Ratings. Is it a bit sad that I check them a lot?

[Thenaughtypen]

Hi,

Pretty new to erotic writing, but massively enjoying it. My second book, a historical novel, is just massively fucking hard work and I am stuck. This has proven to be an absolutely brilliant way to get the writing brain engaged and have some fun with new stuff. My normal may just get racier.

Anyway - I have a confession in that I am becoming a little obsessed with ratings. I don't have facebook, instagram, twitter or so on, but I understand the culture of likes and follows, and how easy it is to be seduced.

So - how do other writers feel? Do they matter? Can you shrug off disappointment of someone who doesn't like what you think is good? Do you write for the crowd because of the ratings?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

No, it's not sad at all. I think we all, when we were first starting out here, checked them continuously. I did, in the beginning. Now, meh.

As I write for myself and write what I would like to read, I have found myself not giving a crap about ratings. Although they are nice when they are above halfway.

Good luck with the book and welcome to the nut house.

 

[Brutal_One]

I’d agree with the sentiment from ZEB. In some cases you may get a lower rating but in my cases I kind of expected it. It’s a bit different for me anyway as I am writing primarily an ongoing series, I typically have very short 1 Lit page long chapters. Often for that length there may not be much erotic or explicit sex but it’s advancing character relationships or a few new bits of plot. I did start tracking more for interest but now only check about twice a month. Unless recent chapters the score does not change much anyway so if I am happy with the score or even if not as long as the plot and character advancement works I am satisfied with the submission. Brutal One

 

[Omenainen]

I’m also new here, and I do check mine a lot, and I do think it’s a bit sad

The thing is, the ratings change up and down over time, with sweeps and more votes etc. So it’s more a question of general level than the last decimal accuracy. It also stabilizes once there’s a certain amount of votes. But of course it’s addictive, especially the first votes when a new story gets published.

 

[sirhugs]

I am far from new here, and when a new story goes up, I still check obsessively, but once it has enough votes to stabilize a bit, I tend to just rely on a daily check up.

 

[Emirus]

I have a confession in that I am becoming a little obsessed with ratings.

When writers begin they do obsess over the ratings their stories receive. But I can’t understand why you feel that way. Your three stories are 4.85, 4.71 and 4.77. There are long standing writers with many stories under their belt who would be happy to have their stories score that high.

I do appreciate that all three stories are new and the ratings may go down but if it happens it happens. There’s nothing you can do about it.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Scores also depend on the category you publish in. All my Incest/Taboo stories score high as do my Sci-Fi stories.

It's my stories in Loving Wives that struggle because of the all the different factions there who hate a particular type of LW story.

 

[SimonDoom]

It's perfectly normal to care about the scores your stories get. But try not to get TOO obsessed about them, or to let scores affect what you publish or how much fun you are having.

Unless you are in the running for placing in a contest, it makes no difference whether your story has a 4.8 or a 4.7. A score may reflect a random attack by trolls. It may reflect how well the story "fits" with the category in which it is published. It may reflect the reader attrition that happens over the course of a long series. It may reflect many things over which you have no control and that have no bearing on quality, so don't take a score TOO seriously.

 

[dontcallme82]

I am writing my 1st story and have got in the habit of checking my ratings regularly. Just an itch I have to scratch even though I don't feel anything if the rating goes down a bit.

I think I made the mistake of putting it into the wrong category. I see it as femdom and as I wasn't sure what category to put it I put it in BDSM. The story is way too light to please the more hardcore readers.

 

[Emirus]

I am writing my 1st story and have got in the habit of checking my ratings regularly. Just an itch I have to scratch even though I don't feel anything if the rating goes down a bit.

I think I made the mistake of putting it into the wrong category. I see it as femdom and as I wasn't sure what category to put it I put it in BDSM. The story is way too light to please the more hardcore readers.

If you feel you’ve put a story in the wrong category submit it again with the word EDIT added to the title and in the notes ask Laurel to move it to the category you feel more suitable. You will keep your comments and votes. Alternatively do the same but put in the notes a request for it to be deleted. Wait until it’s disappeared and then submit it as a new story in the category you want and it starts all over again. Depends on how much you’re bothered about it.

 

[gunhilltrain]

It's perfectly normal to care about the scores your stories get. But try not to get TOO obsessed about them, or to let scores affect what you publish or how much fun you are having.

