Multi-chapter stories with different categories

[gunhilltrain]

I have a couple of stories that might run to three to five chapters.

What is the best thing to do if the chapters have different themes? One might be characterized as erotic couplings and another might be called romance. Or there might be a chapter that has BDSM activities while the others don't.

Is it best to post the chapters in different categories? Or should I attempt to find an overall theme and submit them all to one place?

 

[nosebone]

I have a couple of stories that might run to three to five chapters.

What is the best thing to do if the chapters have different themes? One might be characterized as erotic couplings and another might be called romance. Or there might be a chapter that has BDSM activities while the others don't.

Is it best to post the chapters in different categories? Or should I attempt to find an overall theme and submit them all to one place?

For me personally, I think if you have a definite shift in theme it's best to post it in the more appropriate category. With that said, if you have a romance story and then suddenly shift to BDSM, you might find your follow up story 1-bombed back to the Dark Ages. This has happened to me, here and elsewhere. I only say this because I think most writers like to hear positive things about their many hours of toil. Readers tend to develop their own thought trains about the way a story should go and if you deviate, they're quite vengeful and repugnant. Likewise, readers in a new category likely won't read the previous chapters and take the story as a one-off and splatter it with excrement as well.

 

[SusanJillParker]

I have a couple of stories that might run to three to five chapters.

What is the best thing to do if the chapters have different themes? One might be characterized as erotic couplings and another might be called romance. Or there might be a chapter that has BDSM activities while the others don't.

Is it best to post the chapters in different categories? Or should I attempt to find an overall theme and submit them all to one place?

When I participated in Literotica's year-long Survivor contest, the most stories in the most categories wins, I wrote dozens of multi-chapter stories that were in different categories.

One category sometimes cannot encompass a longer work. Rather than to try in buttonhole it in one category, I suggest posting chapters where they belong.

Good luck with your story.

 

[Hypoxia]

Is it best to post the chapters in different categories?

No.

Or should I attempt to find an overall theme and submit them all to one place?

Yes.
_____

I tried the split-categories trick a few times. Viewership plummeted and readers weren't happy. A.k.a. the response wasn't good and there wasn't much of it. Not like Army chow, which isn't very good but there's lots of it.

Pick a category and stay there. EC and Mature can tolerate some mild kinks. especially if you've packed-in a loyal audience with earlier chapters. Romance has its own dynamic, not really suitable for kinky strokers. Group can accept almost anything as long as there are, y'know, lots of fuckers involved.

Avoid LW of course, unless you're a glutton for punishment.

 

[SusanJillParker]

Allow me to clarify my multi-chapter, multi-category position.

First of all, no mater the category, sex is sex. Seemingly, where most who read stories on this site prefer pornography to erotica, the more sex the better. Ergo, the more categories you write in the better, even within a multi-chapter story.

Being that the vast majority of readers read more than one category, the more categories you touch upon within your multi-chapter story, the more readers you'll attract. Trust me. Having written hundreds of multi-chapter and multi-category stories, I know this for a fact.

Moreover, there is no set formula. Write for yourself. Write whatever makes you feel good. Trust me, it's impossible to please an audience of twisted perverts. With all of the stories I've written, I've only written three out of the park homeruns that ended up on the all-time most read story list.

 

[SimonDoom]

Allow me to clarify my multi-chapter, multi-category position.

First of all, no mater the category, sex is sex. Seemingly, where most who read stories on this site prefer pornography to erotica, the more sex the better. Ergo, the more categories you write in the better, even within a multi-chapter story.

Being that the vast majority of readers read more than one category, the more categories you touch upon within your multi-chapter story, the more readers you'll attract. Trust me. Having written hundreds of multi-chapter and multi-category stories, I know this for a fact.

Moreover, there is no set formula. Write for yourself. Write whatever makes you feel good. Trust me, it's impossible to please an audience of twisted perverts. With all of the stories I've written, I've only written three out of the park homeruns that ended up on the all-time most read story list.

