New Writer -- Story Help

[wigglebiscuit]

Hi folks,

I'm considering posting a story here for the first time, and I have several questions.

First, the idea is to write a Choose Your Own Path style story about a sexually naive girl in her freshman year of university, and the various misadventures she finds herself in.

Question One:
The requirements state that 750 words is the minimum per story. Does that apply to multi-part stories? I might have trouble meeting that requirement, as from time to time I will make a relatively short story so that I can allow for a greater degree of control for the readers.

Question Two:
How would you handle the votes? I notice that there is a comment thread attached to posted stories. Should I use that? Or could I link in my stories to a thread on literotica where votes are cast and tallied?

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I appreciate it!

 

[NotWise]

Welcome!

Question One: I can't say for sure, but I suspect the 750-word limit applies to chapters as well as stand-alone stories. 750 words is actually a *very* short text (less than one typed page, depending on format) and short texts like that seem to be unpopular here.

Question Two: I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "handle the votes." When you log into your account on Lit you can click on your user name and that will take you to your page on Members.Literotica.com. The left side of the window is a sidebar that includes a link titled "Submissions." If you follow that link it will activate a "View" link just below "Submissions." If you submitted stories then that link takes you to a page that gives you (among other things) the score, the number of votes and the number of views for the story. You cannot edit the votes but you can (in fact, are responsible for) moderating the comments.

 

[PennLady]

Hi folks,

I'm considering posting a story here for the first time, and I have several questions.

First, the idea is to write a Choose Your Own Path style story about a sexually naive girl in her freshman year of university, and the various misadventures she finds herself in.

Welcome and good luck

I'm not sure how this will work, but you can give it a try. For one thing, second-person stories (i.e, "you do this...") are not the most popular. From what I've read in the forums, people do not like to be told what they are doing, feeling, etc. I don't know how many men, for example, will want to be put in the place of a sexually naive girl. Personally, I don't read "you" stories for these reasons -- I do not necessarily want to be in the situation the author describes, and so I click off when I see that's what it is.

Second, this sounds like a lot of work, in that you'd have to write at least two options for each choice, right? I'm honestly not sure how that would work in terms of links -- I think you'd have to work that out with Laurel, who vets and posts the stories, by sending her a private message.

Question One:
The requirements state that 750 words is the minimum per story. Does that apply to multi-part stories? I might have trouble meeting that requirement, as from time to time I will make a relatively short story so that I can allow for a greater degree of control for the readers.

750 words is the minimum for a submission, whether it's a stand-alone story or one part of a serial story. You might be surprised by how quickly the words add up, and find that reaching 750 words is no problem. Or, you could put a couple of pieces in one submission, I suppose.

Question Two:
How would you handle the votes? I notice that there is a comment thread attached to posted stories. Should I use that? Or could I link in my stories to a thread on literotica where votes are cast and tallied?

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I appreciate it!

I could be wrong, but there are only two ways to "handle" votes. You allow them or you don't. There is no thread where votes are tallied up. Same with comments -- you can allow them, or not, or allow them but not allow anonymous comments. The problem with the last option is that many people do not wish to post under a username, for various reasons, and if they cannot comment anonymously, they won't comment at all.

You could go to Story Feedback after your story(ies) is posted and provide a link and ask for feedback. Usually someone is willing to do that, often a few someones.

Links in stories are tricky. Again, someone may know better or more, but I believe the basic rule is that you can link to something on the Literotica site, such as another one of your stories, but you can't link off the site. In fact you need to be careful about using even made-up URLs; IIRC, people have had stories rejected for those.

I do wish you luck, but I'm not sure the type of story you're looking at doing would work on this site.

 

[Hypoxia]

Yes, 750 words is the hard minimum for a story. You can bypass that limit by posting as poetry but then virtually nobody will read it. LIT is not build for multi-path stories. I did something like that, all within one story, in Jenny Be Fair Ch. 02 where at various points I presented three optional actions -- but the further narrative continued undisturbed. The story was not well received.

No, you cannot link from your story to a forum thread, but you SHOULD provide a link to your story submissions page from your forum signature. If you've set VIEW SIGNATURES in your USER CP then you'll see the links in my .sig. You have the option to enable or disable voting and all or anonymous comments. I recommend that you enable everything at first and see how you feel about reader reactions. Have fun.

