average "Lit career length"

[TheRedLantern]

While typing a message to someone, I found myself wondering how long the "average" Lit writer posts stories for. In other words, what's the average length of time between the first and last published dates for authors around here?

I assume some will attrite because they get bored, some will take their careers to the next level and sell their work, some will change account/pen names (although it would be SUPER fascinating to be able to match these back to their original accounts to get a full picture of how many years they spend posting stories here), etc.

I know the site doesn't make that data available, and scraping all that with Python & BeautifulSoup would be straightforward albeit tedious, and in the age of unstructured data-hungry AI I'm sure they're guarding against large scale data scraping. Although it would be a fascinating data set to explore (at what point is an author likely to be here for 10+ years? do ratings matter to attrition? is the frequency of posting in the first six months predictive of how long an author will publish? are views predictive of author attrition?)

There's no real question here. It was just an idle thought I had while waiting for my own data crunching scripts to finish.

 

[Areala-chan]

No clue. I'd be an outlier in the data regardless.

 

[TheRedLantern]

I'd be an outlier in the data regardless

We're all outliers, otherwise we wouldn't spend our precious free time writing stories and publishing them for free.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Average? Maybe longer than you think.

Many are at 20 years. Some have been here since the beginning of the site in the late 1990s, though maybe not under their original IDs.


Duleigh, for one has a sign up date of 2004 and is still active.

 

[THBGato]

I do have a sense of admiration for writers like Salish or Limentina who, it seems, had a plan, wrote and published their stories over a year or so and then left.

That's what I plan to do. Four stories left. I wonder if I'll be able to stick to it?

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

Average? Maybe longer than you think.

Many are at 20 years. Some have been here since the beginning of the site in the late 1990s, though maybe not under their original IDs.

I'd completely disagree on that.

Yes, many accounts here are 20 years old, and some are even older. But the question was: How long do people publish, not how long have you been registered.

And my personal impression is that Literotica gets overwhelmed with people who post one, maybe two stories (if not just chapters to a story),... and then vanish again. Be it because they just wanted to get their masturbation fantasy out of their head and accomplished that goal, or because they found out writing is hard, or they got discouraged by comments. I think that's the majority, which makes me think the average time "authors" on here actually post stuff is less than a year.

 

[NotWise]

We have authors on AH who have been posting stories on Lit for years. I don't think that's representative. Totally my impression, but I think a lot of writers post one to a few stories and stop, often within the space of months.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Of six authors I just checked at random by clicking on their IDs on a category page, five of them had been posting for at least 10 years, some going back to '03. Some had long gaps between published dates.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Three more on IT including silkstockingslover all go back to at least '04

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

Of six authors I just checked at random by clicking on their IDs on a category page, five of them had been posting for at least 10 years, some going back to '03. Some had long gaps between published dates.

Huh. Guess that just goes to show how hard it can be to gather reliable data here. I just clicked on the Anal category (because it's the first one in the list), and checked the last six authors to publish there.

The first one has been around since 2001... but had an eighteen-year gap between postings.
The second one has been posting for 2 years.
The third one has been posting for 1 year.
And the fourth to sixth one have been posting for just a few months.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

The two I checked were 'winners' in IT and EC.

Anal is the same thing though. Look at the winners list. Joe Dreamer and Rejectreality for example, plus a few others.

 

[Gamblnluck]

Many of us have no intentions of writing elsewhere for money or not. I wrote for a google role reversal site for several years before coming here. I adapted a few of those stories and published them here. Some of those involved underage kids and no amount of adapting would work.
I read stories here though for many years before posting my first in '20.

 

[NotWise]

If you sample authors who appear on current story lists, then you're only looking at active authors, and very few short-term authors will be caught in your net.

I went to the authors hub and sampled the "random authors" list three times (30 authors total). I see three patterns: people may post a few stories and stop, they may post stories at intervals over a longer period, or they may post a few stories followed by a long gap, and then more new stories years later.

