How do you measure success?

games4yosoul

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In regards to feedback on a story, how do you measure it's success?
Rating? (What's a good rating for Lit?)
Views?
Positive comments?

I was curious as to what you all thought of as success. I know ultimately we write for ourselves but how does one know if a story is well recieved?
 
You have to figure out what that is for yourself. There's no universal answer to this. This is a specifically personal issue.

But now we'll have a yet another long series of testimonials that will provide the answers others have made for themselves, with varying degrees of thought, and at the end of that it will remain something you have to figure out for yourself, based on your own wants, needs, and perspective. And once you have figured it out for this week, it will have changed next week.

You might consider whether such navel gazing is a mechanism to avoid actually writing.
 
how do you measure it's success? I know ultimately we write for ourselves but how does one know if a story is well recieved?

I’ve read stories with a red H that have, in my opinion naturally, been pure crap. I’ve also read stories with less than 4 that have been really good. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

If you are happy with the rating then that’s success.
 
I was curious as to what you all thought of as success. I know ultimately we write for ourselves but how does one know if a story is well recieved?
One measure can be the ratio of votes to views, coupled with the number of comments. One of my stories will typically get 1 score per 100 views, one comment per thousand. If those feedback rates increase significantly, that's an indicator to me that the story struck a chord of sorts with its readers, compared to other pieces of my work. Comments with a little bit of thought behind them, they're always nice to get.

For me, scores and ratings are internal reference points only - it's meaningless to compare my little garden of Red Hs to the next person's, as they will be in different categories writing different material, appealing to different fan bases.
 
In regards to feedback on a story, how do you measure it's success?
Rating? (What's a good rating for Lit?)
Views?
Positive comments?

I was curious as to what you all thought of as success. I know ultimately we write for ourselves but how does one know if a story is well recieved?

Success can be many things. A long list of submissions, having an "H" (4.5+ for a story) for every submission, having a submission on one of the top lists. You need to define that for yourself. I write to write. How they end up is really out of my hands. Yeah, it's great to receive a persistent 4.8 and lot of votes or comments on a particular story, but here it pays the same as a 3.0 or worse.

Just write, write and write some more. Persistence is the key.
 
In regards to feedback on a story, how do you measure it's success?
Rating? (What's a good rating for Lit?)
Views?
Positive comments?
Positive comments, though I'm more likely to get positive comments the higher the rating.
 
Submitting material and getting readership of any kind is success for me. I admire print publishing, but it is a difficult route for most of us to go.
 
By far the most important type of success I've enjoyed as an author on Literotica is my own personal satisfaction from writing and publishing fiction for the first time in my life. I've published 22 since December 2016 and it's been a very enjoyable, and creatively satisfying, experience,

Aside from that, the most important form of success for me is knowing I have connected with readers who appreciate the story. I take the numerical evidence of success -- views, votes, comments, rating, favorites, emails and private messages -- with a grain of salt, but I enjoy knowing people have enjoyed my stories.

The last form of success I enjoy is knowing I have learned something about how to write a story, especially an erotic story. I haven't mastered the art but I've gotten better.
 
My thoughts

I think a story is successful if I go back and read it myself and still enjoy it or remember writing the fun parts, be they sexy or not.

As for feedback, anytime anyone takes the effort to click and type to tell me how much they hated or loved a story, that means it somehow rang true for them. It was good enough to elicit any kind of emotion and they responded.

For example, I have one story that has 25+ comments on it and it's Loving Wives so you can imagine what those comments are. One person told me she'd score me a 10 if she could because of the haters. Another person told me I should set myself on fire and die screaming for the filth I wrote. Then they fought in the comment section like it was a BB forum. it was fun to see it. The story itself scored 4.03, which is killing it in loving wives for me.

Did you have fun writing it? Did it motivate you or make you think you're not bad at wordsmithing? Did you get a comment or two, even "good stuff"? That means it's successful.
 
Not sure what I expected when I came here

There was a story line based on my personal experience that had been aching to come out for some time. After reading a lot of submissions here on Lit, I screwed up my courage and let the electrons flow.

We all want some feedback for what we do, and I had no idea what to expect. What I got was both reinforcing and disappointing. Four stories, three red H's. Almost 42,000 views. Wow! Only 557 votes (1.33%). And most disappointing, five comments.

One of the reasons I submitted here was to keep up my writing skills as I get further into old age. I had hoped for a livelier dialogue about my product

I guess if I really want comments I should write in Loving Wives where the bitch gets all the property, custody of the kids, and turns her cuckold husband into someone's gay sex slave to earn his way out hole into which she has cast him.
 
There was a story line based on my personal experience that had been aching to come out for some time. After reading a lot of submissions here on Lit, I screwed up my courage and let the electrons flow.

We all want some feedback for what we do, and I had no idea what to expect. What I got was both reinforcing and disappointing. Four stories, three red H's. Almost 42,000 views. Wow! Only 557 votes (1.33%). And most disappointing, five comments.

