The story behind the numbers

[driftwood55]

Hello there,

I am a fairly new writer. I posted my first story on the first of March. Three and a half months in, I have posted 18 stories. It has been fun to get into the zone of imagining different scenarios. Craving feedback, I was hoping for more than the 18 comments I've received so far. Considering 7 of those are reactions I wrote, that averages to about one comment every other post. I have only gotten one anonymous "This is trash" note. The rest have been supportive and encouraging. I feel lucky in that regard.

This brings me to the ratings. I have two series going - Cheerleader Lindsay and Adventures of Claudia. All the stories have been posted in the group sex category, apart from one that I submitted under nonconsent.

https://www.literotica.com/authors/driftwood55/works/stories

My first story has a 4.55 rating with 97 votes. This rating has slowly increased. When it got the "H" (hot label for 4.5 and above) I was encouraged to get another story to a similar level. Last week, I had six stories with "H" labels. Four of them were on my last five uploads. Cool, I thought, maybe this shows I am improving a bit, or at least matching the level of my first story.

This week, three of the "H" labels had vanished.

I enjoy analyzing stats and numbers. By taking a few screenshots to track changes, here is what I discovered:

One of the stories was sitting at a 4.5-star rating after 60 votes, equivalent to 30 5-star ratings and 30 4-star ratings, totaling 270 stars. Now the rating is 4.44 stars with 61 votes. This means the most recent vote was a one-star rating. I think this great example of how much one bad rating can tank a story's overall score. To get back to a 4.5-star rating, the story would need a streak of 7 five-star ratings in a row. One dinger does more damage and takes longer to recover from than I expected.

Knowing the rating slipped by as much as it did due to only one vote changed my perspective. Now I see the drop more as an annoyance than a disappointment. Imagine the effect of getting three 1-star votes in a row. 63 votes totaling 273 stars would produce a rating of 4.33. Recovering to a 4.5-star rating would require 21 five-star ratings in a row.

I am hoping new writers don't lose enthusiasm due to misreading a ratings drop. Screenshots and spreadsheets are two tools for getting a closer peek at the composition of the overall ratings. Don't let a few one-star ratings throw you off track. If you give out one-star ratings, take the time to consider that you will be erasing 7 five-star votes. I have read there are sweeps done at times to get rid of votes deemed improper.

Time to crunch the view count numbers. I will update with more thoughts.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Hello there,

I am a fairly new writer. I posted my first story on the first of March. Three and a half months in, I have posted 18 stories. It has been fun to get into the zone of imagining different scenarios. Craving feedback, I was hoping for more than the 18 comments I've received so far. Considering 7 of those are reactions I wrote, that averages to about one comment every other post. I have only gotten one anonymous "This is trash" note. The rest have been supportive and encouraging. I feel lucky in that regard.

This brings me to the ratings. I have two series going - Cheerleader Lindsay and Adventures of Claudia. All the stories have been posted in the group sex category, apart from one that I submitted under nonconsent.

https://www.literotica.com/authors/driftwood55/works/stories

My first story has a 4.55 rating with 97 votes. This rating has slowly increased. When it got the "H" (hot label for 4.5 and above) I was encouraged to get another story to a similar level. Last week, I had six stories with "H" labels. Four of them were on my last five uploads. Cool, I thought, maybe this shows I am improving a bit, or at least matching the level of my first story.

This week, three of the "H" labels had vanished.

I enjoy analyzing stats and numbers. By taking a few screenshots to track changes, here is what I discovered:

One of the stories was sitting at a 4.5-star rating after 60 votes, equivalent to 30 5-star ratings and 30 4-star ratings, totaling 270 stars. Now the rating is 4.44 stars with 61 votes. This means the most recent vote was a one-star rating. I think this great example of how much one bad rating can tank a story's overall score. To get back to a 4.5-star rating, the story would need a streak of 7 five-star ratings in a row. One dinger does more damage and takes longer to recover from than I expected.

