The Unread Chapter

[RowanWrites]

In my current series, I have one chapter with significantly lower readers than all the others. It's not in a different category. Maybe it has a less appealing subtitle or something, but what baffles me is this: it's part of a series. Who are the people reading chapters 1,2,3 -- meh, let's skip 4 -- 5, 6, ...

I'm having a hard time imagining the reason for this; do more experienced authors encounter this and have an understanding of why it might be so?

 

[RejectReality]

First thing I notice is that it came out on Sunday. I haven't allowed something to come out on a Sunday in years because anything that did absolutely bombed with regards to readership. I don't know if that's changed, because I'll remove something from the queue the moment it looks as if it might get assigned to Sunday and wait until the next week. That's how badly I got burned by Sunday releases.

Is it just views, or are the other numbers proportionally depressed? If it's just views, it could be a quirk of a thousand things.

 

[RowanWrites]

Interesting! Sundays are a dud! I did not know that!

(but it still confuses me that the people who refrain from reading filth on Sundays don’t simply catch up on their favorite filthy series on Monday…)

It’s a little hard to know when a story is going to come out, but I guess, don’t submit on wed, Thur, or fri?

 

[tenyari]

I don't know about other people, but when I search for stories and see the 'new stuff' section, it often shows 'chapter 9732' and so I click that, then click to find chapter one. I believe the system might count that as reads of both chapters? Or does it only count a read if I make it to the last page?

If just clicking into a story counts as a read - then it's likely a LOT of our reads are 'false positives' from people who just click in then look for the start, or click in and decide against reading. This would explain how a chapter that goes live on an 'off day' would have lower reads.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've found with my chaptered stories that they settle at chapter 3, after large drops from chapters one and two, and then sustain roughly steady numbers through to the end. Where there are perturbations, with some chapters getting higher Views than the others, I put it down to folk reading that chapter twice.

So maybe your low View chapter is your baseline, and the other chapters are much better, being read twice. This is a glass half full philosophy, whereas you're stating it as glass half empty .

 

[lovecraft68]

As RR says Sunday's aren't the best days, especially in summer and a summer when people are traveling for the first time in two years

Also, you mentioned they read 1-3 but not 4-6 well fact is readership generally dwindles as a series goes along until it levels out into your core audience which will be much smaller than what you saw in early chapters. Some people lose interest for whatever reason, doesn't mean the story isn't good, some just decided that for them its not worth investing time, not every one is a fan of long series and could decided at any point, "Okay, this things just going to keep going and I'm not going a for a long ride"

Plus side is keep going and you'll see higher and higher scores, at least that's the pattern for series

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Trying to achieve any type of relevant analytics on Literotica's numbers is almost impossible to accomplish. "Views" is one of those numbers that all we can do is guess at how it is determined by the system.

What I do with my multi-part submissions (some are chapters and some are "parts" made up of several chapters) is treat them like a marathon rather than a sprint. The stories are long, typically over 100K words, and I know that many readers on this site won't usually tackle them in a single reading. I give it a few months before obtaining an average for views of the story as a whole. Some parts will have higher views and some will have fewer. Like others have said, this could be a result of readers going back and re-reading some parts more than others.

 

[Bramblethorn]

When I read a series for the first time, I generally start from Chapter 1 and read through in order (or until I give up).

But when I re-read a series, I might go back to my favourite chapters rather than take the whole thing in chronological order again. AFAIK those re-reads also count as "views", and that can result in later chapters having higher views.

Things like tags, blurbs, and hotlists can also do it.

 

[RowanWrites]

I don't know about other people, but when I search for stories and see the 'new stuff' section, it often shows 'chapter 9732' and so I click that, then click to find chapter one. I believe the system might count that as reads of both chapters? Or does it only count a read if I make it to the last page?

If just clicking into a story counts as a read - then it's likely a LOT of our reads are 'false positives' from people who just click in then look for the start, or click in and decide against reading. This would explain how a chapter that goes live on an 'off day' would have lower reads.

That's a great point! I hadn't thought of that, but it feels right.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't know about other people, but when I search for stories and see the 'new stuff' section, it often shows 'chapter 9732' and so I click that, then click to find chapter one. I believe the system might count that as reads of both chapters? Or does it only count a read if I make it to the last page?

If just clicking into a story counts as a read - then it's likely a LOT of our reads are 'false positives' from people who just click in then look for the start, or click in and decide against reading. This would explain how a chapter that goes live on an 'off day' would have lower reads.

Keep in mind, the site does not track "reads." It tracks views. A "view" occurs any time a person clicks on a story. If one person clicks on a story multiple times, each time is recorded as a separate "view." The site does not seem to track whether people finish stories. Given that the ratio of views to votes usually falls between 60:1 and 120:1, we can surmise that only a fraction of stories that are viewed are read in full. My guess is it's under 25%. That would be consistent with my own reading pattern, because I often click on stories, scan their beginnings, and then choose not to read them in full.