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What's your all-time biggest hit and greatest miss on Literotica?

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EvelynEden

Really Experienced
Joined
Jul 19, 2015
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158
Hi Friends,

This is my first discussion thread on the Author's Hangout- so bear with me if I'm doing any of this wrong :eek:

I've only just discovered this actually, I've been on Literotica since I was 18 and over the years I've only popped in every now and then to check things out. I had to write this thread because when I was having a nosy through the Authors Hang out I saw an interesting thread---

"Your Literotica Successes & Failures in 2019"- by
RetroFan

It was a great little read with some awesome insights, but it did get me wondering, what everyone's all-time biggest hits and greatest misses were? What genre is your bread and butter and which one just does you no favours?

Again, I really hope this isn't stepping on anyone's toes, like I said this isn't an original question, and I'm not sure of the etiquette... but I was just too curious not to ask.

:) :) :)
 
For me, I think my greatest hit was probably Heatstroked published (under a different username) in the Novels and Novellas. But, I admit, I might be biased. Not only was it the one that scored the highest (and snuck a third prize in a contest), but it was the only thing I wrote with the assistance of my deceased wife. And the last submitted before her death.

My worst... well, pretty much any under this handle were terribad as I was not only writing against the clock trying to compete in the last couple of survivor competitions, but was doing so stoned to the gills on carbidopa/levadopa, ropinerol, lyrica, and I don't even remember what all. But, as I have to pick one, it was probably Breaking Taboos Believably under the How-to. ***shrug*** As I say, I was stoned to the gills on scrips and took a question asked right here in the AH and when my reply in thread got too long (a miracle that I recognized it without being told) went off and published my thoughts. And got pretty well bashed in the voting and comments.
 
My runaway success was my first Floating World story, which took off like a rocket (for me), and gave me a little niche in Mature with older man/younger women stories. It seemed to touch quite a few romantics.

My "I did not realise this was a good story" - until someone told me - is Songs of Seduction - Water. It's possibly the most perfect little thing I've written.

I don't really consider anything a "fail" - just under-appreciated :).
 
My highest-rated story is my light BDSM tale In The Hallway, which is currently rated 4.81. It placed second in the BDSM category of the 2016 story contest. It might also be my personal favorite.

By far my most-viewed story is Late Night On The Loveseat With Mom. I wrote it specifically with the intention of trying to capture the most views possible, and it succeeded beyond my expectations. It spent two months in 2018 as number 1 on the 12-month most-viewed toplist.

By far my worst-rated story is BTB Incorporated, a Loving Wives spoof that drew the ire of the BTB napalm-throwing crowd. It's sitting at 3.7 and will never crack 4, I'm sure. But I enjoyed writing it and don't consider it a failure.

My first story The Holiday Party probably is the one for which I have the least regard. I wrote it in one day to squeeze it into the 2016 winter contest deadline. It's shorter than most of my stories, and it's underdeveloped.
 
My all-time high? 92k views on one of my stories.

... which I wrote mostly drunk and on a dare. My one and only I/T number "More than Video Games." I wish some of my Sci-Fi/Fantasy stuff would pull such numbers.

My biggest failure? Not being able to increase my views in any significant way. My event stories get over 10k, but seeing more than 3k on any of my recent regular chapters is a miracle.
 
My biggest hit was a simple enough first time story where an 18-year-old guy loses his virginity to his sister's hot best friend. My forays into Romance were also successful, with my stories 'Take Cover From Tracy' which takes place around the events of Cyclone Tracy in 1974 and my sad story 'Learning to Love Louise' both rating well with positive feedback. A lesbian story called 'April Leads Julie Astray' which was set in 1963 and a cougar story called 'Mandy Makes a Man of Mark' which takes place in 1964 were also big hits.