Unless you are in the running for placing in a contest, it makes no difference whether your story has a 4.8 or a 4.7. A score may reflect a random attack by trolls. It may reflect how well the story "fits" with the category in which it is published. It may reflect the reader attrition that happens over the course of a long series. It may reflect many things over which you have no control and that have no bearing on quality, so don't take a score TOO seriously.

I say that scores don't matter, but then I become a hypocrite later. If I'm in a bit of a slump, like now (and another site), I go, "What do these people want, anyway?"

 

[dontcallme82]

If you feel you’ve put a story in the wrong category submit it again with the word EDIT added to the title and in the notes ask Laurel to move it to the category you feel more suitable. You will keep your comments and votes. Alternatively do the same but put in the notes a request for it to be deleted. Wait until it’s disappeared and then submit it as a new story in the category you want and it starts all over again. Depends on how much you’re bothered about it.

Thanks for the advice.

The basis of my story is of a 19 year old man falling for an older BBW who subtly controls him into being submissive for other women.

So looking through the possible categories:

BDSM: it has the dominance/submission part but not sadomachism
Not Mind Control
Non consent/reluctance: has reluctance but definitely not a non consent story

So BDSM might be the best category but I have no doubt some people enjoying that
genre will see it as too soft for their liking.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Scores also depend on the category you publish in. All my Incest/Taboo stories score high as do my Sci-Fi stories.

It's my stories in Loving Wives that struggle because of the all the different factions there who hate a particular type of LW story.

Please don't take this personally, but what do think accounts for the popularity of incest stories, especially mother/son incest? I know, it's always other people's kinks that seem odd, not one's own.

Yet I am curious. I'm thinking of Michael J. Fox kissing Lea Thompson (his future mother) and going, "Ew, it's like kissing my own sister."

The one incest story I may do has a stepmother, so that's different. And there may be one about an aunt who is not a blood relative. Her husband, the uncle, is one.

 

[davion2308]

Every time

Every stinking time I log in to come here, I first take a quick stroll around the activity for my stories. Has someone commented? What were the scores? Did anyone start following me? What's going on?

Yes, I watch scores. Yes, they affect me and make me feel happy or sad depending on what they're doing. Yes, I allow random strangers to impact my emotional status for the day.

It's not sad. It just is. I don't judge those who check scores all the time. I don't judge those who don't care and write just to write.

 

[SimonDoom]

Please don't take this personally, but what do think accounts for the popularity of incest stories, especially mother/son incest? I know, it's always other people's kinks that seem odd, not one's own.

.

It's the taboo. In an increasingly progressive society, there are fewer taboos. But incest remains highly taboo. It's deviant. It's naughty. It's transgressive. All these elements are closely tied in with what people find erotic.

The stories also often tend to be somewhat playful, which increases their appeal.

I also think that for whatever reason Literotica, in particular, has come to be seen as a destination for incest stories, so there's a huge readership for them here.

 

[SimonDoom]

I say that scores don't matter, but then I become a hypocrite later. If I'm in a bit of a slump, like now (and another site), I go, "What do these people want, anyway?"

It's human nature. There's nothing to feel bad about.

My feeling about statistics is this: have fun with them, and try to learn from them.

I enjoy statistics, as a general matter, so I find it enjoyable to track how my stories do. It's an interesting value-added feature of Literotica, as I see it.

I also believe one can learn from the data if one cares to and tries to. For example, after a lot of observation a few things about scores are clear to me:

1. Publishing your story in the wrong category will hurt the score.
2. Publishing your story in the form of many excessively short chapters (under 1 Lit page) will hurt your score.
3. Scores tend to go up over the course of multi-chaptered long series, but all that represents is the effect of reader attrition. It says nothing, necessarily, about the quality of the story. If you see the rising scores as evidence that you're getting better, you might be fooling yourself.
4. You improve your chances for a good score dramatically if you follow basic story-writing guidelines relating to decent grammar and spelling, control over tense and point of view, and handling the mixture of narrative and dialogue well.

One thing I DON'T do, ever, is get freaked out about trolls and drops in scores and that sort of thing. I also don't hesitate to write and publish a story that I think might not get as high a score as previous stories. I think those are creative traps. The most important things for me are to stay creative, to keep getting better at my craft, and to keep trying to connect with more readers. Stats are ONLY valuable to the extent that they help me do these things.

 

[Voboy]

I check frequently just after a story posts (to see how it's being received) and when there appears to be massive 1-bombing going on (because it amuses me).

