On Reviewing

[dawn_felagund]

Reviewing (meaning leaving comments on stories) is one of the more anxiety-provoking and frustrating aspects of fandom participation, in my experience. I frequently see newbies lament that their stories aren't receiving comments; authors sometimes stop posting to or leave entirely from sites where they feel that their work isn't receiving adequate

Comments

[dawn_felagund]

I just went through my own stats on the SWG and did some quick figuring of the ratio between readers and reviews, and I often had 500 or 600 readers for a story with 3 reviews. Then I had a story (part of a challenge for another site, so promoted more widely than the SWG) with 150 readers for 3 reviews, but that was the only one that wasn't comparable to or higher than your number. I realize this is like the most unscientific analysis ever. :^P I was too lazy to even count reviewers, like you did. I might make a graph someday to see if I can find any actual patterns. If I have time. Ha.

Something that occurred to me is the similarities between your EQTtD and my By the Light of Roses. Both are longer stories but not epic-length (102K and 68K, respectively, with 15 and 25 chapters, respectively); both received comments from three different people, had about 300 readers total, and both were posted beyond the SWG. BtLoR was reviewed quite heavily on LJ, so the lower numbers on the SWG didn't surprise me, since there's a lot of overlap between my flist and the SWG readership. I don't know if something similar might be at work in your situation.

Anyway. :) The larger question of why so many people read but so few pause to say even, "Hey, I enjoyed this" (and if they keep reading through to Chapter 25, I refuse to believe they're not enjoying it! :) is a good question and one I have often angsted over, as a site mod. How to turn more of those readers into commenters? The SWG averages 3 reviews per story, which isn't bad for a small, niche site, but it isn't great either; I'd like it to be higher. But how to get achieve that, I don't know ...

If you have time to read the story, how can you not have time to type: 'Read your fic, really enjoyed it, thank you for sharing'?

It is baffling! :) My hypothesis is that many people don't think that kind of comment is "good" enough, and they don't have or want to take the time to write something they feel is good enough. (Or they can't articulate why they liked something, which I'll admittedly feel after reading a truly amazing piece.) I think that the "no time" excuse really probably ties in with some of the other reasons for not reviewing that have to do more with insecurity about the "quality" of the review.