There's different types of misses. My worst received story was an Incest/Taboo story series I published this year called 'Body Swap With Sister's Boyfriend', a fantasy/comedy where a nerd swaps bodies with his domineering twin sister's jock boyfriend. The readers hated it, they hated it with a passion. It got off to a bad start when I made the mistake of assuming that people who wanted to read stories about related people having sex wouldn't be offended by menstruation (the twins' bitchy mother has her period and is in a worse mood than usual) and found that the opposite was the true. Things only got worse from there, with vitriolic criticism of the story themes, pacing, characters, dialogue, writing style, sex scenes, comedy and many other things.

Yet I wouldn't consider 'Body Swap With Sister's Boyfriend' a total flop. It did get plenty of views and likes and did get plenty of attention. If it was a movie it might fit into the 'so bad it's good' category and become a cult film, like 'Freddy Got Fingered', 'Little Nicky' or 'Dirty Grandpa'.

Two stories I wrote that bombed were 'The Unsuitable Girlfriends', my Christmas story last year and 'The Coal Miner & the Conservative', an Erotic Couplings story I wrote in 2016. 'The Unsuitable Girlfriends' was set in South Australia and about three brothers who bring their three girlfriends back to the farm for Christmas, and the three girls - one a nutty vegan, one a spoiled rich girl and the other a fat girl with no class or manners - don't get along with the religious and conservative parents and sisters, but get along very well with each other. It was a funny story where the vegan girl brings her vegan dog along and it causes no end of trouble among many other shenanigans, but readers didn't respond to it. It had very few views and low scores from those who bothered to rate it.

'The Coal Miner and the Conservative' was one of my biggest disappointments. It was set during the UK Miners's Strike in 1984, and was about one of the striking miners and a rich, highly opinionated girl. It got reasonable scores, some positive reviews but sank without trace, and had very few views. Political stories don't seem to rate well on this site, and this story that I worked really hard on is one example.
 
I guess my biggest hit was my small series Serendipity. 4 parts. I think only 2 and 3 were above 4.5 with 1 and 4 being right under, but I had so many comments for that one. People loved the story but hated how it ended even though they understood why I did it like that.

And maybe No Such Thing As Time. While there were only a handful of people still reading when I was on chapter 16, the ones still reading were enjoying it. I felt so bad yesterday, I got an email from anon saying they were sad I had deleted that series.

My misses, I wrote 2 short(for me) stories that never hit a 4.5. These were one or two page stories, maybe I need to write longer stuff.
One of them was about a man and woman that meet on a beach and have sex. I got comments about Well I guess sometimes it works like that, but not really believable. sigh...
 
Geez, my biggest hits and misses... Well what I would consider a hit was Everything I wrote in Loving Wives or Sci-fi. My biggest misses were those I wrote in Loving Wives. As I write for myself. What the readers thought follows.

By ratings...

Hit: Warrior One - Fleet Action Pt. 07 Sci-fi
Miss: Vicky: A Slut Wife Story Loving Wives

By views...

Hit: A Night Out with Mom Incest/Taboo
Miss: JAA Ch. 04: Lives of John Abernathy Sci-Fi

By comments...

Hit: Reality - Loving Wives (BTB)
Miss: A Lonely Couple Wakes Up Pt. 06 Loving Wives

By favorites...

Hit: Fraternal Twins Pt. 01 Incest
Miss: The Making of a King Humor/Satire

Although I have many without ratings and comments I didn't count them as I have both turned off on those.
 
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Audience-wise, my biggest success is probably ‘Sweet Summer Nights’ (https://www.literotica.com/s/sweet-summer-nights-1). As I recall, it started out taking a bit of a hammering. (All of my stories do. I just have to put my head up and the one-bombers swarm in.) But then, over time, it gently floated up.

From a writing satisfaction point of view, there are probably a couple of other contenders. ‘Soul Cakes’ (https://www.literotica.com/s/soul-cakes) was fun to write, but it’s in the non-erotic category. Mind you, it still scored a respectable 4.67. I also enjoyed writing ‘Concert by the Sea’ (https://www.literotica.com/s/concert-by-the-sea). Those who like it liked it; but there weren’t many of them; and it remains stuck on 4.49.