I didn't tabulate it, but it looked to me like maybe more than half the authors posted stories over a period of a year or so then (apparently) quit. A few have a long, continuous posting history. The pattern of posting a few stories followed by a long gap makes it hard to say when an author has stopped. @Duleigh was mentioned up-thread, and he's a good example. He posted a few stories in 2006 and 2008 and the rest of his 122 works were published after 2021

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I've been publishing here for 11 years and average a new story ever 141 days. Writing longer novel-length stories tends to take awhile.

The shortest gap between stories was 2 days and the longest gap was 1,397 days.

 

[NotWise]

I've been here nearly 10 years and my longest gap was 507 days.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I do have a sense of admiration for writers like Salish or Limentina who, it seems, had a plan, wrote and published their stories over a year or so and then left.
That's what I plan to do. Four stories left. I wonder if I'll be able to stick to it?

I had a plan when I started this. I had a handful of stories that I wanted to tell, then I'd be done and on to the next creative pursuit.

That was three years and 46 stories ago with no end in sight. I have pages of new story ideas.

So much for my plan.

 

[PennyThompson]

I do have a sense of admiration for writers like Salish or Limentina who, it seems, had a plan, wrote and published their stories over a year or so and then left.

That's what I plan to do. Four stories left. I wonder if I'll be able to stick to it?

Your short stories lately have been just a delight. So I hope that if you do finish your long-term projects and feel satisfied with them, you'll still come back occasionally to drop a little gift when inspiration strikes

 

[MillieDynamite]

I only post stories here after they've been published at Amazon or elsewhere and have run their course. I don't write for free! I do let them post for free when I've earned my pennies, nickels, and the occasional dime.

We're all outliers, otherwise we wouldn't spend our precious free time writing stories and publishing them for free.

 

[lovecraft68]

Three more on IT including silkstockingslover all go back to at least '04

Silk started in 2010, the same year as me. I only know this because someone once commented about the 'class of 2010' being well represented on the top lists.

@Comshaw has been here since 2001.

 

[NotWise]

About two and a half years (2.59 years).

I went back to the author hub and compiled the dates from 25 authors. If they posted in the last five years I considered them active. If they had a gap of 5 years or more, I considered them to have two "careers."

The longest "career" was 10.7 years (and counting) and the shortest was 0 years (someone posted three stories on one day and never published again). Three authors had two careers because their work spanned a gap of more than five years.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I was here for two years before (I'm not sure when). I closed the account, and everything was removed. However, I came back in 2021 and am still somewhat active here.

About two and a half years (2.59 years).

I went back to the author hub and compiled the dates from 25 authors. If they posted in the last five years I considered them active. If they had a gap of 5 years or more, I considered them to have two "careers."

The longest "career" was 10.7 years (and counting) and the shortest was 0 years (someone posted three stories on one day and never published again). Three authors had two careers because their work spanned a gap of more than five years.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've been fairly steady state since 2015, and at last count was up around 1.3m - 1.4m words. That works out, roughly, at 10k a month, 2500 a week. That's what gets published, which these days is not everything.

 

[lovecraft68]

About two and a half years (2.59 years).

I went back to the author hub and compiled the dates from 25 authors. If they posted in the last five years I considered them active. If they had a gap of 5 years or more, I considered them to have two "careers."

The longest "career" was 10.7 years (and counting) and the shortest was 0 years (someone posted three stories on one day and never published again). Three authors had two careers because their work spanned a gap of more than five years.

Not sure where you're getting 10.7 as the longest. Myself, Silk, Heyall, @SimonDoom and EB66 right off the top of my head have exceeded that, and I think Melissa as well and Reject reality, those are just folks who are here on a regular basis, there's many other non AH authors who have done it as well.

 

[TheRedLantern]

I went back to the author hub and compiled the dates from 25 authors.

How did you select the list of authors you looked at? If it was random then you can assume it's somewhat representative of the whole population.

I realized with the thread about the Pixiehoff user that we can't get data about users who delete their accounts without someone like Manu or Laurel's help.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

We're not going to get a reliable average by spotchecking a couple of hundred long timers when we know there are tens of thousands of one shot and goners and who knows how many are no longer here for whatever reason.