Knowing the rating slipped by as much as it did due to only one vote changed my perspective. Now I see the drop more as an annoyance than a disappointment. Imagine the effect of getting three 1-star votes in a row. 63 votes totaling 273 stars would produce a rating of 4.33. Recovering to a 4.5-star rating would require 21 five-star ratings in a row.

I am hoping new writers don't lose enthusiasm due to misreading a ratings drop. Screenshots and spreadsheets are two tools for getting a closer peek at the composition of the overall ratings. Don't let a few one-star ratings throw you off track. If you give out one-star ratings, take the time to consider that you will be erasing 7 five-star votes. I have read there are sweeps done at times to get rid of votes deemed improper.

Time to crunch the view count numbers. I will update with more thoughts.

You're going to make yourself go crazy, but you won't be alone. There are several number-crunching gurus on this forum. have fun.

 

[filthytrancendence]

I'm not going to lie, I just spent like 30 minutes making a spreadsheet to analyze the output of the story stats page over time. But I mostly did that because I was in a bad mood and number crunching in spreadsheets makes me feel better.

So I'm not saying this as someone who doesn't care about or think too hard about the numbers. I do.

It's just, you have to step back at some point and look at these things from a more statistical perspective, rather than a granular, individualistic one. Yeah, getting a rating bomb can hurt, especially early in the story's life when it's fighting for that H on the front page. But you can't control that. And you are subjected to the same randomness as everybody else. So in the aggregate, the ratings are very fair, relative to each other.

In my view, the rating number is not a reflection of the quality of the story. It's a reflection mostly of audience expectations. Give the people what they want and do it in a technically compliment way, and your ratings will be very high. You can become the Mr Beast of Lit if you like, chasing those metrics.

I do not personalty find much satisfaction in that. High ratings are really nice, sure. They are useful feedback. But they aren't the most important measure of the quality of your work. The most important thing is whether you're happy with it. And the neat thing about being the author is, your opinion gets a lot more weight than the expectations of your audience does.

 

[StillStunned]

Those 1s hurt, particularly without any context. They hurt your score, they hurt the story's visibility, they hurt your feelings as a writer.

People here will tell you not to get worked up about it, that sooner or later you'll stop even tracking your scores. I didn't believe them, but you know what? I've found that it's true.

But it took nearly 60 stories to get there. I found I stopped caring as much when I had to click to a second page to see the rest of my stories.

So stay strong, and hope that a few of those 1s get swept and your scores bounce back. And if not, remind yourself that most of your readers enjoyed your story. If they gave 5s before, they'll give those 5s again. Quality wins out.

 

[Writer61]

Another spreadsheet junkie here. I download my stats* about once a week, mostly to see how ratings develop, but it allows me to look at other things when they interest me. For example, I can see that my EC stories generally have a lower score than the EV ones, and that all stories get more readers when something new is published.

As I have been on the site a lot recently, I have been able to follow/impute the individual scores on my three latest stories. They don't tell you anything much, especially as the vote/read rate is so poor (about 1.3% in my case). But as @StillStunned said, the 1s hurt, particularly if you get one early on when each vote carries more weight.

*You mention screenshots, so you may not realise that you can download stats in CSV format from the My Stories page.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Hello there,

I am a fairly new writer. I posted my first story on the first of March. Three and a half months in, I have posted 18 stories. It has been fun to get into the zone of imagining different scenarios. Craving feedback, I was hoping for more than the 18 comments I've received so far. Considering 7 of those are reactions I wrote, that averages to about one comment every other post. I have only gotten one anonymous "This is trash" note. The rest have been supportive and encouraging. I feel lucky in that regard.

This brings me to the ratings. I have two series going - Cheerleader Lindsay and Adventures of Claudia. All the stories have been posted in the group sex category, apart from one that I submitted under nonconsent.

https://www.literotica.com/authors/driftwood55/works/stories

My first story has a 4.55 rating with 97 votes. This rating has slowly increased. When it got the "H" (hot label for 4.5 and above) I was encouraged to get another story to a similar level. Last week, I had six stories with "H" labels. Four of them were on my last five uploads. Cool, I thought, maybe this shows I am improving a bit, or at least matching the level of my first story.