Total disasters? None – so far. But there have been a few stories that have failed to attract a large audience. I think I must be an acquired taste. :)
 
Having written mostly series, that's a hard question to answer. In terms of views, obviously the first chapters of my two series have gotten the most. As for ratings, all but one of my submissions are between 4.61 and 4.87, so that a pretty narrow range and it's hard to choose any as a "biggest hit".

As for the one outlier, it was my first submission, the introductory chapter to my series My Fall and Rise. It's only one page and contains no explicit sex. I don't think most readers know what to make of it. Still, it's always hovered around the 4.50 mark and I'm pretty proud of it.
 
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I only started writing again this year, after moving my older stories to Literotica. So everything except the "Plum Blossom" series is actually fairly old, even if new to the readers.

Score wise: Testing Boundaries 4.73, 12.4K downloads
A fairly light BSDM story, written with significant input from my wife. Neither M'lady or I are seriously pain or the lifestyle, so this is about as far as I'm likely to go in this direction.

Downloads: Party Girl 3.67, 49.8K downloads
On the "Nonconsent" end of "Nonconsent and reluctance" - and still less "Nonconsent" than the original ASSTR version, since Laurel requested I dial the "gangbanged while totally unconcious" element back to "gangbanged while too drunk to object". People either love or hate it, so it still does what I set out to do - I wanted to give the readers a solid jolt. I don't "like" it myself, but I'm proud of it; I think created exactly the story I was trying for, a totally non-supernatural horror piece. And I'm still not sure I can foresee a happy ending for the characters.

Personal Favorite:
Paying the Price 4.42, 7.6K downloads
My riff on the "Mail Order Bride" - and as close as any of my stories come to autobiography. Though she didn't take things quite as far, M'lady did pull this on me after dealing with a "helpful" travel agent once. And even though I changed names and identifying details, I think I did a good job of capturing the moment.

Biggest Disappointment:
Plum Blossoms and its sequels. Actually, "Plum Blossoms," the lead-in novella, got a reasonably respectable 4.49, 6.4K downloads in "Exhibitionists & Voyeur". It was the eight parts of "Plum Blossoms: Full Bloom", the follow-on novel in "Loving Wives" that took the hit - each chapter started out with a flurry of 1-bombs. Even after sweep cleanup, all 8 chapters have an insanely high ratio of votes to downloads, and sit somewhere between 3.5 and 3.95, despite - I think - being better written than the novella. Perhaps thanks to the relentless 1-bombs, the readership dropped dramatically, from 15.8K for Chapter 1 to 1.5K for Chapter 7 (Chapter 8 is at 2.1K - still trying to figure that one out). Despite the hits, I'm happy with the overall story - it was deliberately over-the-top in style, and I knew going in that putting the later parts in "Loving Wives" would dramatically drop the score.
 
"All time" for me is a short history, and I have this problem with not really understanding how to measure "hit" and "miss."

I'll go with "Love is Enough" as both my best win and my worst loss. It hasn't had a lot of views, but the readers' reaction has been good.

"Love is Enough" was a huge emotional load for the months it took to write. At the end, I had great input from beta readers, but I was just too exhausted to respond substantively to their comments.

I submitted it largely as it stood, but I know now that if I had been stronger, then the story would have been better.
 
Biggest hit: definitely Grand Island. I distinctly recall NOT expecting it to do very well in the contest (2013 winter holidays), but it took second place and still gets a new favourite every now and then (the latest was just last week).

Biggest miss: Probably After the Opera. I've had lower-scoring stories than that one, but it definitely has the lowest ranking (by far) of any story I really felt good about. That didn't stop me from writing a sequel, After the Party at Christmas, which of course got an even worse ranking. But they were both a lot of fun for me in any case!

Honorable mention for both, in a way, goes to the Elizabeth series. My proudest achievements, those stories don't get many votes, but the votes they have received have mostly been pretty positive. I get it, Victorian style fiction about a woman with a very hairy pussy isn't everyone's cup of tea. At least I've got the market cornered for those of us who are out there. ;)
 
As far as success go, I hope I have my biggest ones still ahead of me. Even if things usually goes well, I still feel like I will always do better.

