LW Where Quality Doesn't Count!

[Wifetheif]

In an alias, I have on Amazon, I have almost exclusively five-star reviews and nice sales I've also written award-winning nonfiction under my own name. No less than Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Maranis said that I was a "fantastic writer." .I think it is safe to say that I'm not a bad wordsmith. Even though I thought it might be an exercise in futility, I placed a story that wouldn't fit anywhere else in loving wives. The comments, "Exceptionally well written" "Very well written" the score? Hanging a hair under three!
Why did I even bother? Why does ANYBODY bother with writing in the Loving Wives category? "Hamlet" which, at its heart, is a tale of a cheating wife, would receive at best 2.5 stars on Lit.com. Why do we keep this category?

 

[Carnevil9]

ANYBODY? You seem to think that all writers only write to enjoy the adulations of their readers. Many write for much more personal reasons.

 

[SimonDoom]

This is why you bother: because by publishing in Loving Wives you will get a large audience of readers who will enjoy your story.

Yes, there will be a subset of readers who dislike these kinds of stories and will downvote your story. They may leave nasty comments. This is a fact about Literotica.

But that doesn't change the fact that you will have many appreciative readers.

My view is that if you are writing solely to maximize the score you get for your story, there's something not right with the way you are thinking. A high score is nice, and, all things being equal, it's better than the alternative. But all things are not equal. With Loving Wives type stories, there's a tradeoff to be made. A writer might well, it seems to me, be willing to take the lower score in exchange for knowing that the story is connecting with a larger audience of appreciative readers than if it was published in another category.

 

[NotWise]

Why did I even bother? Why does ANYBODY bother with writing in the Loving Wives category? "Hamlet" which, at its heart, is a tale of a cheating wife, would receive at best 2.5 stars on Lit.com. Why do we keep this category?

You might bother for the views and reactions you can get out of LW that you can't get elsewhere. But, if you post in LW, then you shouldn't worry about the score.

The ratings here (and just about anywhere) aren't a commentary on the quality of your writing. They reflect the popularity of the story more than anything else, and the scale varies from category to category. LW scores most stories fairly low. Other categories (Sci-Fi, for instance) tend to score high.

 

[Wifetheif]

You might bother for the views and reactions you can get out of LW that you can't get elsewhere. But, if you post in LW, then you shouldn't worry about the score.

The ratings here (and just about anywhere) aren't a commentary on the quality of your writing. They reflect the popularity of the story more than anything else, and the scale varies from category to category. LW scores most stories fairly low. Other categories (Sci-Fi, for instance) tend to score high.

**
I get what you and the others are saying. Yes LW has the most readers of any category. I just wish they were more discerning readers. My current story makes it very clear that the loving wife cheats because of an unexpected reaction to her change in fashions. Once she stopped dressing like a nun, she got attention from guys at work and other places. Before she could not get the time of day from a stranger and now she is getting wolf-whistles as she walks down the street. It turned her head and made her aware of her sexuality in a new way and that caused her to cheat. And YET, the comments are along the lines of "illogical", "unbelievable", "Unlikeable", Same LW crap"
NO! It was too subtle for you dullards to see!

 

[gunhilltrain]

**
I get what you and the others are saying. Yes LW has the most readers of any category. I just wish they were more discerning readers. My current story makes it very clear that the loving wife cheats because of an unexpected reaction to her change in fashions. Once she stopped dressing like a nun, she got attention from guys at work and other places. Before she could not get the time of day from a stranger and now she is getting wolf-whistles as she walks down the street. It turned her head and made her aware of her sexuality in a new way and that caused her to cheat. And YET, the comments are along the lines of "illogical", "unbelievable", "Unlikeable", Same LW crap"
NO! It was too subtle for you dullards to see!

Loving Wives is what it is, and we've said before that it is not going to change soon. I've only published there twice because the stories seemed to belong there. The scores were actually better than in some other categories.

I've looked at your submissions list. You've done quite well in your years here. Even your previous three forays into LW (2014-16) did okay. (Maybe it was different back then.)

So this time you got burned. Well, chalk it up to experience. It was 2.85 the last I looked. One of those in 178 stories (and 1,600 followers) hardly matters.

