OMG One Bombs!

[Kumquatqueen]

Stories go live at 7 or 8am my time, and mine typically get half a dozen votes in the first 12 hours. Then all the Americans wake up, and there's always a bunch of downvotes overnight. Day 2 usually has some upvotes again, and then things settle down.

Some viewers tell me they don't like my spelling, unknown words, or generally not being American. Sometimes I warn up front for British English (and bisexuality, BDSM and booze, as needed), sometimes not. If the story starts "I left work and walked towards London Bridge" the location should be obvious - though I suppose it could be Arizona... even with the walking.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Stories go live at 7 or 8am my time, and mine typically get half a dozen votes in the first 12 hours. Then all the Americans wake up, and there's always a bunch of downvotes overnight. Day 2 usually has some upvotes again, and then things settle down.

Some viewers tell me they don't like my spelling, unknown words, or generally not being American. Sometimes I warn up front for British English (and bisexuality, BDSM and booze, as needed), sometimes not. If the story starts "I left work and walked towards London Bridge" the location should be obvious - though I suppose it could be Arizona... even with the walking.

I know some UK authors have mentioned a pushback against 'proper' spelling, but being from Canada, I use it most of the time. I've never had a complaint in so many words. Odd. What a silly thing to target.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I've seen the same pattern on nearly all my submissions. Story goes up at around 3 AM my time, I get a half dozen votes between then and midday, mostly all fives. Then in the afternoon, I get a handful of ones. Over the next day or two, the score climbs back up into the 4.7-4.85 range.

BTW, with my new one that went up today, I realized that if you write a very long story (70k words in this case), the votes will come in slowly, it will take you longer to get to 10 votes, and you likely will miss out on the benefits of getting a quick red H. Live and learn.

 

[Voboy]

I believe, with absolutely no proof, that most of a writer’s followers like the author, receive notifications of stories published, read the stories early on and are more inclined to vote higher than the general readership. As a result, in the first hours or first day or two, scores can be quite good and then drop/drift down as the general readers’ votes start coming in. Although one bombs can and do occur, much of the drop in scores is probably a natural phenomenon.

VERY few of my followers care enough to vote. I can say that (without doing any kind of spreadsheets or analysis) because most of my stories never get more than 150 votes. Quite a few never get over 100. And yet I've got well over a thousand followers.

I think a lot of those followers have no clue who I am, frankly. A lot of them are the kind of readers who follow 2-300 different writers.

I do often see an initial rise, followed by a dropoff, followed by a slow rise back up to within about .3-.5 of what the initial inflated "first few votes" was. Very similar to what @MelissaBaby has described just above. It's happened often enough that it's a definite trend in my work, but I don't follow the votes NEARLY carefully enough to know whether they are one-bombs. I don't really care, honestly.

 

[lovecraft68]

I've seen the same pattern on nearly all my submissions. Story goes up at around 3 AM my time, I get a half dozen votes between then and midday, mostly all fives. Then in the afternoon, I get a handful of ones. Over the next day or two, the score climbs back up into the 4.7-4.85 range.

BTW, with my new one that went up today, I realized that if you write a very long story (70k words in this case), the votes will come in slowly, it will take you longer to get to 10 votes, and you likely will miss out on the benefits of getting a quick red H. Live and learn.

Another thing about a long story is being able to tell any bombs right off the bat are deliberate because no one would have time to read it that quickly. Same for 5's in the case of someone who will give you the 5 because they like you, then eventually read the story.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Another thing about a long story is being able to tell any bombs right off the bat are deliberate because no one would have time to read it that quickly. Same for 5's in the case of someone who will give you the 5 because they like you, then eventually read the story.

True on both counts.

Also, it's kind of hard to believe that anyone read all the way through a 70k story they hated enough to give a 1.

 

[lovecraft68]

True on both counts.

Also, it's kind of hard to believe that anyone read all the way through a 70k story they hated enough to give a 1.

For 69,652 words everything was great, but then you used the word infidelity and reeeeeeeeeee!

 

[ElectricBlue]

I know some UK authors have mentioned a pushback against 'proper' spelling, but being from Canada, I use it most of the time. I've never had a complaint in so many words. Odd. What a silly thing to target.

I'm like you on this. I write in Australian English, which is English English with drop bears, and I've not once had a comment about my spelling or grammar. Either no-one reads my stories, or there's some other factor in play - but I have no idea what it is.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I know some UK authors have mentioned a pushback against 'proper' spelling, but being from Canada, I use it most of the time. I've never had a complaint in so many words. Odd. What a silly thing to target.

