Readers but few votes

I'm seeing a trend with my stories the last few years. I get a nice number of readers, but very few votes. I'm not sure what to think about this. If people didn't like my writing style, they wouldn't read through my series stories, right? Is it really so difficult or undesirable for readers to vote? I already don't expect them to review, learned that a while ago.

Diezi said:

I'm seeing a trend with my stories the last few years. I get a nice number of readers, but very few votes. I'm not sure what to think about this. If people didn't like my writing style, they wouldn't read through my series stories, right? Is it really so difficult or undesirable for readers to vote? I already don't expect them to review, learned that a while ago.

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It seems normal to get something like one vote for 100 views. Are you consistently below that?

I have a story that has consistently gotten about 1 vote for each 400-500 views. The votes are favorable, but the ratio makes it pretty clear that few people who view the story actually read to the end and vote.

NotWise said:

It seems normal to get something like one vote for 100 views. Are you consistently below that?

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Yeah. That makes me feel even worse. LOL

I’m averaging about a 3.5:100 ratio of votes to views across the board. It could be the category you are posting your stories in as well. Some readers vote at a lower rate. In IT I am as low as 1:100 in Romance it is about 5:100.

In short, I don’t have an answer for you, just some observations about my own posts.

Diezi said:

Yeah. That makes me feel even worse. LOL

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I checked your catalog, and you've been posting here a lot longer than I have.

I've never posted to Celebrities and Fan Fic. Maybe the readership has changed? Authors in that category might know, but it is a small category.

Don't worry about it. It's statistics. Your latest story was published only yesterday, and as of this moment it's had 797 views and has a score of 4.67, which is a good score. A 100:1 view:vote ratio, which is roughly what I've experienced, would yield 8 votes, but it wouldn't be statistically weird if, given 700 views, it was 3 or 11, so you can't draw any conclusions based on those numbers. From the score you can infer that those that have read it like it. Don't think too much about the number of votes.

Generally I find...

That my number of reviews depends on the category the story is published in. EC and I/T get the most traffic, and the most reviews. My stories in Humor/Satire get proportionately fewer reviews, as few as one or two apiece.

But I think that the 1:100 ratio seems about right. I'd be more inclined to put stock in my score than reviews. And low numbers of positive reviews are always more welcome than the incoherent and illiterate flames that are so predominant in I/T in any event...

BiscuitHammer said:

That my number of reviews depends on the category the story is published in. EC and I/T get the most traffic, and the most reviews. My stories in Humor/Satire get proportionately fewer reviews, as few as one or two apiece.

But I think that the 1:100 ratio seems about right. I'd be more inclined to put stock in my score than reviews. And low numbers of positive reviews are always more welcome than the incoherent and illiterate flames that are so predominant in I/T in any event...

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EC is not one of the more heavily trafficked categories. A lot of stories are published in that category, because it's a default category, but EC stories are on the low end in terms of mean number of readers. Hector Biden has a thread currently running that has some data on this. The categories that get the most traffic on average are Incest/Taboo, which is number one by a very large margin, followed by Loving Wives and Nonconsent/reluctance.

Plus, number of reads is actually the number of times someone clicked on the link to your story...it doesn't mean they read it. It just could have been a mistake and the back click.

I would trade all the votes I get for just a few more comments from the people that take the time to read my stories and offer some thoughtful, useful input. I’m not a professional writer, but I put passion into the things I enjoyKant

Diezi said:

I'm seeing a trend with my stories the last few years. I get a nice number of readers, but very few votes. I'm not sure what to think about this. If people didn't like my writing style, they wouldn't read through my series stories, right? Is it really so difficult or undesirable for readers to vote?

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Speaking as a reader who frequently doesn't vote, it's not the difficulty, it's that the voting system often doesn't allow me to express anything meaningful.

In most categories, a story below 4.5 probably isn't that good (or is niche) and a story at 4.0 or less may not even be readable.

Hence, the voting system really only has two kinds of votes:
* I loved this story (5)
* I hated this story, to a varying degree (4 or less)

As a reader, I don't get to differentiate between "This is the best story I've ever read" and "This was a pretty good story that I enjoyed reading, but it had some flaws". I either vote it a 5, or I vote it something other than a 5, which will lower its score.

Or I just don't vote, which is more often what I do.

Yes, some percentage of non-voting readers are probably just lazy, or the story didn't make enough of an impact for them to have much of an opinion, or somesuch.

I would also expect, however, that there is a meaningful number of readers who look at a 4.5+ story and think "This is a good story, but I neither like it enough for it to meet my personal criteria for bestest-story-ever-5-stars, nor dislike it enough that I want my vote to lower its score" and just walk away without giving any feedback.

This is a known problem with 5-star rating systems.

I actually have a problem voting for a chapter of a multi-part story. I don`t see the point in voting for a chapter. I want to vote for a story, even if that is comprised of 50 separate chapters, but I don`t think that`s possible, or is it?

