"Doing Well" on Literotica

[SimonDoom]

If I were writing for money, then I probably would, as AwkwardlySet suggests, evaluate my Literotica success by the extent to which it contributes to my commercial success. I don't do that, so it's irrelevant.

For me personally, I resist the notion that there are any strict objective markers of success here. I see numbers as imperfect proxies for what I'm after--useful but not wholly reliable, and not to be taken too seriously. My two main goals are a) writing stories that I feel good about writing, and b) connecting with as many readers as possible who enjoy reading my stories. If I've done that, it's success for me. The rest is fluff.

 

[Omenainen]

Finally, I put this at the #1 spot not because I have some appreciation for it or because it's widespread - actually, it's exactly the opposite, but because it was by far the easiest to formulate. Unlike all other #, there is only one simple criterion - How much money you are earning from your Patreon.

Yeah but it’s not a Lit measurement. All of us could claim whatever, and there’s no way to verify any of it. Unlike, say, seeing how many followers someone has. For any kind of pecking order you’d probably have to go by numbers, because how are you measuring the things that can’t be measured like how much enjoyment the author gets from their art? So, we already have the top lists, and I don’t know what else there could be that was any more useful. Trying to construct some kinds of “rules for success” like “you should get at least 10 new followers with each story” sounds a lot like social media nonsense.

 

[KeithD]

I don't understand what is nonsensical about it? It's basic reasoning. There are authors who write on Lit for the sole purpose (or mostly) for the commercial benefit of it. The idea is to use Lit to gather readership and entice them to support the author on Patreon. If you don't post your stories on Lit then you have no source of readers. People don't just browse Patreon and randomly decide "Ah, here's an author of something, let's subscribe and pay him for a few months." So you post your stories/chapters on Lit, gather a following and then direct the readers to your Patreon.

I can see that some who include a commercial aspect to their writing would try doing this. I don't and I've been surprised at how separate my marketplace works and my Literotica postings run. I don't remember anyone from Literotica notifying me that my Lit. stories led them to buy anything of mine in the marketplace. (This happens occasionally on another story site I post to, but not to any significant degree.) And, while I do announce my new marketplace offerings here on the thread provided for that, I don't post stories to Literotica for that purpose. Stories generally get posted here three years or more after they were launched in the marketplace, and I post them here for another place to preserve them and to increase the number of readers for the story. I don't use Patreon.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

For me personally, I resist the notion that there are any strict objective markers of success here.

Honestly, I don't think there are any objective markers of success too, or at least none that could be set with any degree of certainty, or which would be worth more than our personal metrics, whatever those are.
This whole thread was meant for the AH to engage in a mental exercise to try to set some metrics that could, with all the caveats, be used as somewhat less than arbitrary metrics of success on Lit. I never had any illusions about the feasibility of anything objective in this sense.

 

[Omenainen]

To produce something positive, if not any more practical, I like to think of my stories through this imaginary orgasm counter. It would be nice to know how many orgasms I’ve introduced into the world with my stories, and because there can’t and won’t be any real way to know, I can approximate. For example my stories altogether have been viewed now for something like 700k times. If I estimate that 1% of views would lead to orgasming, it’d be 7000 orgasms. Pretty nifty! I’d be hard pressed to produce seven thousand orgasms by any other methods. Even if it would be ten times smaller, 700 orgasms is still a lot. I know for a fact it’s above zero, so 70 is probably too low.

 

[StillStunned]

To produce something positive, if not any more practical, I like to think of my stories through this imaginary orgasm counter. It would be nice to know how many orgasms I’ve introduced into the world with my stories, and because there can’t and won’t be any real way to know, I can approximate. For example my stories altogether have been viewed now for something like 700k times. If I estimate that 1% of views would lead to orgasming, it’d be 7000 orgasms. Pretty nifty! I’d be hard pressed to produce seven thousand orgasms by any other methods. Even if it would be ten times smaller, 700 orgasms is still a lot. I know for a fact it’s above zero, so 70 is probably too low.

I've published 28 stories, so that's 28 orgasms that I can personally vouch for someone somewhere had.

 

[Omenainen]

I've published 28 stories, so that's 28 orgasms that I can personally vouch for someone somewhere had.

See how I said that much more elegantly? I must be doing better on Lit than you.

 

[StillStunned]

See how I said that much more elegantly? I must be doing better on Lit than you.

I'm actually waiting for someone to reply with "Fairytale of New York led to an orgasm, really?"

 

[Omenainen]

I'm actually waiting for someone to reply with "Fairytale of New York led to an orgasm, really?"

You still think people around here read your stories? Kinda endearing.

Who knows, maybe they do. Maybe you all read each other’s stories but nobody just reads mine. Or cares to admit that they did

 

[StillStunned]

You still think people around here read your stories? Kinda endearing.

Who knows, maybe they do. Maybe you all read each other’s stories but nobody just reads mine. Or cares to admit that they did

Normally I'd agree, but Fairytale got a bunch of comments from AH regulars. And not one of them talked about how hot and sexy it was.

On a related note: am I the only one who feels a bit weird getting aroused by stories of people they interact with regularly?

