What About Bob...er...Lana?

[Anothername_9]

Last week a story of mine was posted (Story Told To Lana:We Three) and I am looking for some feedback on it. I know that there is a plethora (sounds like an internal organ or something, doesn't it?) or material here at Literotica and I myself only read a story or two each time I visit. But did anyone (other than the few I heard from) read and enjoy it? Or read and...well...not enjoy it?

Here's the deal: I'd like to submit something else, but I'm wondering if it should be something written in the same manner ('you' POV as was briefly discussed in forum here a while back) or told using another point of view. Let's hear from the 'readers.' (Personally, I thought it was a darn good piece of porn, meself, LOL)

John

(had to come back and fix the spelling on the website's name; got 'plethora' but missed 'Literotica'...)

[This message has been edited by anothername_9 (edited 11-24-1999).]

 

[Laurel]

>>But did anyone (other than the few I heard from) read and
enjoy it? Or read and...well...not enjoy it?

------

Strange, but it seems like though our readership is growing (nearly 60,000 hits to the story index page every day) our authors are getting less feedback than ever. Hey you "oldsters", you authors who've been on the site since last spring or so (DCL, IndianAsian, Bob Peale, et al) - what's your angle on it? Are you getting less feedback to your new stories than previously? Or is it about the same?

I cannot stress enough to the readers out there (including authors reading other's work) the importance of feedback - be it writing the author, posting about his/her story on the BB, or even just voting on the ones you read. You'd be shocked to see how few people take the time to vote.. I'm not sure why - it's not like by pushing that vote button it gives us access to your credit cards, wife, daughter, etc. We're not smart enough to be good criminals.

Anyways... any insight would be appreciated. You guys rock my world!

Oh... On "Lana" - I thought the POV worked perfectly - didn't feel forced. The writing was good - lyrical - and the story had a sweetness & sensuality to it that I liked.

 

[Bs]

Here it is my opinion. The story to which you refer, I could not recall so...I went back and read it over...or shall I say read all the way thru for the first time.... You lost me the first time I tried to read it....found the back button on my browser and used it.... That may be a great chapter for love novel.. but its not what I look for in a good story....things like "she arched her back highly to meet the full thrust of his throbing member" doesn't take alot of thought and you get the meaning right away... not to say it wasn't a good story...you just lost me was all....This may or may not be what your looking for. So always remember... Opinions are like Assholes Everybody has one and they all stink...Please keep writing...Variety is the spice of life....one thing we may all agree on....

 

[Anothername_9]

bs, were you referring to my story, "Story Told To Lana," in your reply?

The quote which you used as an example is not from that story.

 

[Bob Peale]

Laurel,

I can definetely say that feedback has diminished significantly over the last few months, although I am pretty certain that my level of readership has increased. Everytime I go into the chat room, I stumble across someone who has read one of my stories that I'd never heard from before.

Not to say that, as an author, I expect everyone that reads my work to drop me a line and say how bad/great it was, but I wonder if people realize...to the tune of 60,000 or so a day...that the relatively handful of authors that submit to this site do so to entertain. We have no way of knowing if we are accomplishing our goal if no one ever tells us.

Bottom line is, we're all a little bit narcissistic; anyone who says, "Not me; I really just write for me!" is full of s**t. We wouldn't put it here for the world to see if we didn't want to know, on some level, that we were being appreciated.

In truth, it's nice to enjoy some measure of celebrity, and there are a lot of us that have been VERY fortunate in that respect.

But I wonder if people realize how hard it is to write if no one even tells you whether you're still hitting the mark?

That's my $.02, for what it's worth

Peace,
Bob

 

[Laurel]

Yeah, it's so weird... A new story is seen like 10,000 times in its first 24 hours on the site, yet many stories don't get more than 30 or 40 votes in their first week, if that! I don't get it... I mean, even if you don't feel comfortable emailing the author, it takes no time at all to vote on a story... Maybe once we get the voting stats all live and active it'll give people more of an incentive to vote. maybe not. Who knows!? Maybe free clock radios with every vote would do the trick, but I hate shipping those things out...

