Link Policy Complaints

[AdmiralSquish]

So, I just sent this via the Literotica feedback form, but I figured it might be smart to post it here, as well, in the hopes that it might get some more attention from fellow authors and urge the site to actually act.

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Hi there, I write erotica and post it to your site. You have easily the largest audience of all the sites I post on, and I enjoy the feedback I get from your users.

That being said, using your site, as a writer, is infuriating. You depend on people who write erotica to post their stuff to your site, but it honestly feels like you're actively fighting any attempt to self-promote or benefit in any tangible way from posting here. You explicitly forbid posting links in the stories themselves, which seems excessive, but workable, except your moderators don't just reject stories with links, they reject stories that so much as mention the existence of patreon, or even simply urge readers to check my author page. Hell, I had a story rejected because, when I tried to explain that a story was going on hold without mentioning patreon, despite it being patreon's policy changes that motivated the hold, it "seemed like a 'tell-me-more' tease", which, I suppose, might have motivated somebody to look at my author page where they might, conceivably, notice the link to my patreon. I had to resort to posting stories with a dry, purely-informative header, and then waiting and watching my feed to see when a story finally went live so I could actually post my usual, more friendly header, with the appropriate links, as a comment. Now, I can't even do THAT, because you've made it so comments now need to be approved by a moderator. By the time the comment gets approved, it'll be too late, all my followers who went to read it when the notification first appeared, and all the users who thought to check it out because it's new, will have already read it and will have no reason to go back and look at the comments.

For comparison, I have 1000 followers on Literotica, and 600 on Hentai Foundry, which allows the posting of links in the story text. But when I polled my patreon patrons as to how they encountered my work and then came to my patreon, about a fifth of them cited literotica, compared to more than half from HF. By my math, I get one patron per 33 followers on HF, and one patron per 208 followers here. That’s SIX TIMES worse. If literotica had the same rate of followers-to-patrons as HF, the number of patrons from literotica alone would equal my entire current patron count. If they pledged the same amount on average as the rest of my patrons, their pledges alone would equal my current total pledges.

I started writing erotica because it was fun. If I weren’t getting paid for it at all, I would probably still write it. But I’d write much, much less of it, and I’d be worse at it. The only reason I CAN write as much as I do is because of fans who enjoy what I do and choose to support me in continuing to do it. Right now, patreon is my only source of income. I don’t make much money, I don’t even make enough money to really live off of, but it’s better than nothing, and I’ve somehow been able to scrape by, thanks to my fans. So, this isn’t some idle, entitled complaint about how I should be making more money because I want a new computer or a new game and I ‘deserve’ it, your policies are making it harder and harder for me to actually SURVIVE. I don’t know if these policies are intentional, some strange attempt to keep the site ‘amateur’ or something, or if the damage they do is accidental, but allow me to be clear; They are hurting the writers you depend on, and they are hurting YOU. I myself have probably a dozen stories that I haven’t posted here, simply because the submission process is so troublesome and it’s ultimately not worth dealing with if it doesn’t actually produce tangible results at the end. I’ve seriously considered just leaving your site entirely several times, but the sheer scope of the audience available here keeps me here, thinking ‘if I could just figure out a way to reach out to them directly...’. But I if I came close to leaving, consider how many others actually have left, without telling you about it. Consider how many stories other authors have neglected to post because it simply wasn’t worth it for them. Make no mistake, your policies have cost you users, both writers fed up with them and readers with no reason to return because their favorite authors have all left.

If you want to help your writers, instead of fighting them, all you have to do is remove the ‘no links’ rule from your guidelines. Better yet, you could easily get a bot to look over incoming stories for excessive grammar/spelling mistakes, add a ‘report story’ button readers can use to report stories with content that breaks the rules, and, in the process, free up your mods to deal with actually problematic stories instead of stretching them thin looking over every new story to the point that problematic ones slip through anyways.

I sincerely hope you actually read all of that, instead of just skipping to the end, and I hope my words show you a side to this you hadn’t considered before, that maybe you’re simply unaware of the harm your policies have caused and that this plea inspires some action.

 

[AfterDusk]

I can’t speak for other writers or readers but I personally find the idea of Patreon tacky. If you want to get paid for your work then publish it as a book and entice people that way instead of begging for patrons to fund your future writing attempts.

I don’t think that Lit’s policy of posting links is bad—you know people would abuse it if it were allowed. If someone finds your writing compelling enough that they want to pay you to do more then I would believe they’d check out your author bio, where you could mention said Patreon page. But constantly pandering for money with each free story you publish is, to me, the same as harassing someone on the sidewalk.

