Making the reader finish

[StillStunned]

I just checked my story stats, and I have about 1082k views with 14.5k votes. This is spread across 63 stories, ranging from 181k views with 3k views (60:1) to 834 views with 36 votes (23:1). Overall, the view-to-vote ratio is 75:1.

Most people quote a rates of about 90:1 to 100:1. If so, I must be doing something right. Particularly if we take this as an indication of how likely a reader is to finish a story.

So I'm sorry to disappoint all you statisticians, but this is actually a thread about getting readers to keep reading.

We're forever discussing ways to get people to click on our stories, and of course that's the first step. Without the click, there's no reader, no vote, no comment, no disturbing email about how the story reminded the the reader of what they did to their mother when they had to share the guest bedroom.

But once we've got the click, what then? Assuming that the reader has some idea of what to expect from the category, title and description, how do we hold their attention until the end, when they wipe their brow/eyes/fingers [delete as appropriate] and leave a vote and perhaps even a comment?

Two of my high view count stories that skew higher than my average view-to-vote count most likely put readers off quite quickly. One is 2P POV, the other warns about a twist halfway through the story (the blackmailed student turns out to be trans and blackmails the professor). I think we can chalk those up on the side of "don't try this at home".

But how about some positive advice? Something more concrete than "I just try to write an engaging story." Sure, we all do that. But what do you do to engage your reader? Instead of just shrugging and muttering "dunno", take a moment and think about your writing style, or your approach to characters and plot, or setting the mood, or whatever.

Remember, there are no wrong answers. Except shrugging and muttering "dunno".

(I'll link to this thread in the other thread about the craft of writing.)

 

[StillStunned]

Personally, I try to make the reading as smooth as possible. Keep their mind's eye moving forward. Descriptions follow one direction: up to down, down to up, left to right, etc. No jumping around. Cause always precedes effect in narration.

It's tiny, but I think that it costs the reader energy to have to think backwards and then jump forwards again. You describe a character's hair, their lips, their breasts, their eyes, their hands, their clothes, it creates a jumbled picture that the reader has to piece together and put in the right order. If you describe hair, eyes, lips, breasts, clothes and hands, it's that much easier for the reader to imagine a camera panning over the camera.

If you can keep the reader's mind moving forward, their eyes will keep moving forward too.

 

[Bamagan]

So I'm sorry to disappoint all you statisticians, but this is actually a thread about getting readers to keep reading.

This is where I stopped reading. I was hoping for more stats.
3

 

[NuclearFairy]

Shrugs and mumbles, "I dunno."

But no seriously, I've noticed that my sci-fy/fantasy stories also have that same view to vote ratio. First day posting in that category it'll be even closer to 1 vote per 50 views. While my non-human stories it's more like 1 vote for every 150 views, even on the first day.

 

[NotWise]

Umm... Write a better story?

 

[MrPixel]

I just wish there was a way other than voting to confirm if a reader made it all the way to the end. I know from my own reading habits here I will click out of a story if it isn't my cup o' tea - typically about the fifth paragraph - but it will have been recorded as a "read".

Cases in point are my latest. 3400 reads, 23 votes. 148:1. One posted five weeks ago, 6460 reads, 19 votes. 340:1. Yikes. So, again... how many of those "reads" were folks who clicked out?

 

[filthytrancendence]

I feel like one of my criticism mantras is becoming, "Every sentence needs a reason to be here" that I think gets to the heart of this.

There are several reasons why this is true. When you're telling someone a story, there exists an implicit promise between you and the reader that the things you are saying are somehow relevant to the story you are telling. If you keep this promise, it makes it a lot easier for people to keep reading until the story is over. If you break the promise, you've broken a bit of trust with them. They've disengaged to some degree and now they have to make the effort to re-engage.

The reason that requires trust between the reader and the author is that the author is the one who is responsible for editing their stuff down. It's rarely immediately clear whether a given sentence keeps the promise as you read it. But when you pay something off, or delight them with a vivid description, or turn some seemingly useless nugget of information into an exciting twist, you've demonstrated your trustworthiness to keep the promise, and the more latitude they will give you to lay long sections of pipe before putting something through it.

Engaging the reader is a set of skills to carefully balance setup and payoff. You have to earn somebody's trust before you can set off setting up something complex or convoluted. You do this by giving them rewards that start small and slowly grow until the entire work feels like a setup to a climactic payoff.