I suspect it's more the word choices than the spelling. There's nothing misspelt in a simple sentence like "All right mate, fancy a swift half down the Bull or a cheeky Nando's, or d'you have to scarper sharpish like?" but your average American wanting a quick wank doesn't instantly grasp the meaning and is pissed off (or pissed, in his mind...)

Canadian dialects are much harder to distinguish from American.

 

[EarlyMorningLight]

I'm like you on this. I write in Australian English, which is English English with drop bears, and I've not once had a comment about my spelling or grammar. Either no-one reads my stories, or there's some other factor in play - but I have no idea what it is.

My last story took place in the US, so I used American English. My next one takes place here in Aus, and I realised halfway through that I was writing in Australian English. I’ve lived roughly half my life in both places, so I find myself switching between the two subconsciously.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Canadian dialects are much harder to distinguish from American.

Drop bears can do it, so can you.

Mind you, Americans in loud shirts and wide asses, stomping through the bush - they do make it easier for the bears.

But with Covid and no international tourists, the bears are changing their diets, which is worrisome for the locals .

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm like you on this. I write in Australian English, which is English English with drop bears, and I've not once had a comment about my spelling or grammar. Either no-one reads my stories, or there's some other factor in play - but I have no idea what it is.

I've had one spelling complaint that I can recall, but it wasn't an Australian English thing, just a commenter taking "loosed" for a typo (it wasn't).

I get the feeling some categories may be more parochial than others on US/non-US English spelling?

 

[NotWise]

I've seen the same pattern on nearly all my submissions. Story goes up at around 3 AM my time, I get a half dozen votes between then and midday, mostly all fives. Then in the afternoon, I get a handful of ones. Over the next day or two, the score climbs back up into the 4.7-4.85 range.

BTW, with my new one that went up today, I realized that if you write a very long story (70k words in this case), the votes will come in slowly, it will take you longer to get to 10 votes, and you likely will miss out on the benefits of getting a quick red H. Live and learn.

I see a similar pattern, but my scores rarely go so high. The stories are usually public for five hours or so by the time I get up in the morning, and the first score I see is low. Relatively few stories have ever started out near or above the score where they eventually settled. The main examples of those are my three stories in Romance. There are only a couple cases other than the Romance stories.

Aside from the fact that I can usually say the scores will go up, the first score turns out to be a very poor indicator of the eventual score -- like, almost no correlation at all. That's due in part to the gradual increase in scores, but also to the effects of sweeps.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I see a similar pattern, but my scores rarely go so high. The stories are usually public for five hours or so by the time I get up in the morning, and the first score I see is low. Relatively few stories have ever started out near or above the score where they eventually settled. The main examples of those are my three stories in Romance. There are only a couple cases other than the Romance stories.

Aside from the fact that I can usually say the scores will go up, the first score turns out to be a very poor indicator of the eventual score -- like, almost no correlation at all. That's due in part to the gradual increase in scores, but also to the effects of sweeps.

Someone has probably done an analysis of this, but I get the impression that readers in the categories I have written in the most, Romance and Novels and Novellas, are fairly generous with scoring.

 

[NotWise]

Someone has probably done an analysis of this, but I get the impression that readers in the categories I have written in the most, Romance and Novels and Novellas, are fairly generous with scoring.

The few stories I have in those categories all score well. The Romance readers are pretty friendly if you give them a Romance. Anything else, and the scores are often in the 3s.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I see a similar pattern, but my scores rarely go so high. The stories are usually public for five hours or so by the time I get up in the morning, and the first score I see is low. Relatively few stories have ever started out near or above the score where they eventually settled. The main examples of those are my three stories in Romance. There are only a couple cases other than the Romance stories.

Aside from the fact that I can usually say the scores will go up, the first score turns out to be a very poor indicator of the eventual score -- like, almost no correlation at all. That's due in part to the gradual increase in scores, but also to the effects of sweeps.

Someone posted some stats last year. According to those Romance has one of the higher average scores at 4.33. Novella's was the absolute highest at 4.44, but there were only 5 entries during the time surveyed so the stats might be skewed.

My experience is similar to other peoples, my scores often start low and climb. My latest one had a couple of early 1-bombs, started from about 3.5 and has now climbed to 4.36 after a couple of weeks. I've seen the same pattern play out nearly every time I've posted a story.