 

[jaF0]

If you're talking about using this site to promote another ......

Go Fish.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't publish anywhere else, or use Patreon, but I suspect the OP is right. I think this site's policy on linking probably is short-sighted, and it would do well to reconsider its model and do more to enable authors to use it as a platform for advertising their stories, here or elsewhere. It probably would enhance rather than diminish site traffic.

Traffic is the key for Literotica, since it doesn't charge anything. It already has the highest traffic and biggest story repository, and the way to leverage its strengths for the future is to make things as easy for authors and readers as possible, with as few restrictions as possible.

 

[jaF0]

Links would drive traffic away.

 

[KeithD]

I publish to the market place for money and publish here for a high volume of readership. I have no trouble with Literotica being compartmentalized to the extent it is and for my publishers to worry about how to maximize profit in the marketplace without relying on Literotica for more publicity than it already provides to authors (which is considerable). My regular readers know that if they want to read something close to when I've written it, they can buy it and if they want to wait for it, quite a bit of it will eventually be made available to them for free. I don't use Literotica as a come-on to buy elsewhere.

 

[AdmiralSquish]

My usual header for stories consists of a more detailed description of what goes on than the little blurb allows, maybe some contextually-relevant info about the writing process for this particular chapter, followed by a very simple "If you like what you read, check out my Patreon for early access to new stories! Much appreciated, and enjoy!" All in all, three, maybe four short sentences. I would hardly consider it obtrusive, or tacky begging.

My author page DOES mention my patreon page, and has for quite some time, and yet, the numbers above are rather indicative of how effective that advertising strategy is.

As to people abusing links, they already have mods checking each story getting submitted, how much more work would it be to check where a link's going? And I don't see what's wrong with including a link to, say, a page where you could buy this story below as a book.

Patreon is NOT a gofundme for creative types kinda thing, people just pledge a certain amount, either per post the author puts out, or per month, and get rewards based on what they pledge.
And if an author did say 'I won't continue until I get 200$ in pledges' or whatever, the reader's under no obligation to pledge anything. There's no gun to their head, they decide if the pledge is worth the rewards on their own.

I have a couple books on the marketplace, but I've yet to be able to get much traction, as I don't have a lot of stories that don't tread on topics the marketplace doesn't like and also are wholly original properties. Most of my writing has been done based on patron requests or commissions, and a lot of those are based on games and shows and the like.

Writing for 'Publicity' is pretty much like working for 'Exposure', and neither one pays my bills. The problem is literotica's policies make it almost impossible, or at least extremely inefficient, to turn that 'publicity' into any sort of actual, tangible return.

 

[TxRad]

Just for your information, there is one person going through all the stories here. That would be Laurel, one of the site owners. She had done it by herself since day one. With the volume here, do you think she has time to check links? I don't think so.

 

[Hypoxia]

Who expects Laurel to let writers directly promote LIT's competitors?

Be indirect. Start a blog. Link to it from your author's profile. In the blog, link to your marketplace stories. Watch the euros and pesos flood in.

 

[Manu]

Thank you for the feedback on this. We read all of these threads even if we don't reply to all of them.

As I've mentioned before, we are aware that Patreon and similar services are increasingly important to authors and other artists online. Patreon links will be native to the next Lit update for the Profile/Author Page. We are also considering the possibility of including them on the story page, if we can do so in a way that won't annoy readers. We have no plan to allow external links in the text of stories at this time (there are too many dangers), but hopefully we can find a good way to include an author's official Patreon (or Amazon, etc.) link into various pages where their works are published on the site.

As far as a time frame, we are not making changes to the old Lit templates since the new templates are slowly being rolled out (see the Tags Portal and Search). We had hoped to release more of the new templates before the end of 2018, but we had to re-allocate resources to needed work on the Control Panel several months ago.

We are constantly trying to find a balance between what authors want and what readers want. We get feedback - often conflicting - from both sides. We long ago learned that it's impossible to make everyone happy all of the time, but we are doing our best to try to find that balance. Your feedback (and the other replies on this thread) help us to better understand the issue, so we appreciate it, even if we can't do everything you suggest (at least not right away).

Thank you again and please feel free to contact us anytime!

 

[SimonDoom]

Thank you for the feedback on this. We read all of these threads even if we don't reply to all of them.

