Error discovered, corrected but no reaction.

[Bodington]

I do attract some readers to my submissions but very few comments. That became really evident in the following example. My fourth novel was simply titled "Vivian Laaning" the name of my MFC. The novel ends where her husband is murdered in prison while awaiting trial for a white collar crime. She loses her job as an attorney in a prestigious law firm in Chicago. Since she has Estonian heritage and can speak the language, she decides to take along her five month old daughter to visit that Baltic state in Europe. Mention is made that during the visit she meets and marries an Estonian farmer.

I intended that to be a stand alone novel along with my other submissions. However, in a subsequent novel, "Ingrid's Dark Secret Passion", I was inspired to include in a cameo role, Vivian, now the Estonian ambassador to the United States, along with her now adult daughter, Maia, a forthcoming graduate student at the University of Illinois. Once I had finished and submitted "Ingrid's Dark Secret Passion", I naturally was inclined to fill in the gap between the end of "Vivian Laaning," to the cameo role appearance in "Ingrid's Dark Secret Passion". I envisioned a sequel of two novels completing a trilogy. The first one, depicting Vivian's life to where she becomes the ambassador, and the other one depicting the life of Maia, Vivian's daughter.

Accordingly, I completed the second novel titled, "Vivian: Life in Estonia". It contained forty-three chapters, and I submitted all 43 chapters at once. Here I hit a snag as my work was rejected for containing description of underage sex. I need not go into the details of the controversy since I had penned another thread on this matter.

I was unsuccessful in convincing Lit management that my novel didn't contain any description of underage sex, so I waved the white flag of surrender. Obviously after chapter 13 of my opus there is zero possibility of underage sex objection. Accordingly, I reworked the numbering of my opus with chapter 14 becoming chapter 1 and original chapter 43 became chapter 30. I submitted these 30 chapters under the title of "Vivian: Life in Estonia". That was accepted without fuss.

So then I reworked the original thirteen chapters eliminating or revising the offending passages. I then submitted these chapters under the title of "Vivian Travels to Estonia" and it was accepted without any fuss as well. So, now I'm working on the next sequel which is titled "Maia Laaning" and which I've opted to release in piecemeal fashion. Currently there are 26 chapters published on Lit and I plan to submit some more chapters in July.

Now it so happened that for the purpose of ensuring consistency, I had occasion to check the text of chapter 9 in "Vivian: Life in Estonia as it appears in Lit. To my horror I found that it contained the same words contained in chapter 9 of "Vivian Travels to Estonia" So, I immediately corrected the chapter replacing with the intended text.

I wasn't interested in ascertaining how I came to make this error, but I was nonplused by the absence of any reaction from my readers. When I discovered my error there had been listed 2.1 K readers of both chapters 8 and 9 and a drop off to 1.5 K readers for chapter 10. What was even more amazing was that two readers favorited all three chapters, despite the obvious discrepancy of chapter 9 and failed to comment. Makes me wonder if anybody really reads my submissions.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

If your legions of fans are hanging on your every word and can recite your novels like priests with the Bible, then why are you not on the best sellers list?

 

[AchtungNight]

Trust me, the sort of people who obnoxiously point out errors get more joy in pointing out an error than applauding its correction. They like to revel in their superiority over you. If you fixed the error, great, but they don’t feel the need to acknowledge it. They’re already moving on to the next error they can find, the next lesser being they can mock and thus get their fix. If they do thank you, they might also feel they’re rubbing in that you did wrong and they don’t care to do that. You already know.

Or maybe you’re right. They’re not bothering themselves to read your stories repeatedly. They didn’t think you would bother to fix the issue perhaps. Kudos for doing it anyway. Good luck with your future projects.

 

[ElectricBlue]

.Makes me wonder if anybody really reads my submissions.

You lived and breathed this story for years, by the sounds of it. Your readers just read it, and took it for what it was. Two different perspectives, I think. Don't fret the detail, it's not worth it.

 

[KeithD]

I do think you are harboring unreasonable expectations of how closely Literotica readers are going to follow the running of long story series. Re corrections, in particular, most readers who are going to read anything are going to do so within the first two weeks of the work being on offer. Very few are going to go checking back on corrections later.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I agree with almost everything above. It's the same for almost every "creative" endeavor. Once in while, something like Titanic (the one by James Cameron) will hit a nerve and people will see it multiple times. I'm guessing that Cameron was more impressed by winning an Oscar from his "peers" at the Academy; the millions of ticket-paying moviegoers were just numbers.

We had a thread about "second responses," people who comment again after the author has responded. I checked as best I could, and I don't think that has ever happened on any of my stories.

 

[gunhilltrain]

To be fair, the thread was started by someone he had gotten three responses to their story. Not surprisingly, it was in the LW section. I read the responses, and the guy seemed to be on some kind of rant. So it happens, but it's an anomaly.

 

[ElectricBlue]

To be fair, the thread was started by someone he had gotten three responses to their story. Not surprisingly, it was in the LW section. I read the responses, and the guy seemed to be on some kind of rant. So it happens, but it's an anomaly.

What? Only three responses to a LW story? That's missing the mark a bit, surely?