How do you related to your audience?

[Liethra]

How do you relate to your audience?

This might be an odd question, but I just had a looooooong conversation with a group of artists friends about the creator-audience-relationship and I thought it could be interesting to see how people here look at it.

Now, I originally come from the visual arts world myself, where the relationship with your audience is quite different. Especially in an age where images and visual art are mass-consumed and are rapidly being hollowed out.

Do you interact with your readers at all? Are they just a meaningless crowd, or do you use them as a resource to reflect on your own work? Do you have an audience outside of Literotica? Are audience reactions like ratings and comments something that you care about at all? Is growing your audience a specific goal of yours?

These are, of course, very personal questions where there is no right or wrong way to do it, only different attitudes. But I'd love to hear what other writers think about this anyway.

 

[Hypoxia]

I usually don't exchange PMs with readers. I accept and sometimes respond to post-story comments. Mostly, I've posted stuff, and readers have supplied comments, votes, favorites. That's good enough for me. My "fan base" are a quiet lot.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I usually don't exchange PMs with readers. I accept and sometimes respond to post-story comments. Mostly, I've posted stuff, and readers have supplied comments, votes, favorites. That's good enough for me. My "fan base" are a quiet lot.

Pretty much the same. If they like, they vote or comment; that tells me where we stand.

 

[ElectricBlue]

On the whole, my readers are a mystery to me. One in a hundred leaves a Vote (depending on category), one in a thousand leaves a comment. It's not much to go on, and doesn't much affect what I write.

Although I did abandon a fourth part of a recent story because the response to the third part was tepid - which surprised me, because the first two parts both ran well (getting nearly the same number of Views, which is unusual).

 

[SimonDoom]

I'll echo what others say. Meaningful responses from readers are few and far between. I enjoy those I get, and I monitor feedback (views, votes, comments, scores, favorites) closely to glean whatever useful information I can from the data.

On those few occasions when I get a highly positive and substantive response, I'm happy. If someone sends me an email or a PM about one of my stories, I try to respond promptly and to be grateful for and encouraging of feedback.

My general rule is to try to write the best stories I can by my own standards, rather than by my readers' standards, but I do write some stories with reader reaction and response in mind. In addition, trying to be responsive to reader concerns and criticisms has helped me sharpen my writing in a few areas, such as correct word choice, character motivation, and plausibility.

 

[ElectricBlue]

In addition, trying to be responsive to reader concerns and criticisms has helped me sharpen my writing in a few areas, such as correct word choice, character motivation, and plausibility.

And tenses, I'll never forget tenses.

"Awww, that's so sweet," said Suzie. And she was .

 

[JaxRhapsody]

This might be an odd question, but I just had a looooooong conversation with a group of artists friends about the creator-audience-relationship and I thought it could be interesting to see how people here look at it.

Now, I originally come from the visual arts world myself, where the relationship with your audience is quite different. Especially in an age where images and visual art are mass-consumed and are rapidly being hollowed out.

Do you interact with your readers at all? Are they just a meaningless crowd, or do you use them as a resource to reflect on your own work? Do you have an audience outside of Literotica? Are audience reactions like ratings and comments something that you care about at all? Is growing your audience a specific goal of yours?

These are, of course, very personal questions where there is no right or wrong way to do it, only different attitudes. But I'd love to hear what other writers think about this anyway.

My readers don't PM me and I don't respond to their comments. Not here, anyway. I write it, they read it, and they better like it.

 

[Liethra]

To add my own two cents:

Audience interaction is actually rather important to me. Not so much here yet, obviously, you can only do so much with one comment over 14k views. But having some kind of back-and-forth with people makes it feel like I'm not just throwing stuff into a void.

The ratings and views don't really bother me much beyond gauging interest - got really fed up with metrics after trying to make instagram work for my art. At least there are no algorithms to fight here...

More than just having an audience, I really enjoy collaboration. So I always try to find people that I could work with among those that enjoy what I do. People who just passively consume might as well be bots really. So when I find someone whose work I really enjoy, I try to reach out myself.

 

[NotWise]

It's hard to gauge the audience. The Lit Readers are nothing if not heterogeneous.