 

[Wifetheif]

Loving Wives is what it is, and we've said before that it is not going to change soon. I've only published there twice because the stories seemed to belong there. The scores were actually better than in some other categories.

I've looked at your submissions list. You've done quite well in your years here. Even your previous three forays into LW (2014-16) did okay. (Maybe it was different back then.)

So this time you got burned. Well, chalk it up to experience. It was 2.85 the last I looked. One of those in 178 stories (and 1,600 followers) hardly matters.

**
Thanks for putting things in perspective. The only place this story would have fit was loving wives. I knew going in that it probably would not score as high as my more recent stories. That goes with the territory. The thing that I don't get ab LW is how often the stories are not even read! The visceral "screw that ho!" pushback can be quite overwhelming and doesn't seem to occur in the other categories.
I'm not bothered by honest criticism, in fact, I welcome it as it tends to make me a better writer. But an automatic one star just BECAUSE it is a LW story is both frustrating and maddening.
Again, I know it goes with the territory, but I don't have to be happy about that fact.

 

[BiscuitHammer]

I've never submitted a story to LW, admittedly, but I'm thankful for its existence, because otherwise the subhumans who seem to infest the category looking for stories to feed their rage would be spread out through the other categories, hunting for sustenance.

I'm sorry for the low votes people get submitting there, but at least you know what you're in for. Best of luck to you.

 

[1950scuckold]

I've written three cuck stories in LW that started out with 2 or even 1 star ratings but slowly crept up much higher (one at over 3.5 now and two over 4). I think what happens is the people who militantly object to the subject matter just auto 1 star it without even reading it and then more slowly as those who are actually interested read the story they end up rating it 5 stars.

You can actually calculate how many people rated your story 1 or 5 stars (and I suspect that's mostly the breakdown of ratings in such a polarized category) and even if it has a low average rating a sizable amount of people probably still rated it 5 stars which should matter to you. Look at favorites too. If your story got a 2.5 rating but 200 people rated it then that means about 100 people probably rated it 5 stars. You calculate it by multiplying the number of voters times the percentage of stars. So don't be disheartened.

 

[jaF0]

Why did I even bother? Why does ANYBODY ...

... fuss over ratings?

 

[yukonnights]

**
Thanks for putting things in perspective. The only place this story would have fit was loving wives. I knew going in that it probably would not score as high as my more recent stories. That goes with the territory. The thing that I don't get ab LW is how often the stories are not even read! The visceral "screw that ho!" pushback can be quite overwhelming and doesn't seem to occur in the other categories.
I'm not bothered by honest criticism, in fact, I welcome it as it tends to make me a better writer. But an automatic one star just BECAUSE it is a LW story is both frustrating and maddening.
Again, I know it goes with the territory, but I don't have to be happy about that fact.

You probably know this already … but; You can turn the scoring option off. I think that if I ever post in LW that's what I'd do. A reflexive 1-bomb score is too easy. It takes at least some effort to leave a nasty comment … and even then you can delete them if you wish. And don't be surprised if the score suddenly rises after a periodic vote sweep by Lit.

 

[Abbafan]

Take it with a grain of salt, my man. Loving Wives is notorious for lower scores. For some reason it attracts people who aren't content to skip a story that's just not to their taste (as opposed to down voting something based on the quality of the writing). Think of a 3.5 as a 4.5 in other categories, especially if you write certain types of stories.

 

[gunhilltrain]

**
Thanks for putting things in perspective. The only place this story would have fit was loving wives. I knew going in that it probably would not score as high as my more recent stories. That goes with the territory. The thing that I don't get ab LW is how often the stories are not even read! The visceral "screw that ho!" pushback can be quite overwhelming and doesn't seem to occur in the other categories.
I'm not bothered by honest criticism, in fact, I welcome it as it tends to make me a better writer. But an automatic one star just BECAUSE it is a LW story is both frustrating and maddening.
Again, I know it goes with the territory, but I don't have to be happy about that fact.

It's up to 3.11 now - with 367 votes! I saw some of the comments on your earlier LW stories - a mixture of good and bad. There are stories at times where almost every comment is negative. I recognize one name who comments on nearly every LW story. I wonder what else he does with his time.

