Views don't matter?

[SimonDoom]

I found this a very interesting comment and prompts me to ask, and this is not a criticism, do you write for yourself or for the reader or do you, in your opinion, write for both?
/QUOTE]

Speaking for myself, since I think I'm somewhat in the same boat on this issue as LexxRuthless, I write the stories I like to write, and I try to write stories I think I would enjoy reading. I read erotic stories online for over 15 years before writing my first one, and I developed a pretty good sense of what I liked and didn't like.

But I also see writing and publishing as a communicative act, and I get pleasure from the idea of maximizing the number of people who can see and enjoy my stories. It's a pretty amazing thing to think that I can publish a story online at no cost and that thousands of people will read it and like it. I had never experienced that until two years ago, in middle age. Whatever the actual numbers are, it's a cool thing.

I've published 24 stories, 14 of them in Incest. I know that by writing incest stories I dramatically increase the number of readers and followers I have. I also find them a hoot to write. By publishing incest stories I increase the readership for my stories in other categories, which I enjoy writing as well. It works. In 29 months I've written 24 stories and I have 1836 followers and about 3,600,000 total views. But I don't write purely for popularity. Some of my stories are quirky and offbeat, like my low-rated Loving Wives spoof, or my tentacle porn tale. My tentacle story is by far my least-viewed, but it was one of the most fun to write. I'd been wanting to write a tentacle sex story for a long time. There's no question that the views for that story are much higher than they would have been because I've published incest stories.

I enjoyed writing those stories just as much as the popular ones. I have several other offbeat, non-incest stories I'm working on, which I expect to publish sometime this year, along with at least two more incest stories.

Numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt, and they're not meaningful in and of themselves, but they do yield information that can be useful to you if you want it to be. Authors should feel free to follow whatever muses and motivations strike their fancy.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Views accumulate with years of posting and numbers of stories on site. Even my older crap stories still get more views 16 years after posting.

Post Incest and watch the views climb...

Yeah, that's not likely to happen. My stories are loaded with daddy ideas, but I keep it more subtle.

 

[gordo12]

I won’t pretend that it doesn’t piss me off a little bit that most of you have single stories with more views than all my submissions combined, but I made the choice that I was going to write what I felt called to write and not worry about popularity.

And thus produced a string of stories that EVERY SINGLE ONE has a big red H. THAT is an accomplishment those of us writing into dreck categories won't ever see.

You write from the heart while many of us here are writing from the POV of what arouses us. There is no comparison in quality or durability.

I envy that ability. I don't have it.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I never thought to count the views either. It’s nice but I’m more interested in telling a good story that I enjoy writing. 10k views or 250k views doesn’t really matter to me as long as I’ve written the story I wanted to write.

I’d have guessed 2 million views Zeb.

Me too I rarely look at views. I really don't watch my scores either. Hence not many comments in the xxx thread.

With 244 stories posted, i ain't counting views. But for general information, one story of mine has over 1.02 million views.

Views may not mean much but when you look at a number that size, it has to mean something.

Took me about minute... download your works into a cvs file, then load that into an excel spread sheet and do an auto sum on the views column.

 

[Hypoxia]

And thus produced a string of stories that EVERY SINGLE ONE has a big red H. THAT is an accomplishment those of us writing into dreck categories won't ever see.

My longish last series all rated high and the chapters shuttled between Incest (not my original plan) and Group. Good votes... and few readers, mostly under 10k, some under 3k views. I do NOT find that Red-H's attract readers. But at least I'm grabbing SOME eyeballs.

PS: I just d/l'd the spreadsheet. Five years of LIT postings average 17k views per story with 4.32 score, 0.53% votes per views, and 0.02% comments per view. Not exactly stunning, hey? But it's only a hobby, hey?

 

[GroverLang]

I found this a very interesting comment and prompts me to ask, and this is not a criticism, do you write for yourself or for the reader or do you, in your opinion, write for both?
/QUOTE]

Speaking for myself, I write the stories I like to write, and I try to write stories I think I would enjoy reading.

Ive only quoted what I think is the most significant part of your comment. If you don’t write a story you yourself enjoys reading then are you going to produce the best version you are capable of writing? I don’t think you would. I had a comment on a story I wrote some time ago and, as a result, read my story again for the first time since submission. I enjoyed it and was rather pleased with myself.

 

[GroverLang]

I made the choice that I was going to write what I felt called to write.

If the writer isn’t happy with what they’re doing they aren’t going to produce anything worth reading.

 

[SimonDoom]

If the writer isn’t happy with what they’re doing they aren’t going to produce anything worth reading.

I'm not so sure about this. I'm rather confident that the history of literature is filled with great writers who were tormented and miserable while they wrote. Happiness isn't a reliable path to success, in my view.

I think, too, that we have to be cautious about creating a false dichotomy: either you write for yourself, or you write to please others. You can be damn sure that William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens were extremely mindful of their success with their audiences, and that they wrote to please them. There is no necessary conflict between writing to satisfy your own standards and writing to please an audience. Such a conflict MAY arise, and in practice it sometimes does, but it doesn't always have to, and in particular, I don't think it has to at a forum like Literotica.

 

[Hypoxia]

I'm not so sure about this. I'm rather confident that the history of literature is filled with great writers who were tormented and miserable while they wrote. Happiness isn't a reliable path to success, in my view.

I think, too, that we have to be cautious about creating a false dichotomy: either you write for yourself, or you write to please others. You can be damn sure that William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens were extremely mindful of their success with their audiences, and that they wrote to please them. There is no necessary conflict between writing to satisfy your own standards and writing to please an audience. Such a conflict MAY arise, and in practice it sometimes does, but it doesn't always have to, and in particular, I don't think it has to at a forum like Literotica.

I'm sure unhappy writers gain some small comfort by being paid a bit. (But I recall one underpaid but strong writer suspending his miserly editor by his ankles from a high window.) Here, we write to please ourselves one way or another, satisfied by our efforts or by reader responses. Views, votes, faves, follows, comments -- those are the payments. To keep posting on LIT, we *must* be happy about SOMETHING.

 

[LexxRuthless]

For me, writing and posting stories to the site had been an attempt to give something back. I was just another anonymous reader for twelve years or so. I only voted three times over that span, when a particularly breathtaking story demanded that I give it a 5. I never posted a comment.

I don't think I'm anything special as a writer--oh, I know I am a proficient technical writer, but I'm not an artist.

Still, I felt like I had enjoyed reading hundreds of stories and wanted to at least try to share some of my own stories. I figured that if nobody liked them, at least I had made the effort. I was shocked when my first lame efforts still earned "Hot" ratings. I pumped out a bunch of quick, short stories over four categories to see what people liked. I figured that would tell me what I ought to spend my time writing going forward.

Thanks to these forums, I realize my naivete now. My I/T stories got loads of views--not because they were my best-written stories, but because that is a massive readership. Still, it motivated me to write a lot more than I would have otherwise.

The stories I write and post here are for the readers on the site. Some of my recent stories were specifically ideas that were suggested by readers through e-mail. I figured if I was lucky, I would manage to write maybe 30 good stories. Not "great" stories, but ones that people would enjoy. I feel I've written eleven or twelve "good" stories.

There are other stories and parts of stories that I have written that were just for my own enjoyment. I got caught up in a story idea and ran with it for several nights. A couple of those wound up posted here, but others I won't post. The stuff I post here is definitely written for other people.