I guess I should put the first chapter of "Futanari Breeding Agency" as my biggest success so far as it garnered quite a lot of interest as well as fan fiction and art. Rating could be higher but perhaps to be truly successful you also need to garner some controversy.

As far as failure goes, that is a given. "Kneel Mother" is the only story I have here that falls below the red H with a 4.45 rating. I think it is an awful story. I originally wrote it for a contest on a small website, and I struggled a lot to write towards the rules, mostly the rule that forced the story to be under 5k words. It came out as an awful mess and I do not know why I posted it to Literotica.
 
Across the board top stats has to be "Holly Jolley Christmas". I have stories with higher scores, slightly more hits, etc., but that one is the best across the board.

So far as enjoying the reaction, that's probably "Ebon Genesis". There's nothing like people saying they hate you for making them feel sympathy for a twisted madman like Zoraster.

For heartfelt and poignant comments, it's a tie between the entire "Magic of the Wood" series and "Nude Holly Day". I've received some very long love letters from those.

As always, my biggest failure is the glacier-like progress of "Sisters of the Mists". It will remain so until I finally type "The End" on the final chapter. The story itself is something I'm proud of, and what I've posted has done well, but without the conclusion in black and white, it's a nagging failure that's always in the back of my head.
 
MelissaBaby said:
As for the one outlier, it was my first submission, the introductory chapter to my series My Fall and Rise. It's only one page and contains no explicit sex. I don't think most readers know what to make of it. Still, it's always hovered around the 4.50 mark and I'm pretty proud of it.
Click to expand...

And you should be. That first chapter packed an emotional wallop. It still haunts me. Which goes to show that "highest rating" isn't always the metric for "greatest success".

I'd have to say that my most successful story isn't my highest rated either. I tried my hand at Sci-Fi with Time to Breathe and spent months doing research and working out the math. It generated more positive feedback and laudatory comments than anything else I've written, even though the rating is about middling. SimonDoom even started a "Recommend a Story by Another Author" thread in the AH by recommending it. That is maybe the best metric of success I can think of.

As for failures, without question it's Leslie Takes Control. It was a quicky entry into a 750-word story challenge where I recycled a pair of characters from some other stories and tried to squeeze in too much backstory. It does happen to be my lowest ranked story, but it deserves to be. I really ought to go back and do that story justice someday.
 
I am a newcomer this year but was inspired by the many fine stories I found myself reading and re-reading. One writer suggested I try my hand at it and I did. My stories have done well rating-wise although I would like to expand my number of readers and get more comments and feedback.

By far my biggest failure is a story, "Jimmy Trent and Me," that was very short (just over 1 page) that I put in "Romance" and belatedly moved to "Erotic Couples." It didn't get a lot of reads or votes or comments. It's at 4.14. But I like it as a change from my normal, romances.

I also had two series that didn't do as well as I hoped with characters I became quite fond of.
 
According to my stats, one of my biggest hits is a story called "Quarantined with Mom"

It's a mom/son story where they visit an island and mom drinks a juice of exotic fruits. Later on the cruise ship, everyone on board is quarantined temporarily and mom becomes horny as hell from the drink.

I still remember the process of submitting it because I wondered if it was good or not. Particularly, I wondered if it would ruin my reputation and be hated because at the time I was writing longer mom/son stories. This was my first story where it was was an emergency dilemma.

Sure enough, it became a massive hit.


On the flip side, my biggest misses were stories that I really loved. I was really excited for them upon release and then they did much below expectations. But that's okay. Each story is a new learning experience to improve.
 
It is always hard choosing among one's children.

My "A Journey Never Begun" series is probably my consistently highest rated series (https://www.literotica.com/s/a-journey-never-begun - link to the first). Two of them (#8 & #10) cracked the all time list for Sci-Fi. Although the PSI Plague series is not that far behind.

My most viewed story is also my lowest scoring, both probably due to posting in Loving Wives (https://www.literotica.com/s/just-some-innocent-fun-1).

Mostly though, I write what I want and it is only when there are threads like this one that I pull out the tape measure and look at scores.

James
 
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