As I've mentioned before, we are aware that Patreon and similar services are increasingly important to authors and other artists online. Patreon links will be native to the next Lit update for the Profile/Author Page. We are also considering the possibility of including them on the story page, if we can do so in a way that won't annoy readers. We have no plan to allow external links in the text of stories at this time (there are too many dangers), but hopefully we can find a good way to include an author's official Patreon (or Amazon, etc.) link into various pages where their works are published on the site.

As far as a time frame, we are not making changes to the old Lit templates since the new templates are slowly being rolled out (see the Tags Portal and Search). We had hoped to release more of the new templates before the end of 2018, but we had to re-allocate resources to needed work on the Control Panel several months ago.

We are constantly trying to find a balance between what authors want and what readers want. We get feedback - often conflicting - from both sides. We long ago learned that it's impossible to make everyone happy all of the time, but we are doing our best to try to find that balance. Your feedback (and the other replies on this thread) help us to better understand the issue, so we appreciate it, even if we can't do everything you suggest (at least not right away).

Thank you again and please feel free to contact us anytime!

Thank you for this response. It's good to know that you and Laurel are reading these threads.

I have always maintained that the needs of readers must come first, authors second, because there are far more readers and traffic is the key to the success of the site.

Have you ever considered adding the capability for authors to create blogs on this site? It seems like that would add value for both authors and readers, allow authors to update readers on the status of stories, and enhance the ability of authors to brand themselves without having to go elsewhere.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I have always maintained that the needs of readers must come first, authors second, because there are far more readers and traffic is the key to the success of the site.

But without content there is no traffic.

You've got to eat the sausage from both ends, I reckon, for any site to work ideally. It's a balancing act, for sure. But content is the key to survival of the site, surely?

 

[jaF0]

Oh goodie, The Chicken and The Egg again.

 

[SimonDoom]

But without content there is no traffic.

You've got to eat the sausage from both ends, I reckon, for any site to work ideally. It's a balancing act, for sure. But content is the key to survival of the site, surely?

Yes. But the content will come because this is the site with the most readers, and it's free and fairly easy to use.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Yes. But the content will come because this is the site with the most readers, and it's free and fairly easy to use.

There is that, but I'm not sure we should be fixing things to the detriment of writers - but then, you're not saying that, either. It has to be a juggle. The features noted in Manu's post sound good, though, and let's cross fingers for sooner rather than later .

 

[jaF0]

. The features noted in Manu's post sound good, though, and let's cross fingers for sooner rather than later .

Like ..... the forum profiles?

 

[ChloeTzang]

....As I've mentioned before, we are aware that Patreon and similar services are increasingly important to authors and other artists online. Patreon links will be native to the next Lit update for the Profile/Author Page. We are also considering the possibility of including them on the story page, if we can do so in a way that won't annoy readers. We have no plan to allow external links in the text of stories at this time (there are too many dangers), but hopefully we can find a good way to include an author's official Patreon (or Amazon, etc.) link into various pages where their works are published on the site.......

.....We are constantly trying to find a balance between what authors want and what readers want. We get feedback - often conflicting - from both sides. We long ago learned that it's impossible to make everyone happy all of the time, but we are doing our best to try to find that balance. Your feedback (and the other replies on this thread) help us to better understand the issue, so we appreciate it, even if we can't do everything you suggest (at least not right away).

Thank you again and please feel free to contact us anytime!

Thank you, Manu. It's great that you took the time to respond and articulate that, and yes, you can't keep everyone happy all the time, it's a balance. I'm going to suggest a couple of things here:

(1) Better integration between Author information and stories - I like how Wattpad has it, with the author profile and links to author stories all together - and you can broadcast notifications to your followers to let them know when you have new stories up. That's a win-win for Literotica (more views), readers (they know when a favorite author has posted a new story) and authors (we can target our followers).

(2) Links from an"Author Page" and from stories (maybe a predefined box at the end of each story submission) to a limited # of book selling sites such as Amazon. Again, something Wattpad allows. It should be possible to allow only mainstream bookselling sites and filter out anything else. And you know what, there could be a referral income stream there for literotica, couldn't there? That'd be a win-win as well.

Anyhow, my two cents worth.

 

[Bramblethorn]

If you want to help your writers, instead of fighting them, all you have to do is remove the ‘no links’ rule from your guidelines. Better yet, you could easily get a bot to look over incoming stories for excessive grammar/spelling mistakes,

I would question "easily". It's hard enough to program a bot to handle something like formal non-fiction writing where a single ruleset applies. On a site where authors are writing in US, British, Australian, Indian, Canadian, New Zealand, and probably other varieties of English, and writing characters who've never heard of Strunk and White, it becomes a massive challenge.

add a ‘report story’ button readers can use to report stories with content that breaks the rules

This already exists. It appears at the bottom of every story page. I do think it could afford to be more prominent, but it's there. This is what you're looking for:

Happy to see Manu's update about links to book sites etc. and I will certainly be taking advantage of that once it goes through.