Diezi said:

Yeah. That makes me feel even worse. LOL

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I checked your latest story. As of today it appears you have 999 views and 9 votes. That's very close to the average ratio of approximately 100:1. That's approximately what my average is, but it varies from category to category and from story to story.

Long stories will have a higher ratio because people are less likely to finish the story and vote on them.

Chapters deep into a series will have lower ratios, because the readers are more likely not to click on the story unless they know they want to read it.

In my experience the view: vote ratio has nothing to do with how good or how highly rated the story is. My highest rated story has a ratio that's worse than 100:1, while my most unpopular story is near 50:1.

So don't feel bad! Your story is doing fine.

My latest story had a 50:1 ratio. But that's in Incest/Taboo

My latest in EC is 26:1 & 51:1

Gentleman_G said:

I actually have a problem voting for a chapter of a multi-part story. I don`t see the point in voting for a chapter. I want to vote for a story, even if that is comprised of 50 separate chapters, but I don`t think that`s possible, or is it?

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No, it's not possible.

But - voting on a chapter still gives feedback to a writer, especially if it's coming from a bunch of readers who are in for the long haul with a story. It enables the writer to see whether they are sustaining consistency, gives them an insight into category reader likes and dislikes (if that's important to a writer), gives them a sense of a longer story's ups and downs. I say, please vote on every chapter, for exactly that reason.

And in my multipart shaggy doggy story, it gave me incontrovertible proof that most Lit readers do not like unexpected GM (especially when laced with incest) dropped in. Do that, and the drop in score sticks out like dog's balls.

SimonDoom said:

In my experience the view: vote ratio has nothing to do with how good or how highly rated the story is. My highest rated story has a ratio that's worse than 100:1, while my most unpopular story is near 50:1.

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The 50:1 ratio does tell you something. It tells you that twice as many people really, really didn't like the story and they're itching to let you know.

When your average consistently runs at 100:1 and then suddenly changes to 50:1, that's an unusual reader reaction. If the score is trending high, they're giving you a very big "I like it" message. Likewise, if it's trending down fast, they're pounding it into the ground.

It's the sudden change in a measure that makes you pay attention, not the level of the measure itself. That's Trend Analysis 101.

Zeb_Carter said:

My latest story had a 50:1 ratio. But that's in Incest/Taboo

My latest in EC is 26:1 & 51:1

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The one that has the 26:1 ratio is my third highest rated story. And it's in Mature.

My highest rated story is in EC and has a 21:1 ratio.

electricblue66 said:

The 50:1 ratio does tell you something. It tells you that twice as many people really, really didn't like the story and they're itching to let you know.

When your average consistently runs at 100:1 and then suddenly changes to 50:1, that's an unusual reader reaction. If the score is trending high, they're giving you a very big "I like it" message. Likewise, if it's trending down fast, they're pounding it into the ground.

It's the sudden change in a measure that makes you pay attention, not the level of the measure itself. That's Trend Analysis 101.

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The 50:1 story was a Loving Wives story, which I think is a fairly responsive category, but in that case it definitely was partly a result of the fact that so many guys wanted to score the story low. It also was a result of the fact that it was one of my shortest stories, and there's a clear relationship between story length and the ratio.

Diezi said:

I'm seeing a trend with my stories the last few years. I get a nice number of readers, but very few votes. I'm not sure what to think about this. If people didn't like my writing style, they wouldn't read through my series stories, right? Is it really so difficult or undesirable for readers to vote? I already don't expect them to review, learned that a while ago.

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On average, sadly, you should expect to receive 1/2 of one percent in votes. For every 1,000 views, you should receive 5 votes.

I'm lucky that I receive 3 to 5 percent. For every 1,000 views, I receive 30 to 50 votes but it has taken me years to build up my fan base. I wrote an essay about the lack of votes and comments and nothing has changed since I wrote the essay years ago.

My take on voting is that most readers fear that their votes and/or comments will come back to bite them in the ass. They fear that their wives, girlfriends, significant others, or even their employers will not only read something that they wrote but also know that they read Literotica.

Just my informed, personal opinion but ever since that prostitution scandal in England, the readership has gone down. I remember having stories one after another with views in the low six figures. Now, I'm lucky when I get fifty or sixty thousand hits.

What I do as a reminder to the reader, in the first line and the last line of my stories, I ask them to vote.

Valint said:

In most categories, a story below 4.5 probably isn't that good (or is niche) and a story at 4.0 or less may not even be readable.

Hence, the voting system really only has two kinds of votes:
* I loved this story (5)
* I hated this story, to a varying degree (4 or less)

As a reader, ... I either vote it a 5, or ... I just don't vote.

This is a known problem with 5-star rating systems.

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This pretty much sums up the way I vote too. If I think the author did a good job and somebody else might enjoy reading the story, I vote 5. Otherwise, I just let the masses decide. (I really liked your references about alternative voting systems, by the way).