 

[Lumiere_Amie]

As someone who spent their entire career measuring things, always against a set of specifications, the concept of 'doing well' is the ultimate subjective measure. If a customer had sent me a product and told me to tell them if it was 'good', I would have sent it back and told them to define good in terms of quantifiable measures. No measures on this site qualify as quantifiable in the sense of a specification. Can't compare scores because each of us has our own audience, and my audience probably scores stories differently than yours. Since scores don't work, then the Red H, which is based on scores, can't be used either. Green E's? Have any of those been awarded in recent memory? Besides, those are the opinions of one person. Comments? Nope, again different audiences and we get many more ratings than we do comments.
If you're in a relationship, who loves the other more? Can you measure it? Can we all agree on a set of measures? No.
Ultimately it comes down to each author's own personal feelings about how they're 'doing'.
Y'all keep chattering, pissing away your time. I'm going to work on my next story.

 

[SimonDoom]

To produce something positive, if not any more practical, I like to think of my stories through this imaginary orgasm counter. It would be nice to know how many orgasms I’ve introduced into the world with my stories, and because there can’t and won’t be any real way to know, I can approximate. For example my stories altogether have been viewed now for something like 700k times. If I estimate that 1% of views would lead to orgasming, it’d be 7000 orgasms. Pretty nifty! I’d be hard pressed to produce seven thousand orgasms by any other methods. Even if it would be ten times smaller, 700 orgasms is still a lot. I know for a fact it’s above zero, so 70 is probably too low.

I like the orgasm test, too. I have no idea how many orgasms my stories have produced, but I know it's more than zero, because I've had readers tell me my story got them off.

Think of it as the cum bucket test. How many cum buckets have you filled?

Figure one cum is half a teaspoon (I'm using a figure I pulled off the Internet). 48 teaspoons make up a cup. 80 cups make up a bucket. That's 7680 ejaculations per bucket. Of course, that's just male ejaculation. For the sake of ease and fairness, we'll count a female orgasm as the same thing.

By your estimate you're responsible for approximately one cum bucket. I think that's worthy of congratulations. You get a "White C."

 

[alohadave]

On a related note: am I the only one who feels a bit weird getting aroused by stories of people they interact with regularly?

You are not.

 

[lustychimera]

To interrupt real quick:



Old boy back?

 

[AwkwardlySet]

You just won the worst screenshot award

 

[StopT]

To interrupt real quick:

View attachment 2328968

Old boy back?

When did Keith ever leave?

 

[lustychimera]

When did Keith ever leave?

I meant the bald self appointed megalomaniac, lol. Tlan --> Tilan?

Idk if he got banned or what happened to the guy. Came back after a while, he was gone, and the forums felt oddly empty without the grump to pile on.

You just won the worst screenshot award

Sorry I got some of the screenshot in your eyes, Lt. Dan.

 

[StopT]

Came back after a while, he was gone, and the forums felt oddly empty without the grump to pile on.

Well, good riddance then.

 

[lovecraft68]

Y'all keep chattering, pissing away your time. I'm going to work on my next story.

This attitude is a measure of success here in itself.
Stop griping and get to typing.

 

[StillStunned]

This attitude is a measure of success here in itself.
Stop griping and get to typing.

Some of us can do both.

 

[Voboy]

To produce something positive, if not any more practical, I like to think of my stories through this imaginary orgasm counter. It would be nice to know how many orgasms I’ve introduced into the world with my stories, and because there can’t and won’t be any real way to know, I can approximate. For example my stories altogether have been viewed now for something like 700k times. If I estimate that 1% of views would lead to orgasming, it’d be 7000 orgasms. Pretty nifty! I’d be hard pressed to produce seven thousand orgasms by any other methods. Even if it would be ten times smaller, 700 orgasms is still a lot. I know for a fact it’s above zero, so 70 is probably too low.

I feel the same way.

I reckon every favorite, every follower, every positive comment, every email, and every 5* indicates at least one orgasm. I do find that fairly satisfying. I've always felt good about causing that.

OP, the "cum count" is as useful as anything else and, to judge by the replies here, more useful than "commercial success."

 

[tenyari]

I imagine if most of you looked at my numbers you'd be very worried and think you were doing horrible.

I mostly have pretty good scores. But I probably have very low readership and don't get many comments. However I haven't posted in more than a year now, and before that took an almost 20 year break. So... for me the metric of doing well is very different.

The comments I do get are either blank because somebody misclicked, positive in nature, or imply people confusingly think I'm a naked alien girl living on earth or something (you mean this is fiction?).
The stories that get higher scores are the ones I expected to, and the ones that don't are "mostly" the ones I expected to struggle.

For me the metric of success is "am I getting out there the things I wanted to get out there" - and sadly, I'm not. life took a rough turn in 2023 cutting off my writing. I am doing well by my own standards for what I do have out there, but am very frustrated with the work I was working on before 2023...

 

[gacor]

I am not a professional writer, nor have any training in the topic. All I can claim is that I have read a lot over the years, and I have learned some of what works. English is not my first language either, so that is an added difficulty.

With that stated, success for me is to make a story I can be happy with. I want to try new things in each story I write, and get better little by little. Due to what I mentioned above, the room for improvement is enormous, and I feel it every time still.

If I’m more satisfied with what I have achieved in my latest story than I was with the previous one, even if scores do not reflect it, I consider it a success.