Forum / views

• 
  Matthew A. Hamilton

  Apr 22, 04:37am

  I get more views than comments. That's ok, but if there is no comment, its hard to determine how many of those views like the piece. I want to write what people like, what they want to see.

  Any thoughts on this?

• 
  Kevin Myrick

  Apr 22, 10:12am

  Matthew, I have the same issue with a lot of the stuff I post: I get views, but no commentary or faves.

  I think its one of those things that it depends person-to-person on whether they decide to comment or fave a story.

  I'd like to think though that if you're getting a good amount of views on a story but no commentary, you're doing something good.

• 
  Finnegan Flawnt

  Apr 22, 11:12am

  (nods)

  i got views on my earlier stories here and no comments. no favs either, of course. my theory is that you somehow need to get into the "quality world" of people before they do anything else but view your stuff. this requires commenting on others - giving before you can get. it's the same everywhere. no free lunches. (not that i thought you thought there would be free lunches - i'm only reflecting on my experiences here). same at other writer sites as far as i can see.

  now, when you begin to get more comments (i think it took about 2 months in my case during which i was a pretty steady presence on the site), you notice they're mostly nice and often not too substantial. unless you created an author's note that is where you say what this is about what you're looking for etc. people don't use the author's note enough in my view.

  for serious advice/discussion on unfinished pieces, the various workshoppy groups are better suited than the main wall, of course. but you knew that.

  agree with kevin - views are pretty neat, too, since every visitor of the site has got a lot of choice - and picked you. of course you don't know if you could hold him - which is a thing to ask in the author's note - and there's even a group on "first lines" (or something - susan gibb runs it i believe), which i have used a couple of times with great return.

  just my 0.02. enjoy!

• 
  Matthew A. Hamilton

  Apr 22, 06:14pm

  Thanks for the comments. I'm not looking for favs, though, just a note that says my story sucks or doesn't suck.

  But you're right, Finnegan, if they are viewing it, that can be a good thing, too.

• 
  eamon byrne

  Apr 23, 12:57am

  Yeah. Assuming they're views. They might be skims. Or just clicks. Maybe they just read the first sentence. Maybe they look at the word count and then it's uh,oh.

  Maybe a jerk reads your stuff. Who knows.

  What I say to myself when I think about all this: sheez!

  Have a nice day.

• 
  eamon byrne

  Apr 23, 01:00am

  Poor attempt at a punch line. Sorry.

• 
  Walter Bjorkman

  Apr 23, 11:33am

  Live frog heads always taste better than dead ones.

  I think often it is that the reader is working off the main page, recent stories, or recommended. They are in the mood for poetry, see a 1,328 word story when they view, and go back. Or opposite, of flash, etc. The author's comment only appears when viewed, so the excerpt is key, as it is seen, line breaks don't work there, so when a poem, especially prose poem, I have begun adding the space/space between lines so it is evident. Another option would be just to post the author's note in the excerpt.

  This is more a service to the reader, and what's the downside to the author? Someone sees that killer first line/paragraph that we all are so proficient at (see above), they might read your work even if they were looking for something else.

• 
  Finnegan Flawnt

  Apr 25, 03:48am

  came back to this thread to report that i've been adding numbers: total number of views of my stories pubbed on fictionaut (including all stories, many of which are "private" now because they're on the market) is at around 4,500 since october 2009. that's not half bad, me thinks, though it's a tenth of the number of readers i get on my two personal blogs. but how many mags are there with that many readers? (i honestly have no idea since nobody seems to offer any stats....wait: metazen gets as much as 1000 hits a day now and puts out a story daily. fluctuates a lot depending on the fame of the author. metazen has had over 176,000 hits since we've been counting - aug 2009.)

• 
  Finnegan Flawnt

  Apr 25, 03:52am

  ....my point being that the effort to get 5,000 readers (many of which also comment, thereby changing me as a writer) with a paper-based publication must be way greater. not to mention 50,000 (no. of readers who visited my own blog, http://flawnt.me/ and http://flawnt.tumblr.com/, in the course of one year) ... numbers writers of old could only dream of. mind blowing.

• 
  Martha Williams

  Apr 25, 04:34am

  On Walter's point, it would be very nifty if the tags were visible on the main page - flash, excerpt, poem, etc. I might try putting it in mine - see how it looks. Hmm.

