Relative Degrees of Interest
The dynamics of the portion of the furry fandom that actually reads stories are a complex thing. I only sometimes pretend to understand them, myself. As my audience, being as I'm a member of the fandom myself, I suppose there's a part of me that's always at least nominally in touch with the readership, but sometimes things still happen that surprise me.
I was checking out the statistics on my stories on Yiffstar earlier, and I noticed something that I thought was actually rather unusual: my story "Stray" had twice as many Favorites as "Starting from Scratch" (42-to-21, an honest twice-as-many).
"Starting from Scratch" is a story about two young college-age males who have been in an online-based relationship and who finally get to meet in person. "Stray," on the other hand, is about someone in his mid-to-late 30s who has been in a committed relationship for the better part of a decade and is having both family and fidelity issues.
My first assumption would be that furries, and especially the main userbase of Yiffstar, would be much better able to identify with the former than the latter. And yet the numbers, there, show that "Stray" is fully twice as 'popular' (as determined by a not-so-accurate single data point marker) as "Starting from Scratch."
Perhaps that's a testament to the perverse and often baffling nature of the trends of the furry erotic fiction world. Maybe it's because "Stray" has 'Wolf' and 'Fox' as species tags, and so it comes up in searches more often than 'Coyote' and 'Panther' stories. Maybe the people who follow my stories, in particular, come from a slightly older crowd (I'll admit that I don't exactly cater to the light-and-fluffy, even when writing porn). I'd be flattered to think that "Stray" got that many more Favorites simply by virtue of it being a better story; on a personal level, I certainly like to think that it's a more meaningful and more emotionally significant story, at any rate.
Really, it's a nice surprise to see "Stray" so well-regarded in general. In terms of Favorites, it's currently ranked #4 out of the 38 stories I have on Yiffstar, and that in and of itself is almost as much of a surprise as the two-to-one against "Starting from Scratch." That makes me happy, since I think it's one of the better stories I've ever written, but reader and writer almost never seem to line up in that regard.
Whatever the reason or reasons, though, that's the way it is. Surprising, perhaps confusing, but certainly not anything bad. Food for thought, if nothing else.
I was checking out the statistics on my stories on Yiffstar earlier, and I noticed something that I thought was actually rather unusual: my story "Stray" had twice as many Favorites as "Starting from Scratch" (42-to-21, an honest twice-as-many).
"Starting from Scratch" is a story about two young college-age males who have been in an online-based relationship and who finally get to meet in person. "Stray," on the other hand, is about someone in his mid-to-late 30s who has been in a committed relationship for the better part of a decade and is having both family and fidelity issues.
My first assumption would be that furries, and especially the main userbase of Yiffstar, would be much better able to identify with the former than the latter. And yet the numbers, there, show that "Stray" is fully twice as 'popular' (as determined by a not-so-accurate single data point marker) as "Starting from Scratch."
Perhaps that's a testament to the perverse and often baffling nature of the trends of the furry erotic fiction world. Maybe it's because "Stray" has 'Wolf' and 'Fox' as species tags, and so it comes up in searches more often than 'Coyote' and 'Panther' stories. Maybe the people who follow my stories, in particular, come from a slightly older crowd (I'll admit that I don't exactly cater to the light-and-fluffy, even when writing porn). I'd be flattered to think that "Stray" got that many more Favorites simply by virtue of it being a better story; on a personal level, I certainly like to think that it's a more meaningful and more emotionally significant story, at any rate.
Really, it's a nice surprise to see "Stray" so well-regarded in general. In terms of Favorites, it's currently ranked #4 out of the 38 stories I have on Yiffstar, and that in and of itself is almost as much of a surprise as the two-to-one against "Starting from Scratch." That makes me happy, since I think it's one of the better stories I've ever written, but reader and writer almost never seem to line up in that regard.
Whatever the reason or reasons, though, that's the way it is. Surprising, perhaps confusing, but certainly not anything bad. Food for thought, if nothing else.