All of that is pretty abstract and I've already written a lot, so I'll close by attempting some more concrete examples.

The reason we tell new authors to start with a hook at the beginning of their story is so that they begin immediately by building this trust. A hook can take a lot of forms:

• An evocative image in their minds
• A captivating detail that anchors a scene
• A joke, or just something insightful

But what they all have in common is that they immediately give the reader something interesting to chew on. Don't make them wait for it.

And don't stop there. Build on the image or detail or joke. Take that trust you've built and lay a bit of pipe. Expand the scope of your description, re-contextualize the detail, have another character put a twist on the joke. Whatever. Just make sure you're balancing your setup with a satisfying payoff. And then keep going in that direction until you've paid off all of your story threads. If you do that, you will have delighted the reader, and guided them all the way to the end of your story.

 

[MrPixel]

Oh... and as far as reader engagement and attention goes, I don't think there's one good answer. You can't please everybody. If you chance into something that draws readers, you may or may not end-up pandering to that particular crowd if your priority is building readership. Mine isn't; I write stories to suit myself and my interests. If they match someone else's, that's super, and thank you.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

This is where I stopped reading. I was hoping for more stats.
3

Why? 78.329% of all stats are made up on the spot. I read it on the internet.

 

[yowser]

The next step after the 'attract the eyeballs' bit (alluring title, intriguing description, etc. - I am not sure tags are as important as these others) is the story beginning. If I am not intriged after the first few paragraphs (and I am unreasonably fussy as a reader) then the story plain doesn't get read.

So the first few paragraphs are essential. As a reader I want to know 1. is the writer competent? (bar fairly low, but not ground level) 2. do I have questions about the character/situation/initial movement that I HAVE to know the answers to? 3. do I trust the writer to have perception, some degree of intelligence, confidence? I want to be in good hands, and can ignore all manner of other inconsistencies if the writer has these three qualities.

It's like going to a festival, a parade, a first date - am I intrigued enough to be involved? First impressions are devastatingly important.

 

[Bamagan]

Why? 78.329% of all stats are made up on the spot. I read it on the internet.

Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling...

 

[HordHolm]

Get the grammar and punctuation right. That might not matter to most but it matters to some, and poor grammar will absolutely discourage some readers to the point they back out of the story.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

The next step after the 'attract the eyeballs' bit (alluring title, intriguing description, etc. - I am not sure tags are as important as these others) is the story beginning. If I am not intriged after the first few paragraphs (and I am unreasonably fussy as a reader) then the story plain doesn't get read.

So the first few paragraphs are essential. As a reader I want to know 1. is the writer competent? (bar fairly low, but not ground level) 2. do I have questions about the character/situation/initial movement that I HAVE to know the answers to? 3. do I trust the writer to have perception, some degree of intelligence, confidence? I want to be in good hands, and can ignore all manner of other inconsistencies if the writer has these three qualities.

It's like going to a festival, a parade, a first date - am I intrigued enough to be involved? First impressions are devastatingly important.

Exactly this, people have short attention spans and there is a flood of content. If they read the first two paragraphs and aren't interested then it's super easy to hit the back button and find something else.

 

[StillStunned]

The next step after the 'attract the eyeballs' bit (alluring title, intriguing description, etc. - I am not sure tags are as important as these others) is the story beginning. If I am not intriged after the first few paragraphs (and I am unreasonably fussy as a reader) then the story plain doesn't get read.

So the first few paragraphs are essential. As a reader I want to know 1. is the writer competent? (bar fairly low, but not ground level) 2. do I have questions about the character/situation/initial movement that I HAVE to know the answers to? 3. do I trust the writer to have perception, some degree of intelligence, confidence? I want to be in good hands, and can ignore all manner of other inconsistencies if the writer has these three qualities.

It's like going to a festival, a parade, a first date - am I intrigued enough to be involved? First impressions are devastatingly important.

Exactly this, people have short attention spans and there is a flood of content. If they read the first two paragraphs and aren't interested then it's super easy to hit the back button and find something else.

So what do you do as writers to hold that attention beyond the first couple of paragraphs?

 

[Carnevil9]

I tried one experiment to try to elicit more responses: I crafted a story with a clearly ambiguous dilemma for the main character (there was still plenty of sex). Then I had the MC make his decision, and challenged the readers to agree or disagree with his decision. Hoping to get a good rousing discussion going.