• 
  Martha Williams

  Apr 25, 05:20am

  OK, didn't like the tags in my excerpt, might try a word count. So readers know it's flash/poem before they open. Hoping that will reduce 'skims' and put more 'reads' into the views. Then...re: comments and favs... it's all down to whether people like what they see, with a hint of chaos/random chance/serendipity. Etc. Reckon?

• 
  eamon byrne

  Apr 25, 05:57am

  Just a click makes a read count. The site would have to put a timer on the click (say 20secs) to filter out the click on, click out instances. The timer count should be a proportion of the text length, cos some pieces are only a few words. Of course, short pieces get more reads proportional to clicks.

  I could go on, but I won't.

• 
  eamon byrne

  Apr 25, 06:48am

  Actually, I got curious. So here's a curious fact which I hope doesn't strike you as gloomy. In the last 10 pages of submissions, there were 3 with > 100 'clicks'.
  On the first page of the site (page 270 I think), 9 submissions got > 100 clicks. Go figure.

  Here's some more stats for you. Last year, zootrope got > 10,000 entries for their yearly contest.

  Here's another, and this one's a doozy. The Australian Arts Council just put a big ad in the papers and I quote:

  "Last year more than 9 out of 10 Australians actively participated in the arts.

  More than seven percent of them [ie 7% of 90% of about 21 million: go figure again] were working on a novel or a short story and more than 900,000 of us [sic] were busy writing poems.

  Was one of them you?"

  Funnily enough, I know for a fact that one of us was.

• 
  Susan Gibb

  Apr 25, 01:39pm

  And, consider that every time a piece posted here is referenced on Facebook or Twitter, the views count goes up by double digits (probably webcrawlers). On the other hand, I'm not sure why anyone would want to run up the views; I'd rather have 10 views with 10 comments (and some faves!) than 100 views and no comments.

• 
  Finnegan Flawnt

  Apr 25, 02:41pm

  i love numbers. big numbers, that is. australia sounds like a very creative place.

• 
  eamon byrne

  Apr 25, 05:02pm

  Their ads are VERY creative.

• 
  Susan Gibb

  Apr 26, 04:54am

  Eamon, you got me curious and I had to check out the stats and it confirmed what I suspected: page 270 has 8 posts over 100 views, but that's because the page display covers 4 months of postings! The last 10 pages may have only 3 or 4 (I didn't check), but those 10 pages cover only 6 days!

  It seems obvious that there are so many more writers posting, and so many more stories to read, that folks may only read the top page or so and not go back further. The stories are only active for a matter of hours (versus 4 months!) though we may check out a writer's work and read some of the older work.

  A while back a complaint was made that some new members were posting several stories at once and that drove everyone else's work off the front page quickly. Jurgen handled this by not allowing a post if there was another piece by that writer on the page already, but that covers about the timespan of half a day these days!

• 
  eamon byrne

  Apr 28, 04:29am

  Good forensics Susan. On that frequency-of-posting point, that could become an issue. Maybe a max of 1 posting a week could be imposed? It's sure hard to keep up with the material coming through, and the sheer volume encourages skimming and skipping.

• 
  Susan Gibb

  Apr 28, 05:08am

  I would agree with this. It's once of the reasons I don't even post any more. All many of us want is to be read. I used to read each and every piece but that's just no longer possible for me.

• 
  Savannah Schroll Guz

  Apr 28, 08:39am

  I do feel the movement towards ever shorter fiction is fueled by several variables. One of them is the speed with which we expect information to be transmitted...I admit I've gone a bit adhd because of the amount of information that appears in my world each day. I also wonder if readers lose their desire to concentrate on one concept or commune with one character for any length of time without a quick payoff. A new development, too, with so many literary journals appears to be stories under 1,000 words (I just checked out the Nanoism site, which is based on the 140-character Twitter format). Many online journals won't accept stories over 3,000, which I can understand and appreciate under the circumstances, but it makes me a little sad. A kind of deeper resonance and didactic power is possibly being lost. On one hand, there is greater gratification for the writer--I can crank out stories more quickly and get them out into the world if they are accepted, but are we compromising characterization and content in the process? Or is this new brevity truly the soul of wit? I still wonder where this trend and the habits that naturally develop from it will lead. Already my students don't focus on anything that's over four or five paragraphs...it's, at least in part, an unsettling trend.

• 
  Savannah Schroll Guz

  Apr 28, 08:42am

  Apologies, everyone! I just wrote a response here that I intended for a different thread. I'm so sorry!!

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