Advice: How to overcome publication discouragement

[Rob_Royale]

I also believe that if you write really well or really badly, readers will tell you. If you write a story that sits in the middle of the bell curve, there might be a fair score response, but comments will be very rare.

Well, that explains an awful lot. Thanks. It also makes the quote in my signature that much more poignant.

 

[TheSoaringCrow]

I don't read much here, because I'm a writer; but (heresy) I happen to believe that the scoring system, for all its sins and the debates we writers have about it, including the fact that it's only a one percent feedback factor, does contain within that one per cent a quality factor.

Because without doubt, anything I've ever clicked on over the years with less than a three has been junk, and I've clicked out within the first several hundred words. Caveat - I haven't read a thing in LW since the week I joined Lit back in 2014, and discovered what that category contained, but I know scores and comments there are in no way representative of the rest of Lit's reader behaviour.

I also believe that if you write really well or really badly, readers will tell you. If you write a story that sits in the middle of the bell curve, there might be a fair score response, but comments will be very rare.

But trying to figure out what "readers want"? First, you have to define what readers you want, and then you have to figure out what they want - if you want to pander to those wants. But if you do that, on the whole you'd be writing an Ikea assembly manual, because it seems to me that 80% of readers want the same thing over and over again. Which is fine, if you want to write for that market.

But I write my own fantasies, not those of some hypothetical (non-existent) reader; and I write to my own standards, not theirs. So I "solve the problem" by writing what I want to write, and getting better at it over time - as judged by my range of scores and the comments my stories get.

Fair enough. Thank you for your thoughts on the matter!

 

[Emilymcplugger]

One extra thing as well in terms of publishing discouragement.

As an extra on this my collection of poems did get published and attracted a mere 20 views all day, which made me really chuckle. Previously I was worried about only getting 2000 views per story chapter, but seeing how erotic poems get treated, that now feels like a lot.