You've been doing this longer and have more experience to draw on, but I'm skeptical of this approach.

I checked out your submission list and scanned some of your multi-chapter stories. You are unusual in the degree to which you write stories in practically every category and your chapters within stories cover a wide range of categories, even categories that have nothing to do with each other.

Your stories follow the same pattern as everyone else, with the number of views dropping with successive chapters. That happens regardless how you categorize the chapters, so it's hard to tell if categorization had anything to do with it. There were a few cases where it seemed like there was a sharp drop off with a new chapter in a new category, but that doesn't prove anything definitively.

My impression of readers here is that many readers have very particular tastes, confine their reading mostly to a few favored categories, and find stories through searches and hubs peculiar to their tastes. If you post a subsequent story in another category, they may not even see it to read it.

It may depend on the category. I wouldn't recommend starting an incest series and then inserting a gay male chapter, for example. You'll just lose the incest audience, most of which don't want to read a gay male story.

 

[SusanJillParker]

Yeah but...

I have a different agenda than receiving lots of hits, votes, and high scores.

I write stories for fans for a small fee.

My agenda is that I want fans to send me e-mails with their interest of having me write them a story.

For every 100 e-mails I answer, I receive one request for a story. For every 1,000 e-mails I answer, I receive one request to write a multi-chapter story. For every 10,000 e-mails I answer, I receive one for a novel length story.

As long as the e-mails received aren't nasty, I answer all of my e-mails. There's money in answering e-mails.

Suffice to write, I spend as much time responding to e-mails as I do writing stories.

With every story that I write, I'm looking for that deep pocketed fan who loves me and my writing.

I have as many fans who want me to write their story as I have fans who give me money and gifts for all of the stories I've written. Writing stories under 15 different names is how I earn my living.

 

[SimonDoom]

Yeah but...

I have a different agenda than receiving lots of hits, votes, and high scores.

I write stories for fans for a small fee.

My agenda is that I want fans to send me e-mails with their interest of having me write them a story.

For every 100 e-mails I answer, I receive one request for a story. For every 1,000 e-mails I answer, I receive one request to write a multi-chapter story. For every 10,000 e-mails I answer, I receive one for a novel length story.

As long as the e-mails received aren't nasty, I answer all of my e-mails. There's money in answering e-mails.

Suffice to write, I spend as much time responding to e-mails as I do writing stories.

With every story that I write, I'm looking for that deep pocketed fan who loves me and my writing.

I have as many fans who want me to write their story as I have fans who give me money and gifts for all of the stories I've written. Writing stories under 15 different names is how I earn my living.

Got it. Makes sense.

Most authors don't do it this way, however, so their concerns would be different.

Another reason I like to maintain continuity of category is the aesthetics of it -- each story for me has an erotic theme, and I want to preserve that theme throughout the story. Others may have completely different agendas.

 

[gunhilltrain]

The stories that I'm talking about already exist, they were written before I found this site. The three main categories they might overlap are erotic couplings, BDSM and romance.

For argument's sake there might be two chapters about two people getting to know each other - romance? - and they might consummate things in the last chapter - erotic coupling?

Or a couple may have a BDSM scene in the first chapter and then later discuss certain things, both sexual and otherwise, later on the same day. Romance?

Even within a single-chapter story there may be fuzzy boundaries between categories. However, there are sometimes advantages to multi-chapter stories in that you don't have to keep reintroducing the same characters and settings.

 

[SimonDoom]

The stories that I'm talking about already exist, they were written before I found this site. The three main categories they might overlap are erotic couplings, BDSM and romance.

For argument's sake there might be two chapters about two people getting to know each other - romance? - and they might consummate things in the last chapter - erotic coupling?

Or a couple may have a BDSM scene in the first chapter and then later discuss certain things, both sexual and otherwise, later on the same day. Romance?