 

[RetroFan]

I wrote a story earlier this year called 'Grumpy Humphrey's Easy Wife' but chickened out and didn't end up posting it in Loving Wives but Group Sex where it flopped.

Now I kind of regret not posting it into Loving Wives but given what happens in the story - the floozy of a wife makes a fool of her resentful husband by screwing around with men all over town but often refusing sexual advances from him - and wins easily in the end, never brought to account for her behaviour I think I would have received death threats from angry LW readers.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I wrote a story earlier this year called 'Grumpy Humphrey's Easy Wife' but chickened out and didn't end up posting it in Loving Wives but Group Sex where it flopped.

Now I kind of regret not posting it into Loving Wives but given what happens in the story - the floozy of a wife makes a fool of her resentful husband by screwing around with men all over town but often refusing sexual advances from him - and wins easily in the end, never brought to account for her behaviour I think I would have received death threats from angry LW readers.

Death threats: first they would have to find you. It is true that my profile narrows me down to a strip three blocks wide and about a mile long, but there are so many people in there that I would feel safe.

Anyway, an occasional 3.26 isn't so bad. Now a 2.00; that stings. But that's because I wrote about a real-life 1960s celebrity-shooting radical feminist lesbian prostitute. I found out there is no market for that. Mary Harron had the same result.

 

[RetroFan]

Death threats: first they would have to find you. It is true that my profile narrows me down to a strip three blocks wide and about a mile long, but there are so many people in there that I would feel safe.

Anyway, an occasional 3.26 isn't so bad. Now a 2.00; that stings. But that's because I wrote about a real-life 1960s celebrity-shooting radical feminist lesbian prostitute. I found out there is no market for that. Mary Harron had the same result.

Some of my other works in other categories have antagonised readers to the point that they wished physical violence upon me. One was a body swap story series I wrote in Incest/Taboo and was intended to make readers laugh. It had the opposite effect and one angry reader put a comment on the story 'Kill Yourself - get it through your head, it being a bullet'. Another was surprisingly in Fetish, which involved a stuck up girl soiling her panties while on her period, and where I explicitly warned readers about the graphic nature of the content. One reader said that I needed to have my head smashed in with a hammer, although site administrators deleted the comment and the suicide one was also deleted.

Given the IT and Fetish crowds aren't normally so vocal (although I have a habit of annoying the IT readers in many different ways) maybe its best I avoid Loving Wives. As for feminist lesbians, maybe the Lesbian Sex readers might like such a character?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I have posted a lot of stories in LW, mostly because that's what I like to read, secondly because it irks the shit out of have the readers there. Scores? At first I turned the off, then I turned them on. Sure at first they were lousy, but after a while they will begin to rise. See the trolls very rarely go back to check, those that do will most likely have their low scores swept away at some point in the future.

Now, my highest scores are, as NotWise alluded too, in Sci-Fi and most don't even contain any sex.

ETA: Death threats, I just laugh at those. Most people here know I live in Houston... but where in Houston is the question. It is after all, the 4th largest city in the U.S. population wise and kind of high up there as far as city sprawl is concerned. I have no fear about someone finding me to carry out their very stupid threats. I really do laugh at them. I also know I have hit the note that makes their spine shiver at the thought of what their wife has done or is thinking about doing to them.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Some of my other works in other categories have antagonised readers to the point that they wished physical violence upon me. One was a body swap story series I wrote in Incest/Taboo and was intended to make readers laugh. It had the opposite effect and one angry reader put a comment on the story 'Kill Yourself - get it through your head, it being a bullet'. Another was surprisingly in Fetish, which involved a stuck up girl soiling her panties while on her period, and where I explicitly warned readers about the graphic nature of the content. One reader said that I needed to have my head smashed in with a hammer, although site administrators deleted the comment and the suicide one was also deleted.

Given the IT and Fetish crowds aren't normally so vocal (although I have a habit of annoying the IT readers in many different ways) maybe its best I avoid Loving Wives. As for feminist lesbians, maybe the Lesbian Sex readers might like such a character?

I can't figure out why the body swap stories would cause such a problem. You know what would be an interesting concept? It would be a gender switch too - a male and a female switch bodies. I wonder if anybody has done that on this site already? I'll have to think about that one.

