New Author - Multi-Part Story Getting Mixed Reviews

[SanguineSavage]

Hey guys! I've been a lurker on Lit for years, and finally posted my 1st story over the weekend. It's a somewhat slow-burn kinda story, and one I've been crafting in my head for years. The first chapter did OK, getting 4.3 stars. The 2nd chapter got posted earlier today, and MAN is that shit tanking! 3.9 stars. I don't understand why, as it's spicier than the 1st chapter, and no one has left any comments. How much does the rating actually matter? I was REALLY gonna shift things into 5th gear with Part 3, but the abysmal rating on my last one has me pretty discouraged. Could it simply be the category I posted in? Like some categories are more brutal in their ratings than others?

If my writing is shit, then I can understand that LOL! I just wonder how much of it is my skill level, and how much of it is people being salty that I haven't gotten to the hardcore sex stuff yet.

 

[RowanWrites]

Would you like some feedback?

I have seen stories with negligible sex get good ratings, so my first hunch is that it is not *only* the slow-burn aspect of it. There are a lot of factors that end up mattering: category, number of readers, proportion of readers-to-raters, the handling of the arc and chapter transitions.

I like to think that ratings are the most substantive metric, but there is no absolute guide to what is "good or bad" -- some categories tend to attract a lower-voting audience, others tend to invite less voting, but those votes are generally more positive...

 

[SanguineSavage]

Would you like some feedback?

I have seen stories with negligible sex get good ratings, so my first hunch is that it is not *only* the slow-burn aspect of it. There are a lot of factors that end up mattering: category, number of readers, proportion of readers-to-raters, the handling of the arc and chapter transitions.

I like to think that ratings are the most substantive metric, but there is no absolute guide to what is "good or bad" -- some categories tend to attract a lower-voting audience, others tend to invite less voting, but those votes are generally more positive...

Sure! I wouldn't mind some feedback! I noticed that some of my fav authors on here get low-4s ratings sometimes, which is insane to me as I love their content. I really don't know what people are looking for though, so some direction would really help. Thanks!

 

[Phantom300]

I wouldn't consider a 3.9 tanking. It might not be what your first one did, but it isn't a terrible rating.

From what I gather, series tend to get fewer reads as the chapters pile up, that's gonna make the random 1-bombers votes more impactful.

And category can matter, give us a link?

 

[SanguineSavage]

I wouldn't consider a 3.9 tanking. It might not be what your first one did, but it isn't a terrible rating.

From what I gather, series tend to get fewer reads as the chapters pile up, that's gonna make the random 1-bombers votes more impactful.

And category can matter, give us a link?

Sure thing! Sorry - I assumed people could access my stories by clicking on my name.
Here's my user profile: https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=6449726&page=submissions

 

[Voboy]

Quick question: is there at least one orgasm per chapter?

 

[SanguineSavage]

Quick question: is there at least one orgasm per chapter?

Nah, that's why I said it's a bit of a slow-build. I was building up towards the 3rd part, which was gonna be explosive.

 

[Voboy]

Nah, that's why I said it's a bit of a slow-build. I was building up towards the 3rd part, which was gonna be explosive.

It might not be this simple, but if I was a reader and you were looking to hook me into a multipart series and there wasn't some payoff in each chapter? I'd stop reading.

No offense. It's just how I roll. And I've heard similar things from my own readers.

ETA: I just checked quickly, and it seems you're just doing 1-2 page chapters? That'd be another turnoff. Many successful stories here are 5-9 Lit pages. You're parceling these out in tiny packets, then you're not even providing a payoff. In my experience, I don't think that's a recipe for success.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Story link: https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=6449726&page=submissions

You might also post this in the Story Feedback forum.

I can't see the rating on chapter 2, which means that it has fewer than 10 votes. At that point, one shouldn't read much into scores; a single voter on a bad day can make a big difference to your scores.

 

[SanguineSavage]

It might not be this simple, but if I was a reader and you were looking to hook me into a multipart series and there wasn't some payoff in each chapter? I'd stop reading.

No offense. It's just how I roll. And I've heard similar things from my own readers.

ETA: I just checked quickly, and it seems you're just doing 1-2 page chapters? That'd be another turnoff. Many successful stories here are 5-9 Lit pages. You're parceling these out in tiny packets, then you're not even providing a payoff. In my experience, I don't think that's a recipe for success.