No such luck. There were only two comments, and they both agreed that the MC made the only logical decision.

I guess the failure was on my part at not making it ambiguous (or interesting) enough.

 

[TheLobster]

So what do you do as writers to hold that attention beyond the first couple of paragraphs?

The easy answer is to start in media res. I despise it because it feels not only like a cheap trick but basically like straight-up cheating. It gets the reader invested into the scene, only to pull over to a screeching halt when you finally get the end and realize that this was just a teaser before we get to the "real" story. What follows after is usually a vulgar info dump of raw exposition, since the author feels like he "earned it" by essentially reordering two scenes from the draft and adding a few sentences of perfunctory glue.

But maybe this is just my pet peeve. After all, it's not like there hadn't been widely acclaimed works of art that didn't start this way.

A less blatant method is to immediately start hinting at the erotic content. Bathroom, wardrobe mirror, dressing up to go out, dressing down to go to sleep; scenes like that. Or you can even open with unambiguously sexual situation, but one that isn't the main dish; in one story, I opened with couple's post-sex conversation; in the other, the first scene is a solo masturbation session mixed with bits and pieces of exposition.

The hard way, I believe, is to "simply" make your narrative style compelling enough so that it can carry the reader through almost anything. Even in 3P, a little flair and personality to the voice of the narrator -- I like mine to be just a touch sarcastic, for example -- can go a long way without descending into outright Lemony territory.

 

[Writer61]

Making the reader finish​

Relieved to find that this thread is not about my initial assumption.

 

[TheLobster]

Making the reader finish​

Relieved to find that this thread is not about my initial assumption.

I'd say @StillStunned has demonstrated he's done his homework here.

He wanted to talk about keeping the reader's attention, and to this end he has skillfully showed us how to get the attention in the first place: using a well-crafted, irresistibly compelling title

 

[SimonDoom]

Judging from my own reading habits, I'd say that the most important thing is to get off to a good start. Of the stories I click on, I check out of the majority within the first 5-10 paragraphs. If the story is interesting enough to get me past that point, there's a good chance I'll keep going.

Don't let your story dawdle. The view:vote ratio is likely to be better for a shorter story, because people are more likely to read a shorter story.

Quality counts. For my own stories I've noticed at least some correlation between what I regard as my better stories and a higher likelihood of getting a vote.

Readers are more likely to vote if they like the story. Give the story a satisfying ending.

 

[SimonDoom]

One thing I have definitely noticed: if the story defies the typical expectations of readers of the category, then the vote to view ratio is likely to be less favorable. But that is not, IMO, a reason NOT to write such stories. The goal, after all, should not be to maximize the vote:view ratio for its own sake. Defying expectations is a perfectly legitimate goal. But be mindful of what is likely to happen.

 

[ThatNewGuy]

So what do you do as writers to hold that attention beyond the first couple of paragraphs?

I think of a story as a series of mini-mysteries or questions. The desire to know the answers to those questions drives the reader forward. They can be small questions, but they have to make the reader wonder "and then what"?

I generally try to avoid using examples from my own work, but I'll do so here because it's what I'm most familiar with. My story Abandoned starts with this sentence:

"I'd seen some weird shit inside abandoned storage units, but what I saw that night in November took the cake. By a mile."

That's the initial hook. What did he find? The answer comes a few paragraphs later: a coffin. This immediately raises new questions. What's it doing there? Is it empty? Will he open it?

More answers come soon after. There's a young woman inside wearing a dress straight out of Bridgerton that's splattered with mud. (Who is she? What's she doing there?)

She claims she's a vampire. (Is she really?) He takes her photo with his phone. She doesn't show up in it. (Is she going to hurt him?)

The narrator tells her that he's there to clear out the storage unit because the owner hasn't paid rent. She rails against an unnamed character for lying and saying she'd be able to stay there as long as she wanted. She smashes her coffin. (Who is this new person? What did he do to her? What's she going to do without a coffin?)

After some awkward back-and-forth, the narrator invites her to stay with him until she finds a new place. She accepts. (Is this a good idea? Is the damsel-in-distress act all a ruse?)

That's the opening scene. In each subsequent scene, I try to establish additional questions with the hope that the reader will want to keep going to find the answers.

Another thing I've found that keeps readers engaged is humor. I tried to inject some humor into the opening scene of Abandoned, and judging from reader response, it went a long way toward getting readers to identify with the characters and make them feel like real people.