I can’t speak for other writers or readers but I personally find the idea of Patreon tacky. If you want to get paid for your work then publish it as a book and entice people that way instead of begging for patrons to fund your future writing attempts.

I don't get why Patreon is any more "begging" than marketing a book you've already written, or selling subscriptions to a newspaper?

One of the biggest challenges for an author trying to get by on their writing is that the income is lumpy and uncertain. It's very hard to plan for the future when your income stream looks like "nothing for the next six months while I finish writing this book, then some amount that depends entirely on how many people decide to buy my book" - and try getting a loan or a rental when you can't show a regular source of income.

Patreon is one model that gives creatives a bit more financial stability. They know roughly how much is coming in from month to month, they can budget on that. (Except for that time when Patreon fucked up the payment structure and then had to roll it back...)

It's not for everybody, but it's a good solution for some folk.

 

[AfterDusk]

I don't get why Patreon is any more "begging" than marketing a book you've already written, or selling subscriptions to a newspaper?

One of the biggest challenges for an author trying to get by on their writing is that the income is lumpy and uncertain. It's very hard to plan for the future when your income stream looks like "nothing for the next six months while I finish writing this book, then some amount that depends entirely on how many people decide to buy my book" - and try getting a loan or a rental when you can't show a regular source of income.

Patreon is one model that gives creatives a bit more financial stability. They know roughly how much is coming in from month to month, they can budget on that. (Except for that time when Patreon fucked up the payment structure and then had to roll it back...)

It's not for everybody, but it's a good solution for some folk.

Oh trust me, I know this just as well as everyone else. My issue with patreon is that you are essentially asking people to support your life choices on the promise of giving them something in return--would you go to a grocery story and pay for a loaf of bread that they promise would be baked the following week?

When you are offering up a finished product to sell, it is an even trade--my money, your product. No waiting, no promises, no possibility of a lack of follow through.

By the time the comment gets approved, it'll be too late, all my followers who went to read it when the notification first appeared, and all the users who thought to check it out because it's new, will have already read it and will have no reason to go back and look at the comments.

Bullshit. Comments don't take weeks for approval, I've never had one take more than a day at the very most--you aren't going to get a majority of your reads in the first 24 hours of a story being posted, you will get your reads from people enjoying it and voting accordingly, which will keep it high in the stats.

For comparison, I have 1000 followers on Literotica, and 600 on Hentai Foundry, which allows the posting of links in the story text. But when I polled my patreon patrons as to how they encountered my work and then came to my patreon, about a fifth of them cited literotica, compared to more than half from HF. By my math, I get one patron per 33 followers on HF, and one patron per 208 followers here. That’s SIX TIMES worse. If literotica had the same rate of followers-to-patrons as HF, the number of patrons from literotica alone would equal my entire current patron count. If they pledged the same amount on average as the rest of my patrons, their pledges alone would equal my current total pledges.

How can you really compare the two? From my understanding, HF is a visual art website that dabbles in other things. If there are those who follow you on HF, then it seems that they have less options for good erotica written simply because there is less of it on the website.

Also, "six times worse"? I'm sorry if this comes off as bitchy, but frankly I think you should be happy to have anyone from Lit (a free porn website, mind you) willing to pay money to you to "support" you. The way you are wording it makes it sound as if you are resentful that the thousands of readers on Lit aren't throwing money at your door.

Right now, patreon is my only source of income. I don’t make much money, I don’t even make enough money to really live off of, but it’s better than nothing, and I’ve somehow been able to scrape by, thanks to my fans. So, this isn’t some idle, entitled complaint about how I should be making more money because I want a new computer or a new game and I ‘deserve’ it, your policies are making it harder and harder for me to actually SURVIVE.

This isn't Lit's problem, this is your problem, you do realize this, right? Your life choices led you to choose this. Yes, it is some idle, entitled complaint about how you should be making more money--that is the basis of this entire post. If you are having financial issue the logical choice would be to, oh, I don't know, get a part time job or something...

And I can judge you for this--I work two jobs in addition to whatever personal life I manage scrape out, and I often spend 3-4 hours a day writing.

I’ve seriously considered just leaving your site entirely several times, but the sheer scope of the audience available here keeps me here, thinking ‘if I could just figure out a way to reach out to them directly...’.