I didn't put the Valerie Solanas stories in Lesbian because there is only one brief scene with her girlfriend and there is no sex. If Solanas was looking for notoriety, then she had bad luck. She shot Warhol just three days before the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

 

[BiscuitHammer]

ETA: Death threats, I just laugh at those. Most people here know I live in Houston... but where in Houston is the question. It is after all, the 4th largest city in the U.S. population wise and kind of high up there as far as city sprawl is concerned. I have no fear about someone finding me to carry out their very stupid threats. I really do laugh at them. I also know I have hit the note that makes their spine shiver at the thought of what their wife has done or is thinking about doing to them.

Lol, I do enjoy the death threats. Some moron accidentally used his real email to threaten me once. Claimed he had a sniper rifle and I wouldn't see it coming. It's the sheer cowardice of these people I find fascinating. They often inspire characters in my stories that my protagonists can triumph over.

I kept getting hate from some incel who wanted to murder my female characters with acid. He became the inspiration for Kenny, an incel who Freja and Jeanie ended up beating the shit out of and sending to jail.

I'll happily pay taxes to make sure cowards and failures have a place to stay as long-term guests of her Majesty's prison system. After all, I kinda owe them for giving me such inspiration. Least I can do.

Not all anonymous comments are from cowards, of course, but all cowards comment anonymously. There is an empowerment they feel, probably the only time they feel it in their lives, when they can turn on the crusty, slime-covered valve in their thorax and release the terror and hate they feel onto a web page, protected by not needing to log in.

Lol, there oughta be a challenge where the person who reveals themselves best or most often gets a prize.

And yes, there's a Hundred Flowers Campaign angle to this. Because there's no doubt plenty who are stupid enough to fall for it.

 

[RetroFan]

I can't figure out why the body swap stories would cause such a problem. You know what would be an interesting concept? It would be a gender switch too - a male and a female switch bodies. I wonder if anybody has done that on this site already? I'll have to think about that one.

I didn't put the Valerie Solanas stories in Lesbian because there is only one brief scene with her girlfriend and there is no sex. If Solanas was looking for notoriety, then she had bad luck. She shot Warhol just three days before the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

There's quite a few body swap stories on the site, and a number of them involve a male/female body swap. There's an Australian movie called 'Dating the Enemy' and it involves a constantly squabbling boyfriend and girlfriend swapping bodies, but given it was made in 1996 it might be hard to get hold of.

My body swap story just seemed to be one of those works that is polarising, like the 2001 movie Freddy Got Fingered. Fans of Freddy Got Fingered love the movie and it has become quite a cult film over the years, but others (the majority) hate both the movie and the guy who created it, Tom Green, with a passion. The immature humour in my body swap story seemed to get the readers offside but they criticised most everything about the work. One of the biggest issues was the time taken for the sister to have sex with the brother (in her boyfriend's body), but was I supposed to have the brother and boyfriend swap bodies in two paragraphs and the first thing he wanted to do get into his twin sister's panties?

 

[eroticstoryspinner]

Ok, I freely admit that I am committing thread drift. I have to confess that I don't quite understand the LW category. It seems to be unfaithful wives/cheating wives . But when i have looked at stories there i have seen things that would work just as well in group sex, erotic couplings, fetish (that one might be me since I consider cuck to be a fetish) What is it exactly that has people submit a story in that category?

 

[Wifetheif]

Ok, I freely admit that I am committing thread drift. I have to confess that I don't quite understand the LW category. It seems to be unfaithful wives/cheating wives . But when i have looked at stories there i have seen things that would work just as well in group sex, erotic couplings, fetish (that one might be me since I consider cuck to be a fetish) What is it exactly that has people submit a story in that category?

**
I submitted it to loving wives because that is where it fits best. I could have perhaps have gone with romance, but it really wasn't that. It was about a shy modest wife becoming a hotwife.(Rather quickly that is true. ARTISTIC LICENSE!) My best-rated stories are my SF ones. Some of those were so popular I pulled them from this site, expanded, and repackaged them as e-books on Amazon. The story I posted to LW was too short to use commercially and under my Amazon alias where, I tend to focus on one particular kink anyway.