Okay, that makes sense. Should I delete them and post parts 1-3 in their entirety, maybe?

 

[Bramblethorn]

It might not be this simple, but if I was a reader and you were looking to hook me into a multipart series and there wasn't some payoff in each chapter? I'd stop reading.

No offense. It's just how I roll. And I've heard similar things from my own readers.

IME, you can get away without a payoff in the first chapter or two, but if you're doing this you do need to give readers some confidence that there is a payoff coming up.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Sure! I wouldn't mind some feedback! I noticed that some of my fav authors on here get low-4s ratings sometimes, which is insane to me as I love their content. I really don't know what people are looking for though, so some direction would really help. Thanks!

You haven't lived until you've gotten a 2.83. Actually, my lowest score was 2, but with only one vote I guess it doesn't count.

Don't worry about what people want, because many of them don't know themselves. (There is some analogy here to voting in politics, I suspect.) Do what you want, and take some chances if you feel you've got something that's worth it.

 

[Voboy]

Okay, that makes sense. Should I delete them and post parts 1-3 in their entirety, maybe?

Personally, if the total length of the story is (let's say) five Lit pages, I think breaking them up into multiple postings is not nearly as effective as posting up all five pages at once.

If you do pull them and then combine them (which I'd recommend), I would change the title. Give it a fresh start.

I don't post too many series, but I try to make each part something of a self-contained story, so the reader wants more... but is still happy she put forth the effort to read.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Okay, that makes sense. Should I delete them and post parts 1-3 in their entirety, maybe?

Probably a good idea.

It's not uncommon for new authors to bite off more than they can chew. They post an intro and then get bored/overwhelmed/whatever and never actually complete the story, which obviously gets frustrating to readers. So it doesn't hurt to begin with a good-length slab of story to reassure readers that you have the staying power to satisfy them. As it were.

 

[SanguineSavage]

Thanks so much for the feedback guys! I think removing them and then re-posting them in one chunk with the new chapter could really help, so that's what I'm going to do.

 

[ElectricBlue]

This should really be in the Feedback Forum (and might get moved), but here goes:

The first several paragraphs are a back-fill info dump. Who cares what happened before, it's what's happening now that matters. But, I kept going, because you'd asked for feedback (I would normally be gone, at that point).

Your narrator is very flippant, the narrative becomes annoying, she becomes annoying. Then this:

I'm Riley, and you just scared the living shit outta me! Wait... your cat's name is fucking Barbara

She's literally just met the guy (she's looking for a place to live) yet she's talking like this? That pushes any suspension of disbelief right out the window, and that's when I stopped reading. I wouldn't give her a room, either.

I think you can write okay, but your leading lady isn't the classiest of creatures. Your scores might be down to the characters not being very appealing.

Having said this, I didn't finish the first chapter, so I might be unfair - but that's the way it rumbles. People jump out for any number of reasons, but some go on to leave scores, but no comments. It's up to you what you do with that information - just as it's up to you what you do with this comment.

I'd say, slow down a bit, think into your character's motivation and personality, and write a real person. You're trying too hard to be cool, or something, but I didn't much want to know Riley.

 

[NotWise]

Hey guys! I've been a lurker on Lit for years, and finally posted my 1st story over the weekend. It's a somewhat slow-burn kinda story, and one I've been crafting in my head for years. The first chapter did OK, getting 4.3 stars. The 2nd chapter got posted earlier today, and MAN is that shit tanking! 3.9 stars. I don't understand why, as it's spicier than the 1st chapter, and no one has left any comments. How much does the rating actually matter? I was REALLY gonna shift things into 5th gear with Part 3, but the abysmal rating on my last one has me pretty discouraged. Could it simply be the category I posted in? Like some categories are more brutal in their ratings than others?

To answer the question in bold, the rating matters exactly as much as you make it matter. There's at least a dozen reasons why you might not get the score you want, and some of those may be irrelevant or irrational. When it' said and done, your own satisfaction is the only thing you're responsible for.