 

[MorningStar]

have to agree with Bob....seems like there's less feedback...and yeah it makes me wonder if it's worth trying to put someone else down in print.....maybe it will be for my own satisfaction if I do....finish a story line that still running through my head...still would be nice to get a little feedback once in awhile.

I had no idea the site was getting that many hits on a daily basis....kudo's for you guys...that's fantastic....congratulations

hugs and kissssssssssssssses
MS

 

[Anothername_9]

So....

Back to the original question: did anyone actually read my story? Would anyone like to comment? (By the way, please make sure it's my tale you refer to.

 

[Mrhappy]

Hello, 9
I just finished sending you an answer to your question via e-mail, (much too long to post here)
I thought your style was very interesting. I did have difficulty getting the ryhthym(Laurel, can we get spellcheck?), but once I did, I found myself absorbed in the experience.
I also like the way you addressed Lana almost as if you were telling her about a dream you'd had. It wasn't the usual hip-pounding, juices-flowing fare, but I found it erotic.
Thanks for your story and I'd like to hear your feedback on what I wrote to you since I'm working on a few things I will be submitting shortly.
Thanks

 

[Southernhelle]

I just read the story - not bad. I don't usually choose stories using that particular point of view, but the emotions were communicated well and everything seemed to be spelled correctly. That's always a plus.

It seems like a lot of new authors are posting on the bulletin board soliciting response to their stories. Maybe we could get another topic started: "authors requesting feedback". I'm not griping really, but it seems (seemed?) like if someone had something to say about a story, they would say it. I guess I'm the minority here - In the first week of a story being posted I usually get 10-15 replies via e-mail. After that it's like, 2 or 3 a week. I'm still getting mail a few times a month on stories I wrote back at the beginning of the summer.

btw, 60,000?!? wow. What do you have to do to get priority placing on a search engine's list? I entered "erotic fiction" on Yahoo the other day to see where this site came up, and it was three pages back. Is it a matter of money or popularity of the site?

 

[Guest]

Laurel, I'd like to be able to see how many votes each story has received. Some sites, I've noted, have a counter viewable after one votes. How about it?

 

[Laurel]

We had that discussion here:
http://www.literotica.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000092.html

The short answer: we're working on it. To make it happen, we are going to have to totally change the way our site runs. This takes time, but will happen.

 

[Laurel]

>>What do you have to do to get priority placing on a search
engine's list?

Damnd if I know! hehe... Actually, playing the search engines is both an art and a science. I know a guy who spends his time learning them - figuring out their algorithms, making pages to see what combination of words gets you ranked higher, etc. - and he makes big bucks as a consultant to web-based businesses. We've never had much luck with that with Literotica - we can't even get ranked #1 on a search for Literotica.com on Yahoo! (Some con artist from the Ukraine beats us every time - bastard).

Oddly enough, people who find us generally come to us after searching for "Literotica.com". That's out biggest search term. I take this to mean that they find out about us from friends or on the newsgroups, then go looking for us. If we could grab some of the people looking for "sex stories", "sex fiction", or "erotic stories", I can't imagine how our traffic would skyrocket!

We're superbusy with a couple of big technical projects (one of them is getting us converted over to Cold Fusion - it's a daunting task when your site is 4,000+ pages! augh!), but when the smoke clears from these I want to sit down & work on getting good listings in the search engines so people can actually find us. Wouldn't that be cool...!

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

I read your story.

 

[XXplorher]

Personally, and I don’t want to whine – I get very little feedback, and virtually no-one in the chat is familiar, or even cares whether I’m an author or not. So I rarely, if ever, go there. Yet a couple of my stories have consistently rated very highly. It’s confusing. (Maybe it’s because I’m a self-righteous jerk – ya think? Hehe he – my bad)

On the same token (echoing Helle – how’d that happen?! ; ) , I hate to post asking for feedback on a particular story. If someone wanted to offer it – seems to me they would (though that may not be true). It’s been my pleasure to offer my reactions to several stories I’ve read here through Email, or a quick post. So my mentality thinks others would do the same - if it was deserved. I don’t want to ‘force’ people to read and react to my stuff.

