Mature stories advice

[fsqueeze]

Hey!

I've got what probably ought to be a mature story that's about 3/4 done. Hoping some you might have some words of wisdom or recommendations.

I could post it in EC, but my last experience there left me thinking the EC category doesn't have very many readers--especially compared to I/T. Is mature any better than EC? What's the audience like?

Thanks!

FS

 

[lovecraft68]

Mature is much bigger than EC. The crowd is usually pretty friendly too, especially if its an older woman with a younger man story. They're receptive to both stroke and a good romance as long as the age gap is there.

 

[fsqueeze]

Mature is much bigger than EC. The crowd is usually pretty friendly too, especially if its an older woman with a younger man story. They're receptive to both stroke and a good romance as long as the age gap is there.

What is the minimum expected age gap?

FS

 

[RejectReality]

Ten years is about the minimum to scratch the itch of the May/Dec readership. Fifteen is closer to the sweet spot.

 

[lovecraft68]

What is the minimum expected age gap?

FS

I'd say enough that it could be a parent...as in a milf for the young man or a 'daddy type' if the girl is young. I've found that works best.

 

[SimonDoom]

I've wondered this, too. I'm working on a story with a man in his mid-20s and a woman in her early 50s. She's about a generation older than he is. Would that be best placed in mature, as opposed to erotic coupling? It may have some elements of BDSM and exhibitionism, but those elements will probably be fairly light -- nothing too intense or fetishy. Is mature the right category?

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've wondered this, too. I'm working on a story with a man in his mid-20s and a woman in her early 50s. She's about a generation older than he is. Would that be best placed in mature, as opposed to erotic coupling? It may have some elements of BDSM and exhibitionism, but those elements will probably be fairly light -- nothing too intense or fetishy. Is mature the right category?

I'd put it in Mature.

I've the other flip - young woman with a man older enough to be her father, just enough to touch on the daddy thing (which some women have told me is definitely a thing, if handled with subtlety - not always a Lit strongpoint, subtlety), but more for the older, worldy-wise male. I've received comments from older guys thanking me for the dreamy nostalgia and wish fulfilment, from women thanking me for the gentleness and respect. Oh, they weren't wham bang thank you ma'am stories....

 

[lovecraft68]

I did two with a romantic angle. One a young man down on his luck and an older women who befriends him. Then I did the reverse, a young waitress grows close to an older widower.

Both stories are romance, but have a depressing back story for each character.

They rank #7 and #23 all time in mature with a combined 12k or so votes.

 

[LeandraNyx]

Deleted

 

[RejectReality]

The category has a large readership. An average performance for me for a story is over 600 votes in the first couple of weeks, and hitting 1000 in the first 24 hours doesn't even surprise me any more.

Shocked the hell out of me the first time it happened.

That's for strokers with very little substance. Set-up and screw, which is what this pen name is known for.

 

[NotWise]

The category has a large readership. An average performance for me for a story is over 600 votes in the first couple of weeks, and hitting 1000 in the first 24 hours doesn't even surprise me any more.

Do you mean votes, or views? 1000 votes in 24 hours is pretty unusual.

 

[RejectReality]

Do you mean votes, or views? 1000 votes in 24 hours is pretty unusual.

Votes. I've had something along the lines of 7 or 8 Mature stories hit 1k in 24 hours. For views, I've broken 100k in 24 hours before. Not quite as many times as 1000 votes, but it's close, and the same stories.

Age difference stories in Mature can do almost as well as the lesser genres of incest like cousins.

 

[NotWise]

Votes. I've had something along the lines of 7 or 8 Mature stories hit 1k in 24 hours. For views, I've broken 100k in 24 hours before. Not quite as many times as 1000 votes, but it's close, and the same stories

Amazing. I've only posted in four categories but I have no stories in any category even close to 1000 votes. Even my third place Valentines Day story is under 600.

For reason's I don't understand, the site has removed two months worth of votes from that story in the last few days. No change in score though.

 

[RejectReality]

The first time you post in one of the high traffic categories like Incest, Mature, or Loving Wives, the numbers knock you out of your seat.

Hell, I was shocked when I posted my first story in Romance, because everything prior to that had been in Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Humor & Satire, Non Human, and Erotic Horror. The numbers were triple what I was used to.

Never would have discovered the Mature category if Laurel hadn't changed my chosen category of EC to Mature on "Recycled". I thought it would be a death knell for the story, and then the votes were going up by 5 or 10 as fast as I could click the refresh button on my browser.

 

[sr71plt]

Amazing. I've only posted in four categories but I have no stories in any category even close to 1000 votes. Even my third place Valentines Day story is under 600.

Ditto: Over 11 years I've posted 964 stories in 27 categories and none of them has 1,000 votes. The highest vote count in 673. I like to think that I write to niches here rather than to the lowest common denominator of Literotica readers. When I think of 1,000 votes in 24 hours, I'm thinking of a manual vote generator program.

 

[SimonDoom]

Votes. I've had something along the lines of 7 or 8 Mature stories hit 1k in 24 hours. For views, I've broken 100k in 24 hours before. Not quite as many times as 1000 votes, but it's close, and the same stories.

Age difference stories in Mature can do almost as well as the lesser genres of incest like cousins.

That IS remarkable. That's better than any stories have done in the incest category in the last two months, better, in fact, than any stories published on this whole site have done in that period. I had no idea that was such a popular category. That's good to know.