 

[Voboy]

This should really be in the Feedback Forum (and might get moved), but here goes:

The first several paragraphs are a back-fill info dump. Who cares what happened before, it's what's happening now that matters. But, I kept going, because you'd asked for feedback (I would normally be gone, at that point).

Your narrator is very flippant, the narrative becomes annoying, she becomes annoying. Then this:


She's literally just met the guy (she's looking for a place to live) yet she's talking like this? That pushes any suspension of disbelief right out the window, and that's when I stopped reading. I wouldn't give her a room, either.

I think you can write okay, but your leading lady isn't the classiest of creatures. Your scores might be down to the characters not being very appealing.

Having said this, I didn't finish the first chapter, so I might be unfair - but that's the way it rumbles. People jump out for any number of reasons, but some go on to leave scores, but no comments. It's up to you what you do with that information - just as it's up to you what you do with this comment.

I'd say, slow down a bit, think into your character's motivation and personality, and write a real person. You're trying too hard to be cool, or something, but I didn't much want to know Riley.

I do love writing snarky, disagreeable women. But those stories definitely don't do as well in my catalog, unless I redeem them eventually.

 

[RowanWrites]

Okay, that makes sense. Should I delete them and post parts 1-3 in their entirety, maybe?

No: don't delete them, unless you just want to start over completely.

1-2 page chapters are maybe a little less than people would prefer, but not by much. I go for 5k words per chapter because I *am* writing chapters of a longer story. Some people write 40k words per chapter, but they are lunatics.

 

[SanguineSavage]

This should really be in the Feedback Forum (and might get moved), but here goes:

The first several paragraphs are a back-fill info dump. Who cares what happened before, it's what's happening now that matters. But, I kept going, because you'd asked for feedback (I would normally be gone, at that point).

Your narrator is very flippant, the narrative becomes annoying, she becomes annoying. Then this:


She's literally just met the guy (she's looking for a place to live) yet she's talking like this? That pushes any suspension of disbelief right out the window, and that's when I stopped reading. I wouldn't give her a room, either.

I think you can write okay, but your leading lady isn't the classiest of creatures. Your scores might be down to the characters not being very appealing.

Having said this, I didn't finish the first chapter, so I might be unfair - but that's the way it rumbles. People jump out for any number of reasons, but some go on to leave scores, but no comments. It's up to you what you do with that information - just as it's up to you what you do with this comment.

I'd say, slow down a bit, think into your character's motivation and personality, and write a real person. You're trying too hard to be cool, or something, but I didn't much want to know Riley.

That's perfectly fair - I had my reasons for writing her that way, though. The way she talks is pretty spot-on with how young millennials speak to each other, speaking from experience. They are markedly more casual in their manner of speaking, and generous with their cursing, so it IS a real person, but that may be perceived differently depending on the age and/or life experience of the reader. She IS very flippant, and mainly the reason I wrote her that way was to set up a sort of scenario where she gets her come-uppance. I'll try to re-think her character - but making a likeable and relatable character will make it kind of difficult for me to get the story to move in the direction I'm wanting it to go.

Also, I found it interesting that you didn't like having the background information. I find it difficult to engage with the stories on Lit that don't build their characters a bit first before diving into the nasty stuff, but I'll see what I can do.

 

[RowanWrites]

The first several paragraphs are a back-fill info dump. Who cares what happened before, it's what's happening now that matters. But, I kept going, because you'd asked for feedback (I would normally be gone, at that point).

I think you will get a lot of variance on this.

I personally, and I think many readers, do appreciate having some context. I think the opening paragraphs could have been more dramatic, or told in a way that has a little more power, but I wouldn't call them a total info-dump. The level of desperation that the protagonist brings to the negotiation is important, especially for this story.

 

[SanguineSavage]

I do love writing snarky, disagreeable women. But those stories definitely don't do as well in my catalog, unless I redeem them eventually.

Oh def, no hate to electricblue at all - they're not the only one that feels that way, it seems. But it IS terribly fun, and I feel like it gives the character a little more life, as opposed to the 'yes-man' type of women I tend to see featured in these stories.

Edited: sorry I named the wrong commenter.

 

[Emotional]

I have read thousands of stories here, I will try to read them tomorrow and give you feedback

 

[ElectricBlue]

She IS very flippant, and mainly the reason I wrote her that way was to set up a sort of scenario where she gets her come-uppance. I'll try to re-think her character - but making a likeable and relatable character will make it kind of difficult for me to get the story to move in the direction I'm wanting it to go.