 

[wigglebiscuit]

PennLady,

Sorry for the confusion. The story would be presented in 3rd person, probably present tense. There would be no 'wasted' chapters, as I wouldn't write a chapter until the voting is complete, so to speak.

What I am picturing is I present a series of events, leading up to an important choice by the main character. At that point, I pause the action, and as an aside, present two options.

Readers are then welcome to casts votes in the comments section of the story page. After a reasonable amount of time (say, a week), I'll tally the votes and write the next scene.

Rinse and repeat.

Does that clarify things?

 

[NaokoSmith]

Hey, welcome to the board

That is a simpler version. You seem to have got most of the answers to your questions, but in case it helps:

Yes, 750 words is the minimum, so if you have a very short part-chapter, it will need to be submitted together with the next or previous chapter to make up the words.

Yes, you can link to Literotica webpages within your stories but not others. However, Literotica will automatically provide links to the other chapters if yours is a multi-part story. (There are ways of showing that it is a multi-part story, most important being that you mention this clearly in the Notes box when you submit your chapters so that Laurel sees it and gives each chapter the appropriate name.)

I think there ought to be ways in which we exploit the versatility of the internet to give readers more choice in how they follow what we write. I did myself start to write a multi-part story in which there were several different characters of different sexualities. I wanted to have a simple story line, but allow readers to choose if they wanted to skip sex scenes which weren't to their liking: e.g., they could skip hetero and only read lesbian and gay male. However I did struggle because of the 750 word rule. Sometimes I only needed a little linking part of the 'story' which I would have to post along with the sex scene, warning readers to just read that bit if they didn't fancy three gay werewolves in an alley (no, stop laughing! I seriously wrote that scene).

The main problem is how you get your readers to vote, and I think your best bet here is to publish both endings, then ask readers to vote/comment as to which they preferred. That would be fun for all.

Good luck! and don't forget to post a link to your story when you have started writing it. (Your signature is a good place to do this.)

 

[PennLady]

PennLady,

Sorry for the confusion. The story would be presented in 3rd person, probably present tense. There would be no 'wasted' chapters, as I wouldn't write a chapter until the voting is complete, so to speak.

What I am picturing is I present a series of events, leading up to an important choice by the main character. At that point, I pause the action, and as an aside, present two options.

Readers are then welcome to casts votes in the comments section of the story page. After a reasonable amount of time (say, a week), I'll tally the votes and write the next scene.

Rinse and repeat.

Does that clarify things?

It does clarify things, but I'm still not sure it will work, or will work on this site. If you have a story to tell, then do so. You will find as you go along that compared to your page views, few people vote and even fewer leave comments -- so I'm not sure you will get the response you're hoping for. And all of that will vary even further depending on what category you post in, and even what day of the week your story is posted in the "new" listing.

Speaking personally, if presented with this option, I can't say I'd care or vote. It's your story, again, so you should tell it. If it was a cliffhanger, I'd likely come back to see what happens, but if I had to choose? Well I don't know. What if the path I chose wasn't the winner? Then why would I care to keep reading?

It could be an interesting experiment, though.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Welcome.

I can't say that I would read past the first chapter...and I probably wouldn't vote. With Lit you only have the choice to vote a 1 star through 5 stars, none of which you will be able to see. What you see is an average of all votes.

Of course you could set up a website to get the votes sorted out, but Lit will delete any non-lit links from inside a story...so that option is out.

I also don't see too many readers willing to wait for the next chapter to be published as, even if you had it ready to go, approval times will vary between 72 hour up to a week. I know I wander away from stories where the next chapter isn't sitting there waiting for me to read...but I get bored easily. In fact I'm surprised I have lasted this long...


...oh shiny.

 

[Hypoxia]

The main problem is how you get your readers to vote, and I think your best bet here is to publish both endings, then ask readers to vote/comment as to which they preferred. That would be fun for all.

I have before and will continue to do something like this with two versions of the same story, told from different-gender POVs. These are incest stories, with one version being mom-son, the other dad-daughter. With my first such offerings, A TASTE OF INCEST: TURKEY (Mom) and (Dad), the (Mom) version got about twice as many views, votes, and comments, but the vote scores are nearly identical. I'm writing JUST A CUDDLE for a similar comparison.

No, do not wait for the votes to roll in before writing a sequel. You might have a very long wait.