One thing to keep in mind is that people consider different factors in arriving at their score (eroticism, story telling, writing quality, degree to which the story scratches their own particular itch). These are mostly subjective criteria, and different readers weight them differently, obscuring the precise interpretation of the overall average score.

The interpretation of scores also varies between categories. A while back I analyzed a month's worth of stories and found:

HectorBidon said:

...
Across the entire site, a full three quarters of the stories (75%) received ratings above 4, and almost a third (31%) received ratings above 4.5. Only a very small number, 3%, were given ratings below 3. In most of the individual categories, the ratings were distributed roughly along these same lines.

However, in some categories the distributions were somewhat different. The most noticeable example was Loving Wives, in which the distribution was shifted down about one full star. More than half of the stories in Loving Wives only received ratings between 3 and 4, and almost a quarter received ratings below 3. Only 1% of the stories cracked the red H threshold.

At the other end of the grading curve were the Non-Human and Science Fiction/Fantasy categories, in which the distributions were shifted up about half a star. Two thirds of the stories in these categories received ratings above 4.5. The distributions were also shifted up in Romance and Novels & Novellas, with more than half the stories in these categories receiving the red H.

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I'll also say that I think of scores differently as an author than as a reader. I'm proud of my red H's, but I'm proud of my 4-4.5 scores too. A score above 4 means that at least somebody thought my story was pretty good.

HectorBidon said:

This pretty much sums up the way I vote too. If I think the author did a good job and somebody else might enjoy reading the story, I vote 5. Otherwise, I just let the masses decide. (I really liked your references about alternative voting systems, by the way).

One thing to keep in mind is that people consider different factors in arriving at their score (eroticism, story telling, writing quality, degree to which the story scratches their own particular itch). These are mostly subjective criteria, and different readers weight them differently, obscuring the precise interpretation of the overall average score.

The interpretation of scores also varies between categories. A while back I analyzed a month's worth of stories and found:



I'll also say that I think of scores differently as an author than as a reader. I'm proud of my red H's, but I'm proud of my 4-4.5 scores too. A score above 4 means that at least somebody thought my story was pretty good.

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I humbly disagree with you. I have plenty of stories that are in the high 3 range that are well written, creatively crafted, and excellent stories. Yet, unless they're a contest stories, bashing 1 votes are not removed.

Now, being that I've won twice the contest money than any other writer on the site and because I'm outspoken, I've made a lot of enemies.

Moreover, down voting of stories is not only dependent on subject but on category also.

I have two great stories about gun control that have scores of 2.0 because of the vast supporters of the NRA who don't care how many children are slaughtered in our schools as long as they can have their automatic weapons and as long as the NRA continues contributing to their campaigns.

The rest of us are collateral damage.

Now, I support gun ownership as most people but do we really need a gun that can fire 400 rounds a minute? Do we really need silencers (legal in 42 states) on our guns? Do we really need hollow point bullets? Isn't a handgun, a rifle, and a shotgun enough for any one person? Why must anyone be allowed to have dozens of guns and tens of thousands of rounds of bullets?

Thank you President Bush for not continuing the 10-year ban on automatic assault weapons.

SusanJillParker said:

I have plenty of stories that are in the high 3 range that are well written, creatively crafted, and excellent stories. Yet, unless they're a contest stories, bashing 1 votes are not removed.

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Well, not to criticize your writing style or even your stories, but like HectorBidon said: People consider different factors to arrive at the score they give.

If you write an excellent piece of work some people might downvote it simply because they expected (or wanted) more sex-scenes rather than more character development, or something similar. Doesn`t mean your story is crap, people just wanted something else and your story didn`t suit their taste.

Valint said:

In most categories, a story below 4.5 probably isn't that good (or is niche) and a story at 4.0 or less may not even be readable.

.

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I don't think you can assume either of these things. In a very, very general sense, there is a correlation between story score and quality, but there are so many exceptions and wrinkles to this that if you eliminate all sub-4.5 stories from consideration you will miss out on some good stories.

I've seen plenty of 4.5+ stories that I didn't think were that good -- slopping writing, cardboard characters, etc. And I've seen very well-written stories with marks below 4.5 that were well-written but that I think were marked down because they did not neatly fit within reader expectations. That's especially true of LW stories, but it's true of other kinds of stories as well.

I've found that, in general, the quality of an author's writing is fairly consistent among his/her stories. Not always, and some authors get better over time, but it's rare for one author to write one story that I think is really, really bad and another that I think is really, really good, at least technically. And yet if you look at the scores for an author's submissions sometimes you will find they're all over the map. There are good authors who have written stories that for whatever reason got low marks. But I would trust my own preference for their stories generally over the judgment that other readers gave those stories.

Find authors you like and then look up the authors they like. That's a better way to choose what to read, I think, than relying on scores.