Look, I'm not trying to be a cunt. I *get* it. As a writer (a trained writer who has been attempting to make a go of it for over a decade unsuccessfully) I understand that you want nothing more than to get paid for your work. I think, however, that you should have taken a step back and objectively looked at this situation before going on a rant about it. There's an adage, you get more flies with honey than you do with shit. If you want people to side with you, if you want more people to support you, I think you need to go about it a different way.

Take, for example, your bio--five lines and two of them are links. You are missing out on a huge opportunity to market yourself here. There are others (who also use patreon) that update their bio on a semi regular basis with information pertaining to the posting of chapters to reach their readers.

Your postings on Lit are also erratic--readers don't like waiting months in between chapters (I had one yell at me for waiting 6 weeks). If you want more consistent views, I'd say a month at most. As it stands now, readers on Lit probably won't feel like supporting you is worth their effort--they want it all and they want it right now. People are fickle, the idea of paying for something they'll get in four+ months isn't going to fly.

 

[blozo]

I'd love to make a few dollars at this, but, the way the internet works, porn is free.
What I write is porn. I know some of you write actual literature, I couldn't if I tried.
As soon as I start asking for money, someone will simply copy paste my work and post it up for free somewhere.
And no one will care.
If I go into a snit about it and stop writing, someone who writes better than I do anyway will be along to fill the void in about a minute.
While I feel for the OP and wish him the best, if I were depending on my writing for food, I wouldn't be writing erotica.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Sigh. Premature enthusiasm. Next time, I promise I will pay closer attention to dates.

 

[Hypoxia]

Like ..... the forum profiles?

Haha, guess what, they've been fixed!

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1494482

AND the fix works, oh ye of little faith .

I go from my CP to edit my forum profile and it takes me to the usual Edit Password page. So, not fixed. Your link goes to Manu citing changes to Tags and Search pages, not profiles. What you been smoking, EB? No paraquat, I hope. You gonna share it?

 

[RejectReality]

Signatures have been working the whole time. I update mine every time I release a new story.

The disconnect between the story-side profile and forum profile is still there, and the ability to edit your profile from the forum is still disabled.

My guess from reading about the issue when it happened is that the new infrastructure doesn't play well with this old version of the forum software. It caused a cascade of problems when attempting to pull the profile data from the story-side and display it here, or edit your profile from here. That's why the ability to edit it from the forum was disabled, and the existing profile information at the time was locked.

I honestly wouldn't expect the forum profile to be fixed until such time as the forum is updated, and if it was me, that would be WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY at the bottom of the priority list.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I go from my CP to edit my forum profile and it takes me to the usual Edit Password page. So, not fixed. Your link goes to Manu citing changes to Tags and Search pages, not profiles. What you been smoking, EB? No paraquat, I hope. You gonna share it?

Quite tight, it's still busted, head retracted. I read some dates wrong - I blame Sunday afternoon.

Carry on .

 

[Bramblethorn]

Oh trust me, I know this just as well as everyone else. My issue with patreon is that you are essentially asking people to support your life choices on the promise of giving them something in return--would you go to a grocery story and pay for a loaf of bread that they promise would be baked the following week?

Not bread specifically, but this is a pretty common way to buy stuff, though?

Back when I was reading newspapers and magazines in print form, I usually paid for them up front - $X for their promise to deliver me a year's worth of product. More recently, I paid up front for a year's subscription to an adult website, on the promise that they were going to continue making videos. I've also supported crowd-funded books, board games, computer games, art, and music DVDs that required paying up front and trusting them to deliver something worth what I paid them.

In that time I've been burnt once, by a company who bit off more than they could chew and folded before delivering a usable product. I think I lost $30 on that, which has been eclipsed by the backer discounts on the other products, and by getting fun stuff that would never have been made without pledges up-front to confirm the existence of a market.

Also, baking is a very different game to writing. Bakers are selling a staple that takes less than a day to make; they have a pretty good idea how much they're going to sell each day, and they don't have to go months in between sales.

Also, Patreon isn't purely pay-in-advance. Different creators may have different reward structures, but the ones I've subscribed to have had subscriber-only material available as soon as my first payment processed.

When you are offering up a finished product to sell, it is an even trade--my money, your product. No waiting, no promises, no possibility of a lack of follow through.

That's a perfectly good transaction model, but it doesn't mean other models are bad and wrong. If a creator values stability and/or up-front payment, and they're willing to give me something nice in return for that, that's also a perfectly good transaction model and nothing for anybody to be ashamed of.