chapters, or if they’re genuine guests - it’s obviously not something I can speculate to. But it is a very interesting phenomenon that I’m not finding anywhere else.
5. PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS SURPRISE YOU
Whilst I maintain that bad fics do badly as a general rule (though there are lots of caveats), the fics that do well are sometimes baffling. Nothing could have prepared me for the fault becoming such a big chunk of my kudos this year. It’s done better than the wolf’s just a puppy, which is honestly a bit of an institution at this point. I’m also baffled at how large of a chunk watch has, a fic that is incredibly short, incredibly sad, and very gen. These are outliers that have done better than I could ever have predicted. And, I think, while you can always try to write what you think the people want, that is definitely not a guarantee of success.
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LASTLY, A NOTE ON THINGS THAT I DON’T TRACK (AND WHY)
Comments: I could easily track those in a similar way, but 1) I’m more interested in the content than in the numbers and 2) I play with the notification feature on those a lot. Sometimes, I’m not in a mental headspace where I can cope with having comments come directly into my emails, especially with the kind of comment I sometimes get on Castles. So, yeah.
Subs: I guess you could track subs, but that’s a bit harder to do. You’d have to check your stats every day, which I definitely don’t do. I’m invested, but not that invested. But I would be interested if there’s any specific correlation there.
Bookmarks: Same as subs. Could track, but a much more difficult endeavour.
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CONCLUSION
So, anyway, I hope this was interesting/helpful. I don’t know, it interests me. I took a mental health day off work today, and this is apparently what I’ve decided to do with it, lol. If you have any questions/thoughts, let me know!
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