Does it bother you if the stories you are publishing are above 4.0 or 4.5 rating but there is hardly any comments on your story?

[Tharkibudda]

I feel that comments and favoriting are the best way to learn how good or bad your story is.While having your stories consistently above 4.0 or even HOT is good...I feel a bit disappointed that my new stories arent gathering any comments.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

 

[AlinaX]

Stories without comments feel very lonely...

 

[Rustyoznail]

Stories without comments feel very lonely...

Agreed. I look at the score and wonder why nobody calls.

 

[YDB95]

I long ago accepted that even most admiring readers won't take the time to express that admiration. But yes, I do still wish there were more comments.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Shrug.
I've posted 55 stories and only 10 of them have more than two comments.

If the first comment is abusive, that sometimes encourages others to compliment, but otherwise I've no idea why some stories get a bunch of comments and others don't. Beyond a connection with number of views, of course.

 

[PennameWombat]

I feel that comments and favoriting are the best way to learn how good or bad your story is.While having your stories consistently above 4.0 or even HOT is good...I feel a bit disappointed that my new stories arent gathering any comments.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

Nope. If that disappointed me, I’d never feel any other way. I know some authors here have more voluble readers and some Categories I don’t write in tend to attract more comments. Not much I can do about the first and for the second, there are a few Categories I’d like to get around to, but nowhere near all of them. So the second won’t change.

Shrug.

 

[onehitwanda]

My interest was piqued.

I have 7 stories in I/T, 8 in Lesbian Sex, 12 in Romance.

I/T I get a comment roughly every 30 votes
Lesbian I get a comment roughly every 14 votes
Romance I get a comment roughly every 20 votes

So there's definite variance between categories.

I wonder what it would look in the time dimension

 

[SeraphNocturne]

I think everyone tends to enjoy hearing their writing is well received… you might try to post your story on the Story Feedback board with a general request for comments, or post a new story on the New Story thread asking for feedback, that might bring in more attention.

Honestly I can’t really say for certain what inspires some stories to get tons of comments and others to not aside from the author having a heavy or dedicated following… but it might possibly depend on the sort of story you’re writing.

 

[Zenith77]

Yeah, I feel this. Votes are nice; comments are far nicer. I have a smattering of comments across my 20-odd stories. There's some very nice ones, but I'd say half of them are 'things I did wrong / could've done better' - which is fine, even if I don't agree with many of them.

 

[SimonDoom]

My interest was piqued.

I have 7 stories in I/T, 8 in Lesbian Sex, 12 in Romance.

I/T I get a comment roughly every 30 votes
Lesbian I get a comment roughly every 14 votes
Romance I get a comment roughly every 20 votes

So there's definite variance between categories.

I wonder what it would look in the time dimension

Those are better ratios than mine get. For me, overall, it's about 58 votes for every comment. And since my view:vote ratio is about 92:1, that means roughly 5300 views for each comment. So unless my story gets a lot of views, it's usually not going to get many comments.

It was discouraging at first, but after six years I've stopped being discouraged.

It definitely helps to write stories in categories that get more views, because favorites and comments are definitely related to how many views one gets.

 

[onehitwanda]

Those are better ratios than mine get. For me, overall, it's about 58 votes for every comment. And since my view:vote ratio is about 92:1, that means roughly 5300 views for each comment. So unless my story gets a lot of views, it's usually not going to get many comments.

It was discouraging at first, but after six years I've stopped being discouraged.

It definitely helps to write stories in categories that get more views, because favorites and comments are definitely related to how many views one gets.

There's also a definite drop in the number of ratings on stories submitted after 2016. Far more than can be explained from simple age and the slow accretion of ratings over time.

I think there's a twofold effect:

1. Lit is getting more traffic from authors, so more stories are being published, so stories rotate out of new quicker
2. Lit readers have changed in behavior. Whether this is due to the site design changes, or due to the use of mobile devices, or simply newer readers not having the same drive to leave ratings for content... that I can't say
.

It would be interesting to see some actual rigorous statistical studies of behaviour.

 

[ElectricBlue]

My rule of thumb used to be one Vote per hundred Views, one Comment per thousand. That translates to one comment for every ten votes, roughly, which, looking at it that way, isn't too bad at all. Although the comment ratio has dropped over the last year or two.