But,
I want to xxplore sexual mentality – that’s why I write it. I’m xxploring it myself as I do, and nothing would please me more than to discuss it at length. Both in real situations – and whether I’ve been able to convey those feelings in my writing or not. Why it works, doesn’t work, or how it could improve. I can never know enough, and I want to know it all. There’s nothing more interesting than SEX!

Anyway,
Question pertaining to the new voting system. Is someone hits a stories page, and doesn’t vote - will that count against the numeric value the story gets? As in: the average vote per visit – when averaged, will diminish when not voted on. Did I say that right?

 

[XXplorher]

Comments on the topic story:

I don’t think I disliked the approach. It DID take some getting used to, and I had to stutter back a few times to clear the picture. But that’s just because I’m not used to it. As it settled in, I could see you with a fountain pen, at a desk, describing the scene. And in doing so assumed the perception of the woman you were writing it to. What ‘she’ might feel from it – and that worked. Once I had someone to derive the emotions from – it worked.
Others may have stayed with the male POV, who was writing it – and therefore it confused them, when you kept referring back to the woman reading it. That’s an assumption on my part. Had you placed the event in the past tense – it may have helped it work. As if you were writing her a letter of what that event did for you.
That said, I think each character was distinct. I though the lines were written smoothly, someone said hypnotic – that’s accurate. It danced. The tempo increased. I felt your love for her. It certainly didn’t suck. I’ll be looking for another.

 

[Laurel]

Xxplorher - The voting script takes the total value of the votes on your story and divides it by the number of votes on your story. So, no - nonvotes aren't recorded it all, and do not affect your total.

Dixon - It may be possible (under the new software that we're going to implement early next year) to make it so a forum is automatically generated with each new story. But this question is: would this help?

If people are really giving less feedback for the reasons you mentioned - sameness of stories, too much to read, too many other things to do - I'm not sure that giving them one more place to go will solve the problem. And while I can see that chat and the BB can take up some of people's time, none of that explains why readers don't always give feedback on the stories they DO read.

We're getting more submissions and site feedback than ever. As our traffic increases, our stats show that more people are reading the stories than ever before, so the interest is definitely there. Maybe it's just a lull, and it'll pick up again soon.

 

[Mike Tauron]

Re Feedback:
I've contributed half a dozen stories to the site this year and I've received in total only two brief responses by e-mail. Maybe people who are cruising around the new stories don't want to take the time to stop and compose a letter of comment in between each story. Then again, most forms of media consider that so few people can be bothered to praise or complain, they figure every letter represents thousands of people who feel the same but can't be bothered to write. Maybe Literotica readers are the same.

 

[Guest]

Maybe the shorter, less detailed stories leave less of an impression. Maybe the ones that don't get a person off, so that they have to move on to another story, don't get a vote or comment. Maybe the ones that achieve that goal are the ones that are remembered and commented on.

 

[SpecialK]

<patting XXploreHer on the back> There, there! Poor dear!

(I sent you feedback recently so quit yer whinin!)

Gee.. now what else was I going to say...

Oh yes, I don't think a BB topic for each new story would make any difference. The truth is, people are lazy. I'm guilty of it myself.

Personally, I respond more to the stories that are written well or unique, as opposed to those that are like something I have already read. (Which means I probably won't get a whit of feedback since my stories aren't overly unique.)

I also agree with you XX (or was it 'helle?)... as an author one doesn't want to ask for feedback. It sounds so desperate. If someone has something to say about my story, great, but I don't want them to make up something if they couldn't come up with anything in the first place.

The amount of new stories and authors is a great thing... but it is daunting to read all these stories. (I dunno about you all, but there are days when I'm not in the mood to read erotica -- Blasphemy, I know.)

Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to make our OWN BB topic to let people know that we have posted a new story. At least that would help people pick what they want to read from the host of new stories.

[This message has been edited by SpecialK (edited 12-01-1999).]

 

[XXplorher]

Well actually, you simply said you loved it and it was unique. Which was appreciated, and I responded that I was much obliged. But I’m not looking for praise, I’m looking for ‘why’s’ (and I’m not demanding nor requesting it either – simply commenting on topic. So please no stoning)

BTW, you didn’t mention you were a writer – that may be why you’re not getting feedback in return.

Possibly an author title next to the story post in the new section would help. There are certain authors I’ll read immediately when I know there’s something new from them. More homework Mistress Laurel? Hehehe (sorry)

 

[XXplorher]

Hey Mike, GREAT story just posted! (Lunch W/Rita) Didn't need much detail - it was a quickie anyway, eh ; )

Read very naturally, I had a quick sense of the two of them. Definitely felt the chic attitude he was feeling from her, and it did turn me on.

The vocabulary was fresh, broad and not too calculated or overboard.

I had a totally clear view of the scene. Great job. I don't think that's the first I've noticed from you.

hasta

 

[Laurel]

>>More homework Mistress Laurel? Hehehe (sorry)

Yeah, I'll bet.. hehe (troublemaker, aren't you?

)

Actually, I've considered adding the author name to the description. The problem is space - I try very hard to keep each story title/description down to one line of text. The longer the lines are, the bigger the page is, the longer it will take it to load. When we get really busy, our site sometimes bogs down, and the "new" index page is one of the highest traffic pages on the site. I try to keep it as compact as possible so the reader doesn't have to sit there for an hour before he/she gets to the stories.

Now, if you authors would make all of your titles one word, I could get lots of info in that line!

(Just Kidding!!!)

But I know what you mean about having interest in the author's name. Early this coming year, we're going to completely revamp the site. (My head's already beginning to form the migraine that's going to cause me..

) I'm taking notes (literally - I have a Word file with stuff copied from the BB and emails) on what I want to include in Literotica 2.0. If it's feasible with the new layout & software, I'll definitely through it in.

 

[PHANTOM5875]

katerina, I'm thinking along the same lines as you on this voting issue. I must confess that I have not, in the past, always voted on each story I read (I certainly will henceforth) but, when I did, I assumed the writers were aware of the votes. I will endeavour to provide meaningful feedback as I move forward. It does make since that you writers would want feedback, validation, suggestions on direction, etc. I'll try to do better.

katerina, I went to your web page and you are truly blessed with two lovely angels in your children. The web page is really cute.

Good luck with your future stories!

PHANTOM

 

[Laurel]

>>>To Laurel..regarding voting. I don't
understand why you have this catagory on your site if there is no way for the authors
to even check on their votes? It's a great idea, and I understand you are working on
things, but is there any sense it being there yet, if it is not up and running? People
that do take the time to vote, think the authors will know, but yet we don't.<<<

This question has been answered a few times. So I don't have to explain it again, please go here: http://www.literotica.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000092.html

The voting results aren't going unused. We use them to rank the Top 20 highest rated stories, which is updated weekly (except for last week because we had technical issues that have since been resolved). These rankings are accessible from the Story Index page.

We are a work-in-progress. I've got dozen Literotica projects (new chat, voting, getting ready for the Big Changeover in early 2000 to Cold Fusion, picture galleries for the ladies and gay men, etc.) I'm working on, plus editing stories, plus answering email (30-60 a day), plus all of the other things I have to do in a day. We do consider all of your requests and suggestions and put time into making them happen. However, it won't always happen overnight.

On the subject, several of you guys requested that we provide a way to search the stories in our site. We've put up a site-wide search as a test, but I've received only 2 or 3 emails regarding this (many thanks to those who did respond!). Has anyone tried it out yet? If so, how did it work? Was it effective? Did you have any technical problems? Do you like it? Email me with any comments/questions on the site search.