Even within a single-chapter story there may be fuzzy boundaries between categories. However, there are sometimes advantages to multi-chapter stories in that you don't have to keep reintroducing the same characters and settings.

You may get different answers from different authors, and ultimately it's your call. So I'll get that out of the way.

But if I were addressing these questions, I would ask: what's the main story arc? And in what category does that arc best fit?

Is it basically a romance, with a little rope play or cropping thrown in? Then put it in Romance.

Or is it a romantic BDSM story? If that's so, I'd put all chapters in BDSM and I'd make sure that each of the chapters had at least a few BDSM elements.

Erotic Couplings is a grab-bag, default category. Some stories do well there, but most of the stories don't get a lot of traffic. I don't recommend publishing chapters in that category.

In my opinion -- and this may not be everybody's opinion -- you should figure out what the overall story is, and base your categorization on that. Then make sure all your chapters have some elements that fit in that categorization so you don't lose your readers. If you start with a BDSM chapter, but the second chapter has no BDSM and is put in the "romance" category, you'll lose most of your BDSM readers.

I believe Romance in general gets more views than BDSM as a category.

 

[gunhilltrain]

It seems in the context of this site erotic couplings refers to concise, "fast and furious" descriptions of sex. My first submission was in that category. I got a decent rating, some constructive criticism and an anonymous person who dumped on it. Overall I'm glad I submitted it. (I wrote it long before I found this site.)

Romance, I thought, traditionally made the physical side of sex implicit rather than explicit. That's not necessarily true on this site but I'll have to explore more of the stories here. In any case how people make the approach to sex and the "aftermath" or whatever is at least as interesting as the act (or acts) itself.

I never imagined that mind control would have its own category.

I appreciate the feedback on this issue.

 

[MrKittyLuver]

I would say to pick the category that best fits the lion's share of your work, submit all the parts in that category and make very judicious use of tags to specify your sub-themes. This is in keeping with the work Manu is doing with the tagging system and is likely to yield the best results going forward.

Also keep in mind, there seem to be several "trump categories", such as incest/taboo and gay male. If your story contains elements for one of these categories, then your story should go in that category.

Since there are no rules carved in stone for this, just try to place it where you think it would be received best by the readers of the category you pick.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Thank you everyone, this has been very helpful.

I suppose the remaining issue is: how does one define the boundary between erotic couplings versus romance? I assume romance as defined by this site could include sexually explicit scenes.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Thank you everyone, this has been very helpful.
I suppose the remaining issue is: how does one define the boundary between erotic couplings versus romance? I assume romance as defined by this site could include sexually explicit scenes.

Romance readers are grown ups, and don't mind a bit of intense sex with their emotion. Give them emotion and intimacy, and explicit sex is fine. You definitely don't need to end each scene with dot, dot, dot.

 

[SimonDoom]

Thank you everyone, this has been very helpful.

I suppose the remaining issue is: how does one define the boundary between erotic couplings versus romance? I assume romance as defined by this site could include sexually explicit scenes.

I haven't published a romance story yet, but I've done a little digging and asked some questions. If the story is on the fence, put it in romance, not erotic couplings. It is likely to be viewed by more people that way. You can have some explicit sex, but readers in romance want the emphasis to be on the relationship, not the anatomy and sexual details.

Many more stories are published in erotic couplings than in romance, but that means that they drop off of the new story lists much faster. Your story probably will get more exposure in romance than in erotic couplings.

 

[Valint]

I suppose the remaining issue is: how does one define the boundary between erotic couplings versus romance? I assume romance as defined by this site could include sexually explicit scenes.

My expectation when starting a story in one of those categories is that the focus of a Romance story will be about the relationship, whereas an Erotic Couplings story will be about the sex.

That's not to say that you can't have both in a story, but typically one or the other is going to get the lion's share of attention.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Thank you, all of these replies have been very helpful.