Some categories are more generous than others:

Most comments - Mature 33/360, 48,100 views
2nd - Erotic Couplings 28/280, 36,200 views
3rd - Fetish 19/416 78,600 views

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I view it all as "feedback".

Votes are typically the easiest feedback option for users and a mechanism that most readers are familiar with (ratings). The votes-per-view ratio is also a metric that can be used in addition to the actual score itself.

Favorites are an indication that the reader has enough interest in the story to "keep it on their shelf"

Followers are readers that have expressed some degree of loyalty to the author, though not necessarily for one particular story.

Comments are the hardest for most readers to provide. They typically need to have much stronger opinions about a story for them to put the effort into finding the words that they want to share.

Make readers either love or hate the story and you'll get comments. Otherwise, learn to measure different forms of feedback or ignore all of it.

 

[ronde]

There's also a definite drop in the number of ratings on stories submitted after 2016. Far more than can be explained from simple age and the slow accretion of ratings over time.

I think there's a twofold effect:

1. Lit is getting more traffic from authors, so more stories are being published, so stories rotate out of new quicker
2. Lit readers have changed in behavior. Whether this is due to the site design changes, or due to the use of mobile devices, or simply newer readers not having the same drive to leave ratings for content... that I can't say
.

It would be interesting to see some actual rigorous statistical studies of behaviour.

I think the lack of votes and comments are mostly just human nature. While obviously a lot of people like to read erotica for one reason or another, most would rather not have their reading tastes known to anyone else. They read a story but won't vote even though voting is anonymous. Comments are anonymous only if you make them that way, so that's another deterrent to many readers. I think the genre also has a lot to do with the number of votes and comments, just like any other endeavor involving entertaining the public. You won't see spectators at a golf match wearing shirts with the name of their favorite player in big letters, but you will in American football. That's just the innate difference in humans and how they express their personalities.

I do think you're on to something with the mobile devices. I find it very difficult to type anything of any length on a cell phone or tablet touch pad. It's easier to read something without leaving a comment.

 

[SimonDoom]

There's also a definite drop in the number of ratings on stories submitted after 2016. Far more than can be explained from simple age and the slow accretion of ratings over time.

I think there's a twofold effect:

1. Lit is getting more traffic from authors, so more stories are being published, so stories rotate out of new quicker
2. Lit readers have changed in behavior. Whether this is due to the site design changes, or due to the use of mobile devices, or simply newer readers not having the same drive to leave ratings for content... that I can't say
.

It would be interesting to see some actual rigorous statistical studies of behaviour.

I suspect something like number 1 is going on.

I've been following data pretty carefully since April 2017, 6 years now. Back then, the number 250 story on the 12-month most-viewed list had around 115,000 views. The same-ranked story on the list now has about 85,000 views. That's an enormous drop. I'm not sure if it's the result of more stories, changed reader behavior, or the site somehow screening out "fake" or bot-driven views.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I feel that comments and favoriting are the best way to learn how good or bad your story is.While having your stories consistently above 4.0 or even HOT is good...I feel a bit disappointed that my new stories arent gathering any comments.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

I get a comment for every 4 votes. Now I try to reply to every comment, so half of those are mine. So a reader comment for every 8 votes.

I think people either love or hate my works, maybe that drives comments.

Em

 

[gunhilltrain]

I get a comment for every 4 votes. Now I try to reply to every comment, so half of those are mine. So a reader comment for every 8 votes.

I think people either love or hate my works, maybe that drives comments.

Em

We live in a society with very short attention spans, more so with so much material online. Lit is a mass producer of content, as of I've said. I've seen some readers with hundreds of favorites listed. They couldn't possibly remember them all.

 

[Escierto]

No, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t care about the ratings or the comments.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

Here's my breakdown:

How To: 1 story - 17 votes - 6 comments - C/V = 35.3%
Non-Erotic: 1 Story - 110 votes - 16 comments = C/V = 14.5%
I/T: 1 Story - 61 Votes - 6 comments - C/V = 9.8%
Lesbian: 32 Stories - 5356 Votes - 338 comments - C/V = 6.3%

I've noticed that these percentages have been going down over the past year or more.