 

[NotWise]

The first time you post in one of the high traffic categories like Incest, Mature, or Loving Wives, the numbers knock you out of your seat.

They haven't done that for me yet. I've posted to EC, I/T, Romance and Sci-Fi/Fantasy. EC and I/T are (in term number of posts) the top two categories. As far as I know, the site provides no metric for the number of views in a category, just the number of posts.

In term of posts/day Mature is one of the smallest active categories. If you can get a reader response there that exceeds EC or I/T, which have ~three times as many posts, and continue to do so, then maybe we should all put our stories there.

She's not 18, she's 38. And she knows what she's doing!

 

[sr71plt]

The first time you post in one of the high traffic categories like Incest, Mature, or Loving Wives, the numbers knock you out of your seat.

I've posted to all of those. The volume numbers didn't knock me off of my feet. But then I don't spend any time helping the numbers along.

I've seen contest stories (including the FAWC stories discussed recently, which supposedly were posted blind--author not identified) that were something like twenty Lit. pages long and that racked up 500 votes in four hours with ratings near the ceiling. Really? 500 impressed speed readers/scanners? I wasn't born tomorrow.

 

[RejectReality]

For traffic ranking, I'm going by my own numbers, perusing the toplists, and a few years of tracking the contests, which gave me a daily view for a couple weeks at a time of virtually every category.

Granted, the contest numbers are somewhat inflated because they get top billing on the New Stories list. If I'm remembering right, all of my top fast-climbers were also contest entries, so that's part of the equation.

Still, my most recent in Mature is over 900 votes, and that came out on a Sunday, which has never been anything but garbage for me. The carry-over on Monday nearly equalled the Sunday votes. Probably because of the low number of stories per day. It was still featured on the category hub at the top come Monday.

If it would have come out on Thursday night/Friday morning and been in a contest, I'd guess it would be somewhere around 1200 to 1500 votes and probably 50k higher in views.

 

[sr71plt]

I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, but I don't believe that happens naturally, and so I don't believe anyone not getting those "fabulous" numbers should feel particularly deprived.

 

[NotWise]

I'm going to put a mark in my spreadsheet to see if his thread causes an increase in the number of posts to Mature.

I don't have any age difference stories in mind, but if I did then maybe I'd throw my hat in that ring.

Wait, maybe not. I got this same sort of hype for Sci-Fi before I posted "The Third Ring" and then there was the fiasco of posting "Oscar's Place" to EH.

 

[RejectReality]

I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, but I don't believe that happens naturally, and so I don't believe anyone not getting those "fabulous" numbers should feel particularly deprived.

That last one was actually a reply to NotWise. I should really get back into the habit of quoting...

The stories I write in this name are short, meaningless stroke. They're fun. Blowing off steam, and somewhere to put ideas that were never going to turn into something more.

Lowest common denominator. I've got no problem with that, because I enjoy writing them. That's a huge part of the equation as well.

None of the scores on those fast-climbers are anything stellar, either. They typically fall in around the 4.6 range or lower. Several of them are constantly flirting with losing their Hs.

I'd have to dig through contest tracks, but I'm fairly certain that most of those 1000 in 24 hour stories lost hundreds of votes in sweeps and ended up dropping below the 1k bar. They went back over it after a while, ( after the contest was over ) but the Lit Hoover indeed decided chunks of the initial burst were questionable. Most of them must have been low scores, because my score always went up, if I'm remembering correctly.

All that aside, there's not much basis to argue against the fact that Mature is near the top in traffic for the categories, has a better than average vote to view ratio, and a friendly readership that isn't prone to nasty commentary.

 

[uksnowy]

Many of my stories of late have wide differences in ages and feature older women.

I couldn't give a toss for numbers, reactions, votes and all that stuff.

I write for me, just like to see it on the screen and freely available.

If you can make any sense of the crackpot categories in here, well done...and good luck

 

[KenNicottii]

Mature is much bigger than EC.

Really? Don't the numbers by the categories on the Story Index show the total stories that have been submitted, I wondered? Erotic Couplings has 50K stories and Mature has almost 11K, about a 5:1 ratio of EC to Mature.

Perhaps when you say much bigger, you're talking about readership? Ah, yes, the vote counts tells a different story: the Top 10 for EC totals just under 10K votes and the Top 10 for Mature is more than twice as much at 22K. Now the Mature fans may be voting at a higher percentage than the EC fans; but even so, the voting stats clearly support the 'Mature is much bigger' claim - I never noticed that before.

(And your having a story in the Mature All-Time Top 5 position is a worthy accomplishment, especially for a non-chapter story.)

 

[SimonDoom]

Really? Don't the numbers by the categories on the Story Index show the total stories that have been submitted, I wondered? Erotic Couplings has 50K stories and Mature has almost 11K, about a 5:1 ratio of EC to Mature.

Perhaps when you say much bigger, you're talking about readership? Ah, yes, the vote counts tells a different story: the Top 10 for EC totals just under 10K votes and the Top 10 for Mature is more than twice as much at 22K. Now the Mature fans may be voting at a higher percentage than the EC fans; but even so, the voting stats clearly support the 'Mature is much bigger' claim - I never noticed that before.

(And your having a story in the Mature All-Time Top 5 position is a worthy accomplishment, especially for a non-chapter story.)

I think he's referring to the number of views/votes that stories get in these categories.

On that subject, it would be useful if this site enhanced its search/analytics features so one could answer questions like these more precisely: what's the mean view count for each category? Mean vote count?