One of the reasons I submitted here was to keep up my writing skills as I get further into old age. I had hoped for a livelier dialogue about my product

I guess if I really want comments I should write in Loving Wives where the bitch gets all the property, custody of the kids, and turns her cuckold husband into someone's gay sex slave to earn his way out hole into which she has cast him.
EC Chapter stories that I've looked at recently average 1.1 comments after a week. Whole stories aren't much better at 1.3 comments. I think changing categories was a bad idea because, in your case, people in the Anal category would be unlikely to read your second chapter as they hadn't seen or read the first chapter. EC, Anal and Group Sex from what I see all draw low number of comments. So given where you published, you did well to get 5 comments.

If you want some dialogue about your stories, create a thread in this forum about each of them.
 
Hey, 8Letters, thanks for the quick feedback. Yes, I understand about shifting the story line between categories. I was new to Lit at the time I wrote them. Were I to do it again, I would pick one and stick with it throughout.
 
Almost 42,000 views. Wow! Only 557 votes (1.33%). And most disappointing, five comments.
That's actually pretty typical, based on previous discussions on the vote per view ratio (1:100) and comments per view (1:1000) across most categories.

If you get more comments than that typical ratio, your story is probably better than most or worse than most - you will be told if you're getting to the edge of the bell curve. If you're in the middle of it, don't expect much.

As 8L says, if you specifically want feedback, start a thread here with a link to your story - and tell people the category.
 
There was a story line based on my personal experience that had been aching to come out for some time. After reading a lot of submissions here on Lit, I screwed up my courage and let the electrons flow.

We all want some feedback for what we do, and I had no idea what to expect. What I got was both reinforcing and disappointing. Four stories, three red H's. Almost 42,000 views. Wow! Only 557 votes (1.33%). And most disappointing, five comments.

One of the reasons I submitted here was to keep up my writing skills as I get further into old age. I had hoped for a livelier dialogue about my product

I guess if I really want comments I should write in Loving Wives where the bitch gets all the property, custody of the kids, and turns her cuckold husband into someone's gay sex slave to earn his way out hole into which she has cast him.

I endorse 8L's and EB's recommendation: start a feedback thread and link to your story. You may well get some good and lengthy feedback.

Those numbers you received are typical. I get around 1 vote for every 80 to 120 views on average, and roughly 1 comment out of every 50 votes. So comments are few and far between, and most of them aren't very enlightening. The only way to get a decent picture of the story's reception is to look at all the stats together. Even better is actively to solicit feedback from other authors.
 
Thanks all. Good advice. If I get motivated to write again, I will do as you suggest.
 
I think a story is successful if I go back and read it myself and still enjoy it or remember writing the fun parts, be they sexy or not.

As for feedback, anytime anyone takes the effort to click and type to tell me how much they hated or loved a story, that means it somehow rang true for them. It was good enough to elicit any kind of emotion and they responded.


Not to pick on Davion, but if I go back and read something that I wrote 6 months or a year ago and I don't say, "Who wrote that crap!" I don't feel like I have progressed as a writer. That goes for writing code, writing technical literature or just good old fashioned dirty stories.


That being said, his second point is very true. It is really easy to read a story, but it does take some effort to locate the ratings and apparently even more to figure out how to comment.

If anybody who works on the Android app sees this, how do you post comments?


It took a while to find the ratings and I still haven't found how to post comments.



James

(Someday I will get a really cool signature)
 
I gauge success by ratings, feedback, and “favorites”. All of my stories seem to end up with comparable ratings, and feedback usually is either “Good job!” or “This story is a waste!”. I like to know why people love them and hate them, and that doesn’t come through often in feedback. Sometimes it does, and that is appreciated. In the end, with other factors being mostly comparable, “favorites” seems to be the best indicator of how much of an impact a story has made.
 
By far the most important type of success I've enjoyed as an author on Literotica is my own personal satisfaction from writing and publishing fiction for the first time in my life. I've published 22 since December 2016 and it's been a very enjoyable, and creatively satisfying, experience,

Aside from that, the most important form of success for me is knowing I have connected with readers who appreciate the story. I take the numerical evidence of success -- views, votes, comments, rating, favorites, emails and private messages -- with a grain of salt, but I enjoy knowing people have enjoyed my stories.

The last form of success I enjoy is knowing I have learned something about how to write a story, especially an erotic story. I haven't mastered the art but I've gotten better.

Well said, across the board.
 
Well said, across the board.

Agreed. Simon made most of what I had intended to say redundant.

I would like to add that I have a number of loyal readers who provide me with their feedback. As they have followed my writing from the beginning, I place a high value on their observations.
 
I would like to add that I have a number of loyal readers who provide me with their feedback. As they have followed my writing from the beginning, I place a high value on their observations.

Me too. I'm enough of a stats geek to like numbers, but after a while the numbers don't mean as much. I never get tired, however, of knowing something I've written has given a reader an erotic thrill or some other sort of enjoyment.
 
Me too. I'm enough of a stats geek to like numbers, but after a while the numbers don't mean as much. I never get tired, however, of knowing something I've written has given a reader an erotic thrill or some other sort of enjoyment.

This!
 
Success is being above ground and able to do something kind. Also, reading twice as much as I write.
 
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