Puzzled, I am …
A little bit, anyway. Some of you will remember that I have long been frustrated by the lack of hits (and even more significantly, the lack of reviews) for the Life in Freefall saga on FFN. This is not news; and also, as estora has several times pointed out, the readership of FFN is not especially discriminating in its collective taste. And it's fine, really - but while I have been busy working on the revisions to the first story, I thought I might as well take the old version down there (since it's archived on AO3 anyway) and try and see if, having learned some things about the aesthetics of posting and what readers are looking for, I might get more hits to the story (still no word on why this is such a desirable outcome, but hey).
So I performed my little experiment, posted with some signifiers that I thought matched up with some of the more popular stories (on the assumption that "pitching" the story differently to readers might result in more hits) and waited to see what would happen.
Which was … pretty much nothing. pronker wrote a review (thanks, pronker!), christening the FFV ship as it set sail on a new voyage. Nobody else has said anything, and there are less than a hundred hits. I find this not so much discouraging, since I wasn't heavily invested in that part of the project - after all, I'm posting it elsewhere with happier results - but it is a little surprising. My hypotheses provide no explanation. I would like to investigate further, but I'm not sure how to proceed. Most more chapter? Change the story description? Post the future installments as separate stories and try out various summaries?
What do you guys think? What am I missing here? What draws readers to any given story, or turns them off? I'm curious, folks!
So I performed my little experiment, posted with some signifiers that I thought matched up with some of the more popular stories (on the assumption that "pitching" the story differently to readers might result in more hits) and waited to see what would happen.
Which was … pretty much nothing. pronker wrote a review (thanks, pronker!), christening the FFV ship as it set sail on a new voyage. Nobody else has said anything, and there are less than a hundred hits. I find this not so much discouraging, since I wasn't heavily invested in that part of the project - after all, I'm posting it elsewhere with happier results - but it is a little surprising. My hypotheses provide no explanation. I would like to investigate further, but I'm not sure how to proceed. Most more chapter? Change the story description? Post the future installments as separate stories and try out various summaries?
What do you guys think? What am I missing here? What draws readers to any given story, or turns them off? I'm curious, folks!