Keep in mind, there are other measures of how well your story is doing than its rating. I'm fascinated by the view count early on, not least because I don't know what it's based on, and by the number of favorites and follows. All of them go hand-in-hand in a way that took me awhile to be able to parse well. Fifty-odd stories later, I feel like I've got a handle on it.

But then, there's no guarantee; every now and then, a story either gets inexplicably bad or inexplicably good metrics. Some things just defy full understanding.

 

[KeithD]

I check them a couple of times a day for about a month after the story has posted along with check whatever comments have posted. I try to predict where the ratings will go but rarely am right. I rarely post a new story to Literotica, though--most of them were already in the marketplace for several months to a year or more-- so the attachment to the story isn't new. That probably makes the interest in the rating less. I get higher ratings at a couple of other Web sites, so that's enough for an ego stroking.

 

[gunhilltrain]

It's the taboo. In an increasingly progressive society, there are fewer taboos. But incest remains highly taboo. It's deviant. It's naughty. It's transgressive. All these elements are closely tied in with what people find erotic.

The stories also often tend to be somewhat playful, which increases their appeal.

I also think that for whatever reason Literotica, in particular, has come to be seen as a destination for incest stories, so there's a huge readership for them here.

I think I get that. And I did say that other people's kinks are the ones that seem strange.

I'm sure some people (including most of the ones I know personally) would look at my interest in certain BDSM practices and go, "Yuck. That is weird and disgusting." (I had no idea it was so prevalent until after the Internet was invented.) But, no surprise, I have my limits there too. I don't get the guys who dress up as maids and clean women's bathrooms. (I wish I could get somebody to clean my bathroom.) I don't get the leather hood thing.

Now I'm writing about bondage but, yep, not all of it. I don't get the "girls in cages" practice or the people who seem to have themselves shrink wrapped (that's what it looks like). Or course, I know they're fine with it.

 

[vanmyers86]

I watch my ratings (I even adopted the habit of a writer here who keeps a spreadsheet and records the data regularly), but I don't live and die by them. It's such an arbitrary thing to base my mood on. That said, if I feel a story is not getting the reaction I believe it deserves - especially during the trolling period when something is first posted and I watch the score plunge - I do get a little unhappy. But at the end of the day, this is a free site, and we all get what we get.

The comments are more important to me, because, good or bad, they give some insight into how other people responded, and how my stories struck them. I've got some wonderful readers, and I so appreciate when they take time to comment.

 

[gunhilltrain]

It's human nature. There's nothing to feel bad about.

My feeling about statistics is this: have fun with them, and try to learn from them.

I enjoy statistics, as a general matter, so I find it enjoyable to track how my stories do. It's an interesting value-added feature of Literotica, as I see it.

I also believe one can learn from the data if one cares to and tries to. For example, after a lot of observation a few things about scores are clear to me:

1. Publishing your story in the wrong category will hurt the score.
2. Publishing your story in the form of many excessively short chapters (under 1 Lit page) will hurt your score.
3. Scores tend to go up over the course of multi-chaptered long series, but all that represents is the effect of reader attrition. It says nothing, necessarily, about the quality of the story. If you see the rising scores as evidence that you're getting better, you might be fooling yourself.
4. You improve your chances for a good score dramatically if you follow basic story-writing guidelines relating to decent grammar and spelling, control over tense and point of view, and handling the mixture of narrative and dialogue well.

One thing I DON'T do, ever, is get freaked out about trolls and drops in scores and that sort of thing. I also don't hesitate to write and publish a story that I think might not get as high a score as previous stories. I think those are creative traps. The most important things for me are to stay creative, to keep getting better at my craft, and to keep trying to connect with more readers. Stats are ONLY valuable to the extent that they help me do these things.

Yes, I believe all of this. In fact, I've said some of these things on other posts, trying to convince other people to relax. But there are times when I or anybody else can't walk the walk.

 

[Fervid]

Ratings



"I am becoming a little obsessed with ratings. I don't have facebook, instagram, twitter or so on, but I understand . . . how easy it is to be seduced."

Exactly. I only started creative writing 6 months ago. I've found I really enjoy the process itself, but once I posted a few stories just to see how I was doing, I started following the ratings despite, I suppose, the obvious risk of becoming a karma whore.

Unfortunately, rampant trolling and infrequent, impenetrable countermeasures by the site make it hard to put much faith in ratings as a guide to reader satisfaction.