Also, I found it interesting that you didn't like having the background information. I find it difficult to engage with the stories on Lit that don't build their characters a bit first before diving into the nasty stuff, but I'll see what I can do.

Ahh, okay, a come uppance, just deserts type story. That being the case, some better foreshadowing early on, maybe? Coming in cold on the character, you've got to give readers someone to engage with. Tough to do, with an unlikable character. Why should I care about her, if you don't, know what I mean?

The thing about infodumps, blocks of background up early, is this: how is it relevant to the story? It very often isn't, so are we expected to remember all this stuff? All of it? Part of it? I dread a story that begins, "I was on term break and..." - which is how oh so many stories start - this one follows a similar pattern, but really, tells me nothing I want to know.

It's better, I think, to dole out what backstory you need, when you need it, but not before (and very often, you find you don't need it at all). Building a character is one thing (and can be done in a few graceful sentences) but you don't need a life history to do It.

Compare the beginning of this story - EB shameless self-promotion - and ask yourself, are you intrigued enough to continue? (You might not be, but there's not one second of back story, which is the point I'm making). And she's definitely not a "yes, man" kind of a woman, quite the opposite.

As I say, you can write, you have the technical stuff pretty much okay (nothing jumped out as diabolical, unlike many first stories); and the fact that you brought the story here for comment is an indication that you're thinking about it all - which is always a good sign. Keep going, you'll be fine .

 

[Bramblethorn]

At the end of Chapter 1:

David beams. "I'm so glad we could come to an agreement. This will be quite the... mutually beneficial arrangement," he says ominously.

WHOOOOA, meta!!

This threw me out of the story. I didn't understand what Riley meant by "Whoa, meta" and I had to stop and figure it out. It took me a moment to figure out what was probably intended here:

David beams. "I'm so glad we could come to an agreement. This will be quite the... mutually beneficial arrangement," he says ominously.

***End of Chapter 1***

Hi, this is your author speaking. Did you notice how I dropped the title of the story into David's speech there? Cute huh?

When you're telling a story, most of the time you want to keep your readers immersed in the story, feeling as if they were there themselves. You don't want them thinking "this is a fictional story I'm reading, which somebody made up, which is not real".

What you're doing here breaks that immersion in two different ways.

The first is that the way it's written is confusing. POV shifts generally work best when the shift is clear to the reader. There are various ways of doing this. You can make it explicit with things like "John's POV", or you can use stylistic tricks (e.g. normal text for the main POV, italics for passages from a secondary POV), or limit yourself to only switching POVs at the beginning of chapters where readers are more likely to be expecting some kind of shift. But here you didn't give any of them.

Reading a story should feel like taking a long journey on a train, looking at the scenery go by the window. If the train stops and the driver suddenly makes me look at the directions to try to understand where we're going next, that's bad.

The second is that you're explicitly breaking the fourth wall. This can sometimes be an effective technique but it needs very careful use; by default, all it achieves is to break that immersion. I'm going to quote myself here, from a How-To I've been working on:

Don’t use techniques just for the sake of using techniques.

“The director … has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.” - Roger Ebert, reviewing “Battlefield Earth”.

Flashbacks, plot twists, point-of-view shifts, breaking the fourth wall: there are a lot of clever narrative techniques out there, and we’ve all seen them used by professionals to dazzling effect. It can be tempting to squeeze those techniques in wherever we can, because… that’s what clever writing looks like, right?

But is that really the object here?

...If my readers are sitting there thinking “oh look, Bramble is Doing A Symbolism, how clever!” then they’re not actually in [POV character]’s head; they’re in mine. That’s not where I want them to be.

...

Good writing is invisible, while you’re reading it. As my buddy AwkwardMD is wont to say, symbolism and flashbacks and all these techniques are tools, not decorations. There is a time and a place for them—I’ll talk more later about some of their strengths—and you should be aiming to pick the right tools for the occasion, not to impress readers with the size of your toolkit.

Here, you're not just using technique for the sake of technique, you're using technique (fourth-wall-break) to draw your readers' attention to the technique you just used (title drop).