Story Types.

[Uther_Pendragon]

I'd just submitted my 6th story to Literotica. I came on occasionally to see if it had been accepted yet.
Instead, early this morning, I got *three* fan letters. That's more
fan mail in one day than I have received for the previous five stories.
Here's how the figures stacked up on March 4 in terms of categories:
Category reads votes date title
Mind control 10,584 73 03/03 Vials
Non-consent 6,394 41 02/15 Outage
Erotic co... 6,731 24 11/12 Inn
" 5,532 23 11/12 Turnabout is Fair Play
" 4,827 23 10/15 Hold That Thought
Humor 876 5 12/22 Prone is not Synonymous With Supine, OR Let Me Put It To You in Another Way
:
Yup! The first 24 hours not only produced three times
as many votes for the Mind Control story as for any
Erotic-coupling story, but it produced nearly twice as
downloads as well.
You'd think that staying around for a while would guarantee
more downloads. But that ain't necessarily so.

 

[Axeltheswede]

Story types

Your experience is very similar to mine, Uther_Pendragon. The exception is the incest category. In one of these threads I saw a mention of 100K reads for an incest story.

I wrote, what I thought, was a decent brother/sister encounter. 40,000 reads in the first 24 hours and over 600 votes, and 20+ feedback emails. Some of the feedback was out there but what the hell, diff'rnt strokes and all that.

My next highest read totals come from "Loving Wives" and I'm not surprised. I believe 'watching the wife' type fantasies are the largest single fantasy among men. I have one story that has gotten 27K in two weeks and some of the wildest emails from men and women. We all probably write in categories we like. But, it is kind of cool to see some high read totals and get lots of feedback.

I would like to hear what more experienced writers have to say on this thread.

 

[MaxSebastian]

It's true that different categories have different-sized readerships, and this can be a little annoying for writers of the less popular categories I suppose, but it was always going to happen when you organise an erotica site like this.

For me, the biggest difference is between stories I write in the romance section, which tend to get read by my regular readers only, and those in the erotic couplings which tend to get a lot of attention. Group stories get even more attention, but I don't tend to write incest or wife-swapping stories, so I could say much for those.

I think it's useful to be able to drop a story into a more popular category from time to time - as long as you are still writing what you enjoy - because I find that when I do so, a lot more readers also discover my stories in less popular sections.

But you can't just write erotica just to get votes!

Well, maybe you can.

 

[Mickie]

There are other factors than the category to determine how many reads a story might get early on. Things like when the story before was submitted (the readers will recognize your name easier if it wasn't too long ago) how many stories you already have out (developing a fan base) and even where it sits on the new stories page.

Although, yes, certain categories do get read more and faster than other categories.

Mickie

 

[Frederick Carol]

Mickie said, talking about reader perception of new stories, that there were many factors that influenced readers, including

even where it sits on the new stories page.

I couldn't agree more. My latest opus, I'll Just Borrow Matt, Sweetheart, was fortunate to appear second on the page of new stories. I received more feedback and votes in three days than ever before. The story was posted on Feb 16 and I checked on that day to see if it had been, to find that it had already received 155 votes from 2314 reads. The first twenty-four hours or so were magic!

Reality soon intrudes, but the story has now received 486 votes from 28089 reads. I'm well pleased, and you may quote me! It was the 'Mature' category, if that is significant.

FC

My Stories

 

[MysteryWriter]

comment

Ain't it all just peachy keen...

 

[KillerMuffin]

My highest read is an erotic couplings story, but it's got an audio with it, so I guess that makes a difference.

I think, I haven't checked but I was thinking about this last night, that my stories with the highest views are in Incest, Loving Wives and Anal.

 

[R M Roxinger]

My most successful story (145 votes & almost 40K views) is "Seductive Cindy" in the Mature category. The one ranking #2 (63 votes & 11K+ views) is "Sweet as Ice Cream" in the Loving Wives category. The rest of my stories are the 10 chapters of my novella The Adventures of R.M. Roxinger. One chapter has received 17 votes, but the others got 10 or fewer. The Novels/Novellas category gets far less attention than the other categories. Some chapters would have fit in the Fetish category; others would have gone under Interracial, the rest under Erotic Couplings. So the only way to keep them together was to put them under Novels & Novellas.

My experience with feedback was similar to what's described above. For "Cindy," I got 2 feedbacks within the 1st 24 hours, then a further one occasionally, & finally the feedback died down. I got only one feedback for "Sweet," & none for the Roxinger series. Stories are most viewed, voted on, & critiqued when new.

 

[Jigs]

The category of the story not only has a drastic effect on the number of readers, category likewise effects the scoring of the story. In many categories, a 4.50 average will put the story at the very top of its list. In others the readers are apparently more lenient in their opinions, and that same 4.50 average will not even put the story in the top 100 to 150 in popularity.

Perhaps this phenomena can be explained by the hard core, and to some distasteful, nature inherent to the category. Perhaps BDSM not only has fewer fans than the fantasy sluts of 'loving wives', the readers who do stray into the categories with harder edges do so without much enthusiasm and therefore pass a more harsh judgment on the quality of the story.

However, the popularity of incest seems to disprove this theory about down and dirty categories. Incest is certainly one of the more hard core and politically incorrect groups, yet it is overwhelmingly the most popular one on Literotica, and the average scores there are sky-high. Personally, I find the popularity of incest to be beyond explanation. I have never submitted a story that was specifically about incest, but whenever I have included an incidental incest scene, I have almost always received feedback objecting to the incest. It seems an awful lot of people fantasize about incestuous relationships, but those who don't hate it, and don't want to hear about it at all.