As a current example, here is how the rating/vote count of one of my stories has behaved over the last ten days. It spiked at 4.89/187 a couple of months ago, so it does get trolled a lot (until it gets down to 4.79, typically) and swept very occasionally:

4.79/211
4.86/206 (Sweep)
4.84/206
4.83/206
4.81/204
4.79/204
4.81/202
4.79/202

Weird. I do find that different categories give you vastly different experiences, though; E&V gets trolled assiduously, Romance not so much (or more likely, my Romance stories, in the 4.7's, aren't good enough to troll. That said, one just lost 12 votes in a sweep this morning, with a net result of -.01. I'll never know what that was all about.)

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Please don't take this personally, but what do think accounts for the popularity of incest stories, especially mother/son incest? I know, it's always other people's kinks that seem odd, not one's own.

Yet I am curious. I'm thinking of Michael J. Fox kissing Lea Thompson (his future mother) and going, "Ew, it's like kissing my own sister."

The one incest story I may do has a stepmother, so that's different. And there may be one about an aunt who is not a blood relative. Her husband, the uncle, is one.

I couldn't tell you. When I write those stories as far as I'm concerned it's just two people having sex. That they call each other mother or son or sister or aunt or uncle or cousin, doesn't matter to me. I do know other people like these kind of stories so I took a chance and wrote one. It got rave reviews, so I continued to write them. Mostly, Mother/Son, but some Brother/Sister and Cousins.

Yeah, when I think of kissing my mom like that, I too go Ew. Now my aunt as she is just my aunt by marriage and hot as hell... no ew there.

 

[SimonDoom]

"I am becoming a little obsessed with ratings. I don't have facebook, instagram, twitter or so on, but I understand . . . how easy it is to be seduced."

Exactly. I only started creative writing 6 months ago. I've found I really enjoy the process itself, but once I posted a few stories just to see how I was doing, I started following the ratings despite, I suppose, the obvious risk of becoming a karma whore.

Unfortunately, rampant trolling and infrequent, impenetrable countermeasures by the site make it hard to put much faith in ratings as a guide to reader satisfaction.

As a current example, here is how the rating/vote count of one of my stories has behaved over the last ten days. It spiked at 4.89/187 a couple of months ago, so it does get trolled a lot (until it gets down to 4.79, typically) and swept very occasionally:

4.79/211
4.86/206 (Sweep)
4.84/206
4.83/206
4.81/204
4.79/204
4.81/202
4.79/202

Weird. I do find that different categories give you vastly different experiences, though; E&V gets trolled assiduously, Romance not so much (or more likely, my Romance stories, in the 4.7's, aren't good enough to troll. That said, one just lost 12 votes in a sweep this morning, with a net result of -.01. I'll never know what that was all about.)

I've seen vote/score behavior like that. It appears to indicate a lot of sweeping, and some of that sweeping is sweeping away 5s as well as 1s.

With 200 votes, and after that number of sweeps, a story's score usually is pretty stable. And even though you may be puzzled, asking yourself "Is this a 4.84 story or a 4.79 story?", you know that it's really not an objectively meaningful question. What you DO know is that it's a very high score for nearly any category -- high enough in some to be high on a toplist.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

"I am becoming a little obsessed with ratings. I don't have facebook, instagram, twitter or so on, but I understand . . . how easy it is to be seduced."

Exactly. I only started creative writing 6 months ago. I've found I really enjoy the process itself, but once I posted a few stories just to see how I was doing, I started following the ratings despite, I suppose, the obvious risk of becoming a karma whore.

Unfortunately, rampant trolling and infrequent, impenetrable countermeasures by the site make it hard to put much faith in ratings as a guide to reader satisfaction.

As a current example, here is how the rating/vote count of one of my stories has behaved over the last ten days. It spiked at 4.89/187 a couple of months ago, so it does get trolled a lot (until it gets down to 4.79, typically) and swept very occasionally:

4.79/211
4.86/206 (Sweep)
4.84/206
4.83/206
4.81/204
4.79/204
4.81/202
4.79/202

Weird. I do find that different categories give you vastly different experiences, though; E&V gets trolled assiduously, Romance not so much (or more likely, my Romance stories, in the 4.7's, aren't good enough to troll. That said, one just lost 12 votes in a sweep this morning, with a net result of -.01. I'll never know what that was all about.)

There's an explanation in this thread: http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1528484