On views and votes

My first story on Lit was posted yesterday. I've seen mentions now and then on this forum of the relationship among viewing, actual reading, voting, comments, and so forth. Still, I was surprised to see what the stats showed after the first day:

1274 views, 7 votes.

I haven't linked to the story here because I won't beg for feedback (although I suppose it would be easy to find the story by going to my profile, and I won't try to dissuade anyone who's really interested). I believe that I already know why the reader response hasn't been strong: Instead of starting by introducing characters, developing their relationship gradually, and then setting up a sex scene with slow disrobing and observation/appreciation of revealed anatomy, I put a sex act in the first sentence. There was character development over time, but with sex at least an initially known quantity for the characters.

I've inferred from what I've read here that Lit readers prefer a slow build (and longer content generally; this story is about 3600 words, and it fit on one Lit page). I write a story in whatever way interests me, and this one seemed to me to work best this way. To be honest, I have no desire to write specifically to gain the approval of Lit's (apparently very large) readership.

Back to my original point: Is the disparity between views and votes caused by the dropoff between views and full reads? Might readers flag stories for later reading and voting? Would a quick scroll to the end turn people away because the story is so short? (That seems to run counter to recent indications that erotica buyers on paid-content sites may prefer short stories.) Anyway, I welcome any theories and explanations.

JuanSeiszFitzHall said:

I've inferred from what I've read here that Lit readers prefer

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Once again, there is no universal Literotica reader to prefer anything. It's a humongous story site with probably over 100,000 readers coming and going with little pattern at all. If you manage to dump this premise no matter how often it comes up on the discussion board and internalize that there are too many variables on what can happen in response to a story you post on a humongous story site like Literotica, especially early on in building a story file, you'll enjoy the ride more.

When/if you've posted stories of similar genre and quality long enough to gather a fan base, there will be some steadiness to the response you get. Not until then.

I've published 24 stories over 2 1/2 years and my view:vote ratio is about 90:1. So don't be surprised that there's such a large disparity. That's normal.

The size of the ratio reflects two things: Not all people who "view" the story will finish reading it, for various reasons, and not all those who do read it will vote on it. No one knows exactly how many people actually read the whole story, though it's fair to say it's a number between the view and vote totals.

Your view: vote ratio is not completely out of the ballpark. I think I know why it is not as good as it might be: your first paragraph is confusing. I looked up your story, after some effort (you should fix that by putting a link to your submission page in your profile and always linking to the story when you start a thread). I was baffled after the first paragraph. I imagine others were too, so you lost some potential readers right away.

I don't agree that starting with a sex scene necessarily will turn readers away, although your initial sentence may turn off some readers who don't want the story to begin quite so explicitly. I think the problem is less that than that people aren't going to understand what's going on after the first paragraph.

Anyway, keep plugging away and hang out on this forum and you'll get up to speed on how things work here.

Views and votes will continue to come in for several days while your story is on the New List. Then more slowly after that. You can compare your vote count with other recent stories in your same category by looking at the Sci-Fi & Fantasy Hub listed on the main Site Contents page. The Hub shows the recent stories in the category, and you can see the vote count by hovering your mouse over a story's rating. Some stories have a high vote count because they are part of a popular series, or (I presume) because of the reputation of the author. Yours does not see atypical.

Abandon faith in numbers except those favoriting or following you. Feel good when a very few readers give you high votes for a Red-H. But don't obsess over them unless you get off on numeric obsessions. LIT's reader universe is vast and complex, more than we can understand, and partially random.

Yeah, don't forget random factors. Folks viewing your first paragraph; folks hitting the wrong number of stars when voting; folks voting for some sorts of tales but not others. These can't be pinned down. It's a cloud of uncertainty.

I'm actually replying to all of you, with thanks. As noted, I'm not greatly concerned about my story's reception here, and was just puzzled about it. You've helped clear things up.

I, at least, don't need this thread to continue, but if anyone wants to keep it up or has questions for me, I'll keep a lookout.