I write what I want to write and for feedback I depend on beta readers in part and on the readers' score. I follow the scoring closely, so I'm looking at details to judge the result.

Comments aren't always useful. I typically get rather few. Many are from friends, and I can't take those as representative of the readers. Others focus -- usually negatively -- on details I regard as insignificant.

Given limited feedback, the audience I write for may be as much a figment of my imagination as the stories I write.

 

[SamScribble]

I write first for myself. If I don’t enjoy what I write, there’s not much point in writing it. And, secondly, I write for a small handful of literate readers who enjoy gentle erotica. I’m not exactly sure how many of them there are; I sense their numbers may be in the hundreds rather than the thousands.

When I first started posting on Lit I used to get a lot of ‘you fucking useless limey’ type comments. These came almost exclusively from Mr and Mrs Anonymous. So I turned off the anonymous comments option. If you want to leave a comment, you also have to leave a name. Of course, that doesn’t stop Mr and Mrs Anonymous from leaving a one-bomb, but these tend to get tidied in ‘the sweeps’.

If readers want to engage, I’m happy to engage. But mostly they just tell me happy stories. Here’s a recent example: https://www.literotica.com/s/an-actress-prepares-1

 

[yukonnights]

It's hard to gauge the audience. The Lit Readers are nothing if not heterogeneous.

I write what I want to write and for feedback I depend on beta readers in part and on the readers' score. I follow the scoring closely, so I'm looking at details to judge the result.

Comments aren't always useful. I typically get rather few. Many are from friends, and I can't take those as representative of the readers. Others focus -- usually negatively -- on details I regard as insignificant.

Given limited feedback, the audience I write for may be as much a figment of my imagination as the stories I write.

Mind if I just say; Ditto.

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

.....

 

[PennameWombat]

I'll echo what others say. Meaningful responses from readers are few and far between. I enjoy those I get, and I monitor feedback (views, votes, comments, scores, favorites) closely to glean whatever useful information I can from the data.

On those few occasions when I get a highly positive and substantive response, I'm happy. If someone sends me an email or a PM about one of my stories, I try to respond promptly and to be grateful for and encouraging of feedback.

My general rule is to try to write the best stories I can by my own standards, rather than by my readers' standards, but I do write some stories with reader reaction and response in mind. In addition, trying to be responsive to reader concerns and criticisms has helped me sharpen my writing in a few areas, such as correct word choice, character motivation, and plausibility.

I'm happy this thread happened. I'd have to hunt but I've seen other threads where authors discuss the hundreds or thousands of comments they've gotten, issues with being able to easily reply and manage all of them... It's heartening in a way that plenty of us here all express that we don't have those voluble readers.

But I'll echo the above sentiments overall. But I've overall had very few comments. But of those, I've had enough that said they'd definitely enjoyed the story and such to keep me going here. I usually don't respond except to direct questions, mainly around sequels.

I've rarely PM'd, as I've mentioned elsewhere I wrote one story at request of a non-author member who offered an idea and it caught my imagination enough, "can I do this?" Otherwise, no one talks to me

So I cannot say I 'engage' with my readers so much as I do try to use what's here (comments, ratings, favorites, viewers) to understand that I'm getting something across. Just not always sure what that is And like SimonDoom just said, use what I can glean to improve my writing and storytelling somehow.

 

[Maeven_quinn]

I occasionally get replies from people on here or other social media, but it's seldom writing or "fan" related. People have commented positively on my stories here, but the few times I've reached out to them I don't get much of a reply.

Giving and getting feedback is helpful and that's what I'm more interested in for forums like this.

 

[HeyAll]

I know a lot of people say that comments mean a lot to them. For me, if Lit never allowed comments or emails, it wouldn't really bother me. The views/favs alone is all you need to know that people enjoy your work and keep coming back.

But I answer all emails.

I don't have readers outside Lit. I only post here.

Growing my audience is important, which is why I try to focus on a few different categories; incest, group sex, lesbian, anal. Readers, in my experience, focus on a few categories that they like. So the more you spread yourself the more readers you'll get, and they often go to your profile and check out your other stories over time.