I've gotten death threats (which I laugh off and delete) and well-meaning letters from guys who plainly state that they automatically down vote ANY story in which the wife cheats! Now, since this site deals almost entirely in fiction (or thinly disguised reality) I simply do not get their beef. If you KNOW you are going to hate the story on principle, why would you read it or rate it? I don't like westerns. I don't read them. I had to read several for a course that I took in college, and found them just tolerable. I would not go out of my way to gather up all the western novels in the bookstore and write letters to the authors complaining that I don't like westerns and I'm going to give all your books one star on Amazon. I mean NOBODY does that, so I don't understand why that happens here?
In the end, I've come to the conclusion that these guys have all either cheated themselves, had their wives cheak, or most likely of all, are very insecure in their manhood and feel a need to lash out and dominate. Part of that is "punishing" authors who so much as dare to engage in even a little female empowerment. They certainly all aren't incels, but they unquestionably hate women. They quite possibly have never satisfied a woman sexually in their entire lives. I don't pity them. I just find their behaviour astoundingly odd.

 

[SimonDoom]

Ok, I freely admit that I am committing thread drift. I have to confess that I don't quite understand the LW category. It seems to be unfaithful wives/cheating wives . But when i have looked at stories there i have seen things that would work just as well in group sex, erotic couplings, fetish (that one might be me since I consider cuck to be a fetish) What is it exactly that has people submit a story in that category?

It's a good question. And the answer, which seems to elude so many people so often, is that you have to look at things from the point of the reader. You have to open your mind to the existence of groups of readers whose tastes may vary from your own. Logic is totally irrelevant. The thing that matters is that there is a very, very large group of readers who enjoy stories about wives who enjoy sex outside of marriage. They may be cuckold/humiliation stories. Or they may be "stag" stories, where the husband is not humiliated but helps orchestrate his wife's extramarital dalliances because they turn him on.

It doesn't matter whether you or anyone else "gets it." The reality is that a very big audience of readers likes these stories. It's obvious, too, that, from the Site's description of the Loving Wives category, this was the original intended focus of this category.

It doesn't belong in "Fetish", because the readers for these stories don't want them there. They're not interested in pee or foot fetishes. They want hot wife stories. That's what Loving Wives, originally, was for.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Lol, I do enjoy the death threats. Some moron accidentally used his real email to threaten me once. Claimed he had a sniper rifle and I wouldn't see it coming. It's the sheer cowardice of these people I find fascinating. They often inspire characters in my stories that my protagonists can triumph over.

I kept getting hate from some incel who wanted to murder my female characters with acid. He became the inspiration for Kenny, an incel who Freja and Jeanie ended up beating the shit out of and sending to jail.

I'll happily pay taxes to make sure cowards and failures have a place to stay as long-term guests of her Majesty's prison system. After all, I kinda owe them for giving me such inspiration. Least I can do.

Not all anonymous comments are from cowards, of course, but all cowards comment anonymously. There is an empowerment they feel, probably the only time they feel it in their lives, when they can turn on the crusty, slime-covered valve in their thorax and release the terror and hate they feel onto a web page, protected by not needing to log in.

Lol, there oughta be a challenge where the person who reveals themselves best or most often gets a prize.

And yes, there's a Hundred Flowers Campaign angle to this. Because there's no doubt plenty who are stupid enough to fall for it.

I once gave some moron my IP address of the machine I was using. Of course it was behind two firewalls and was the IP assigned by the modem on my network. You know the one, 192.168.9.55. The one that doesn't mean anything to anyone out in the ether.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Ok, I freely admit that I am committing thread drift. I have to confess that I don't quite understand the LW category. It seems to be unfaithful wives/cheating wives . But when i have looked at stories there i have seen things that would work just as well in group sex, erotic couplings, fetish (that one might be me since I consider cuck to be a fetish) What is it exactly that has people submit a story in that category?

Yeah, I have several of those and the only reason I post them in LW is for the laughs and to poke one group or another with a stick, so to speak. I said this in another thread and had some moron chasing my stories adding comments that I like to poke readers with a stick. She eventually got tired as I just deleted all her comments and had a good laugh at how easy it is to get some people to go absolutely crazy.