This week, three of the "H" labels had vanished.

I enjoy analyzing stats and numbers. By taking a few screenshots to track changes, here is what I discovered:

One of the stories was sitting at a 4.5-star rating after 60 votes, equivalent to 30 5-star ratings and 30 4-star ratings, totaling 270 stars. Now the rating is 4.44 stars with 61 votes. This means the most recent vote was a one-star rating. I think this great example of how much one bad rating can tank a story's overall score. To get back to a 4.5-star rating, the story would need a streak of 7 five-star ratings in a row. One dinger does more damage and takes longer to recover from than I expected.

Knowing the rating slipped by as much as it did due to only one vote changed my perspective. Now I see the drop more as an annoyance than a disappointment. Imagine the effect of getting three 1-star votes in a row. 63 votes totaling 273 stars would produce a rating of 4.33. Recovering to a 4.5-star rating would require 21 five-star ratings in a row.

I am hoping new writers don't lose enthusiasm due to misreading a ratings drop. Screenshots and spreadsheets are two tools for getting a closer peek at the composition of the overall ratings. Don't let a few one-star ratings throw you off track. If you give out one-star ratings, take the time to consider that you will be erasing 7 five-star votes. I have read there are sweeps done at times to get rid of votes deemed improper.

Time to crunch the view count numbers. I will update with more thoughts.

I reviewed your portfolio of published stories here. In my opinion, your stories read more like chapters than episodic serials. Readers may jump into a "chapter" without having read anything previous and get confused, especially if you haven't used the Series Manager to group them properly in the right order, or left them out of the series entirely, such as the case with your two latest "Lindsey" entries.

Stats are just one form of reader feedback.

 

[sinfantasy]

I am in same boat as you, an author with less than 20 submissions. I don't need to crunch the number to see what happened with my submissions.

I posted a novel in Loving Wives. It's a suspense thriller and quite tame compared to what goes in there. There is no cheating in that novel and I assumed I wont pick haters in L/W. The followers started tricking in and I was happy.

Next day, six of my stories in other categories lost red H overnight. It was a hard trade off to get followers by posting in L/W and loose rating on submissions in others. This has been a pattern since then.

If you think L/W exception, it's not. I posted a new story in romance, a bittersweet tale with no happy ending. It got bombarded for sad ending, dropping from 4.87 with 70 votes to 4.55 with 85 votes. The comments and email feedback along the votes confirmed it. Currently it's at 4.65 with 139 votes.

As most of the people here would advice you, rating is not the real measure of success. Write what you love, hone your craft. The followers will add, views will increase, comments will flow and somewhere along the line you will get your satisfaction in making your reader base happy.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Keep in mind that as you gain followers, your early scores will likely rise, due to heavy voting by readers who are predisposed to like your writing. So part of that later decline is natural, even without any hanky pinky from one bombers.

 

[iwatchus]

A few weeks ago, someone (I assume a single person) went through and hit every story I had with a rating in 4.5's with a 1. Two of them actually got two one votes. No other stories got hit. These stories had all become relatively static in voting, so the one votes were pretty obvious.

I was very annoyed at the time; it seems like it had to be intentional to take out as many H's as possible. It succeeded on several, but all but two have recovered. But I think it ended up being a positive for my mindset not to focus on the damned H so much. Of course, my first LW story made it clear that I couldn't get all H's anyway.

 

[Writer61]

A few weeks ago, someone (I assume a single person) went through and hit every story I had with a rating in 4.5's with a 1.

I had a similar experience with all but one of my Adam in Asia series, likely getting a one score. I cannot be absolutely certain, as most had five new votes, but if I assume that the other votes were the previous average, it more or less fits.

Now, that series has most of my early writings, so some not-so-good scores are to be expected. But I don't get the mindset of somebody who deliberately goes through eight stories, presumably without reading them, as some sort of spite.