 

[NoTalentHack]

1. Lit is getting more traffic from authors, so more stories are being published, so stories rotate out of new quicker
2. Lit readers have changed in behavior. Whether this is due to the site design changes, or due to the use of mobile devices, or simply newer readers not having the same drive to leave ratings for content... that I can't say

I think both of these are likely true, but I think there's at least three more things going on: the first is that more erotica is available on Kindle+, Smashwords for free/cheap, etc. and that's going to affect how readers engage with content elsewhere. Often, it's how they're going to engage with it first, with them finding stuff that they like perusing Kindle+ and then looking farther afield.

"Comments" on those sites are very sparse, too, and they're inherently in the form of reviews. Looking at a random short story on the front page of Smashwords, "Dawnshard" by Brandon Sanderson, there are seven reviews on it. Seven. For a Brandon Sanderson story that was published 3 years ago. Over on the Amazon listing for the same story, it has 19,219 ratings (which, on Amazon, are equivalent to Literoitca's ratings) but only 673 reviews , or a ratio of about 29:1. Sounds about equivalent to the categories here.

For comparison (as near as I can; I'm not Brandon Sanderson), I looked at my 15th and 16th story ranked by comments and found that they averaged around 17 ratings per comment. Both of them were in Loving Wives, though, and I think that is related to the second thing: namely, the average age of readers in a category.

I think, and this is pure guesswork, without any real data other than what my commenters are saying, that LW is a relatively older readership. I know I have some 80+ year readers in there, and the group as a whole tends to be more conservative. They both have time on their hands and they are used to more give and take in their consumption of stories on sites like this; some of them (like me) have been here since near the beginning, when comments were more commonplace. If I had to guess, older readers are often here for the story, and that's what they want to talk about; younger readers are here for... well, they're here for the story, but in a different way. *Finger guns* You know what I'm talking about.

Lastly, category matters, as do story choices. The stories of mine that got a lot of comments were the ones where I stirred up a hornet's nest: "At the End of the Tour" (a headfake towards a RAAC and then an ending that was actually an ending, i.e., no details on what happened after the confrontation), "No Place To Go" (an agonizing no-win situation for the MMC that was akin to a very tense one-act play), and "The Last Snowfall" (a short story that ends in the suicide of the MMC). There were things for the reader, even one that wasn't versed in plotting, dialogue, etc. to comment intelligently on: what the characters did, the choices they did and didn't make, etc.

Stories that are "just" well told erotic ones aren't going to draw that many comments. There's not much to discuss about them for the reader that isn't also either a writer or someone who enjoys criticism. Drop a non-HEA in Romance, or a reconciliation on LW or a clever misdirect just about anywhere, and you'll get more comments than if you give the reader just what they expect.

And, of course, volume matters. "Meat Market," which is a sweet strangers-to-friends-to-lovers story about two broken people starting over after their own tragedies, had a ratings-to-comments ratio of 15:1. That's the story of mine with the most comments outside of Loving Wives, even having more comments than one of my LW stories. 15:1 beats the average for me, but that still only meant 43 comments, because there are fewer than 900 ratings on that story.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Shrug.
I've posted 55 stories and only 10 of them have more than two comments.

If the first comment is abusive, that sometimes encourages others to compliment, but otherwise I've no idea why some stories get a bunch of comments and others don't. Beyond a connection with number of views, of course.

You have written some long series, though. From my experience, individual chapters in a series get few comments, then you get a lot of them on the last chapter when the series concludes.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Does anyone else feel the same way?

Nope.

 

[Bazzle]

If you get comments, it means the reader has actually read the story?
Favourites mean nothing.
Scores are wonderful.
But I think we all thrive off comments?

 

[BobbyBrandt]

You have written some long series, though. From my experience, individual chapters in a series get few comments, then you get a lot of them on the last chapter when the series concludes.

This hasn't been consistently the case for me, but since I stopped posting chapter stories, I don't worry about it anymore.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I get a comment for every 4 votes. Now I try to reply to every comment, so half of those are mine. So a reader comment for every 8 votes.

I think people either love or hate my works, maybe that drives comments.

Em

And to complete the picture, I get a vote for every 125 views.

Em