Question for "veteran" Lit authors

[Eve_of_destruction]

I've only written one story so far, and I have a question about the number of votes counted and the scores. The first few weeks after my story was published, I of course saw the number of people voting on the story go a bit higher each day. The number of people who read The Dance and emailed comments to me reflected those numbers. However, for about the past 3 weeks, my score and the number of people who voted have stayed the same - although I still receive feedback via email each day from guys telling me they had just read The Dance, and wanting to know if i was writing a second part.

Does it sometimes take awhile to get new data uploaded, or are all the people in the last 3 weeks who took the time to not only read my story, but also email me, not voting? Just curious... but it does seem a bit strange.

 

[KillerMuffin]

I don't consider myself a veteran, but I do know the answer.

People don't vote. May one one thousandth of all the people who click on your story actually vote on it. Laurel had a number of hits page worked up for the top hit stories. She's working on getting that actually in working order now. There were about 25,000 hits on the number one story on the list and the number of votes were about 115. People may email and not vote. I understand that happens a lot. Voting just doesn't seem to work for them. Maybe because it's harder to get back to the page you were browsing through stories on prior to voting. You click the index or category link you're right back at the beginning, a pain if you were on page 17 of a category.

Anyway, people flat don't vote.

 

[Guest]

Proof is in the data.........

And to back up Killer Muffins point, Laurel has just posted a "test" sampling of readership. On this board, check out:

"Times read feature - Special sneak Preview" By Laurel

One example....my story Mrs. Steel has nearly 700 votes. But...
24,531 people have actually read it!

Now...if that doesn't tell you that MOST people don't even vote, I don't know what does.

I'm actually just thrilled that so many people have actually read it!

To Sleep - Perchance to Dream William Shakespear

 

[XXplorher]

gagablmbleblb

Hi,

I’m simply in a quandary on who has the better post (ass)pic? Uhhh…. I want to peel (or slap silly) that shinyness off of Eve (la destrucrta)… but Killer M is absolutely RIPPING seams on me right now…. Did I say ga-ga? Wait…. “ga-ga”. There, I said it.
Holy fucking Christ, get ahold of THIS squirtgun, woman!!

But back to the point……. Shit, I fucked up my head again. What was the point?

Flash idea – all pics related to posters must be REAL!!!!! Otherwise I’m a cardiac clown.



(I'll check that story........ ev-il *grin*)

 

[LaffWithMe]

I have posted a few stories on here and have experienced the same pattern of email responses. I seldom look at the the voting so I don't know if that pattern is the same.

I beleive that when a story is new, it gets a lot of hits because it stands out. People seem to gravitate to the word 'new'. When a story ceases to be 'new', it becomes just another story among the thousands and fewer people are going to discover it.

I count myself fortunate to get any email response, although I'm sure it would improve if I changed my gender to female <smile>. I like to think that the reason I get so few email thank-yous is because the reader's keyboard has become too sticky to function.

As to counting the number of hits a story gets - I like the idea. However, just because someone accessed a story does not mean they read it or read it completely. I think most readers look at several stories, read a few paragraphs, find that the story isn't grabbing them and move on.

 

[Natalie Nessus]

Voting is nice - feedback via email better