As a reader, if you can make me smile or chuckle at something a character says, I'm pretty much yours until the end. I try my best to keep that in mind when I'm writing.

 

[StillStunned]

The easy answer is to start in media res. I despise it because it feels not only like a cheap trick but basically like straight-up cheating. It gets the reader invested into the scene, only to pull over to a screeching halt when you finally get the end and realize that this was just a teaser before we get to the "real" story. What follows after is usually a vulgar info dump of raw exposition, since the author feels like he "earned it" by essentially reordering two scenes from the draft and adding a few sentences of perfunctory glue.

But maybe this is just my pet peeve. After all, it's not like there hadn't been widely acclaimed works of art that didn't start this way.

I think there are degrees of in medias res. At one end, you have three Lit pages of world building and exposition before any named character is introduced. At the other end, the story begins in the middle of a three-page action scene and the reader has to somehow figure out who's who and what's going on.

A less blatant method is to immediately start hinting at the erotic content. Bathroom, wardrobe mirror, dressing up to go out, dressing down to go to sleep; scenes like that. Or you can even open with unambiguously sexual situation, but one that isn't the main dish; in one story, I opened with couple's post-sex conversation; in the other, the first scene is a solo masturbation session mixed with bits and pieces of exposition.

I'll admit to doing this. Hinting that something sexual is to come is only fair to the reader, I think, on a sex story site.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I just checked my story stats, and I have about 1082k views with 14.5k votes. This is spread across 63 stories, ranging from 181k views with 3k views (60:1) to 834 views with 36 votes (23:1). Overall, the view-to-vote ratio is 75:1.

Most people quote a rates of about 90:1 to 100:1. If so, I must be doing something right. Particularly if we take this as an indication of how likely a reader is to finish a story.

Not trying to one-up you, but I've got a total of @34k votes on @1178k views for a ratio of 34:1. Now, I may or may not be a better writer than you, but I sure as hell am not twice as good.

I think you're overlooking a few important factors.

First of all, I have about twice as many followers than you do. I would think followers are more likely to vote than non-followers.

Secondly, I don't know how many contests/events you have entered, but I think that that may skew voting totals. Winning a few definitely does.

And I think category may be a factor. I didn't look at the numbers specifically, but maybe it's worth checking to see if certain categories (I am thinking particularly of Novels and Novellas) have a higher ratio of votes to views.

I considered whether or not the number of chaptered series makes a difference, and it may. Most of the chapters of Mary and Alvin have good ratios, and there's 37 of them. But almost all were in the Top Fifty at one point, and I do believe there are a significant number of people who rank stories that are high on the list, for good or ill.

 

[StillStunned]

I'd say @StillStunned has demonstrated he's done his homework here.

He wanted to talk about keeping the reader's attention, and to this end he has skillfully showed us how to get the attention in the first place: using a well-crafted, irresistibly compelling title

I originally thought about calling the thread "Holding the reader's attention". I suspect it would have about three replies by now.

 

[NotWise]

The votes/view ratio isn't constant. It's higher when a story is new than it is when a story has been around for a month+. If you look at the average over time, then the ratio gradually drops. The ratio can also change substantially for short periods of time after you post a new story.

The category is the most dependable variable I see when I look at votes/view on my stories. Readers in Romance tend to be engaged, and they give more votes/view. Readers in EC (for instance) are not very engaged and they give lower votes/view.

If I see anything in my stories that increases votes/view, then it's the ending. My two stories with the highest votes/view have one thing in common. They have an emotionally intense climax. Valentines for Cinderella (Romance) ends with a complex scene that ties up all the threads that I've woven through the whole story, and ends with a marriage proposal in front of an adoring crowd. The Third Ring (SF&F) ends when the hero vaporizes himself to raise a monument to his love for his murdered wife. Neither of these stories has sex anywhere near the end, but there's another good example that does.

I find it hard to use "views" for anything quantitative. Views are a measure of traffic, and nothing more. To get from a view to a vote, the process is like: open the story->read->form an opinion->vote. There are too many hurdles between opening the story (a view) and casting a vote. It's hard to expect a very meaningful relationship between them.

Take the "emotional intense ending," for example. Watch Me! has that emotionally intense ending and comments showing that readers get it, but a low votes/view ratio. The story has had a ton of views (about 174K), but it's a long, odd story and a lot of people bail out before the end.