 

[Otto26]

Hmm... Y'all are talking about getting 200+ votes within hours of posting. I've got 23 published works and one of them, after being online for 15 years, has received more than 300 votes in all that time. The rest are all less than 200 and most of them are less than 50. So the kind of numbers you're talking about are pretty alien to me. I'm not complaining about my low numbers, I write stories with sex rather than sex stories and they tend to be four or more pages long and that will keep numbers low, I'm just saying that you're complaining about an artifact of the kind of numbers I can only dream about.

Though, even with those low numbers, I still get one-bombs. My favorite came from a person who wrote "! gave it a 00. It should have been two lower, one off for every page after page one--Unfortunately I could not do that" I also get complaints about story elements, people tend to hate my use of Esperanto in a couple of stories, for example. Frustrating, but unless your goal is big numbers you just have to move on, write what you want to write, and let the sweeps do their job.

 

[8letters]

I don't pay much attention to the rating of my stories on their first day. For those that do, what pages get updated the most frequently and how often? The choices are: the Story Info box on the story itself, your works page, the category hub of your story, your submissions page, the top list for your story category.

 

[8letters]

I captured all the last-30-days top lists yesterday and today (3440 stories in today's pull). I looked for stories that had one vote more today than yesterday and calculated what that vote was. The number of each votes were:
1 - 3
2 - 3
3 - 4
4 - 19
5 - 69

The one votes were all in different categories. The one and two votes were all in different categories except Fetish had two 2-votes.

I'm surprised at how few one-votes there were. I thought they'd be more one-votes than two-votes and three-votes combined. Given the quantity of the other votes, I would have guessed ten one-votes.

Edit: This analysis doesn't give a good estimate of the number of low votes. See NotWise post two posts down as to why.

 

[Bazzle]

Fetish seems to be difficult one to get high scores, as everyone has their own fetish...
I tried entering nude day with a smoking fetish story...it hasn't done well. One person complained about littering! Grrr.

 

[NotWise]

I captured all the last-30-days top lists yesterday and today (3440 stories in today's pull). I looked for stories that had one vote more today than yesterday and calculated what that vote was. The number of each votes were:
1 - 3
2 - 3
3 - 4
4 - 19
5 - 69

The one votes were all in different categories. The one and two votes were all in different categories except Fetish had two 2-votes.

I'm surprised at how few one-votes there were. I thought they'd be more one-votes than two-votes and three-votes combined. Given the quantity of the other votes, I would have guessed ten one-votes.

That does not surprise me. I've been saying that 1* votes are not as common as writers like to think they are.

That said, those data average to a score just over 4.5, which seems high to me. Your numbers have a systematic bias to the high side because low votes are missing from the 30-day list for categories with more than 250 stores in 30 days.

I don't know how important that is. For my own stories the distribution of observed votes comes out to:

1 - 44
2 - 54
3 - 125
4 - 484
5 - 3043

That distribution is biased to the high side (avg 4.71). The distribution of estimated votes is:

1 - 57
2 - 79
3 - 196
4 - 491
5 - 1469

That distribution compliments the first; it's biased to the low side (avg 4.41), but 1* votes are still the least common vote.

Those distributions don't include the votes removed. The distribution of swept votes (both estimated and observed) is:

1 - 34
2 - 43
3 - 45
4 - 31
5 - 229

Look at that! 1* votes are still the least common votes. 5* votes are (by far) the most commonly removed votes, but the average vote removed (3.99) is lower than the average vote cast, so the sweeps cause a net increase in the scores.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

Not sure if any of these stats were compiled when you might have had a story in a contest, but I always get one-bombed whenever I've got a story entered. Happens every time.

 

[NotWise]

Not sure if any of these stats were compiled when you might have had a story in a contest, but I always get one-bombed whenever I've got a story entered. Happens every time.

I think about half of my stories are contest stories.

 

[KeithD]

I know some UK authors have mentioned a pushback against 'proper' spelling, but being from Canada, I use it most of the time. I've never had a complaint in so many words. Odd. What a silly thing to target.

Quite possibly from the arrogance of calling it "proper" spelling rather than the British variant.

 

[JGittes]

I don't pay much attention to the rating of my stories on their first day. For those that do, what pages get updated the most frequently and how often? The choices are: the Story Info box on the story itself, your works page, the category hub of your story, your submissions page, the top list for your story category.

In my experience, the only accurate update is the 'Your Works' page. There may be occasional updates on the other pages you mentioned, but I can't discern a pattern.