So generally, I’m a good internet citizen, and as a rule, I don’t read the comments. On anything. Ever. With some of the publicity that the UfYH book has been getting lately, though, I’ll admit to briefly losing reason from time to time and reading some comments. And there’s one kind of comment I keep coming across that makes me want to scream:
“This is so stupid. I mean, it’s so easy. Just clean up your house. No need for lists or tricks. Just clean it.”
“Can’t this whole article be shortened up to: don’t be a slob?”
“Ugh, how hard is it these days that we need all these ways of telling people how to clean?“
And I always refrain from responding, because I haven’t completely taken leave of my senses, but here’s what I always want to say:
“If you think it’s easy, then this isn’t for you.” That’s it. If you think it’s easy, or stupid, or unnecessary, UfYH wasn’t meant for you. If you think articles and books about cleaning are pointless, well, I’m not sure why you read them except to be a jerk about it in comments. It’s meant for everyone else. For people who don’t know how to clean. Or who don’t know where to start. For people who can’t do it the way they were taught because that takes energy or mobility that they don’t have. For people who are overwhelmed. Or ashamed. It’s OK to be any or all of those things, no matter what sanctimonious strangers on the internet say. If you’re any of those things and you’re here, you’re using the resources you can find to try to make things better for yourself. Isn’t that the point of the internet (well, that and cute animal gifs)?
Screw those jerks who think that because it’s easy for them, that it’s easy for everybody. It’s not. Don’t let them fool you into thinking you’re somehow lesser in any way because you don’t innately know or instinctively do this stuff. There are way more of us than there are of them; we just usually keep quiet about it for any number of reasons (shame, fear, judgment, frustration…). They can go feel smug about their clean houses or whatever somewhere else. Now, go clean, be awesome, and don’t read the comments.
I’ve seen five different authors take down, or prepare to take down, their posted works on Ao3 this week. At the same time, I’ve seen several people wishing there was more new content to read. I’ve also seen countless posts by authors begging for people to leave comments and kudos.
People tell me I am a big name fan in my chosen fandom. I don’t quite get that but for the purposes of this post, let’s roll with it. On my latest one shot, less than 18% of the people who read it bothered to hit the kudos button. Sure, okay, maybe that one sort of sucked. Let’s look at the one shot posted before that – less than 16% left kudos. Before that – 10%, and then 16%. I’m not even going to get into the comments. Let’s just say the numbers drop a lot. I’m just looking at one shots here so we don’t have to worry about multiple hits from multiple chapters, people reading previous chapters over, etc. And if I am a BNF, that means other people are getting significantly less kudos and comments.
Fandom is withering away because it feels like people don’t care about the works that are posted. Why should I go to the trouble of posting my stories if no one reads them, and of the people who do read them, less than a fifth like them? Even if you are not a huge fan of the story, if it kept your attention long enough for you to get to the bottom, go ahead and mash that kudos button. It’s a drop of encouragement in a big desert.
TL;DR: Passively devouring content is killing fandom.
Reblogging again
So much this
You know, kudos and comments are much beloved by all esp. yrs truly, but I have to say: I’ve been posting fic for 20 years, and I have never in my entire life had a story stay above a 1:9 kudos to hits ratio (or comments to hits, back when kudo wasn’t an option). Usually they don’t stay above 1:10, once they’ve been around for a few weeks.
I also have a working background in online marketing. In social media 1:10 is what you would call a solid engagement score, when people actually care about your product (as opposed to “liking” your Facebook page so they could join a contest or whatever). If BNFs are getting 1:5 – and I do sometimes see it – that is sky-high engagement. Take any celebrity; take Harry Styles, who has just under 30M followers and doesn’t tweet all that often. He regularly gets 3-400K likes, 1-200K retweets. I’ve seen him get up to just under 1M likes on a tweet. That’s a 1:30 engagement ratio, for Harry Styles, and though some of you guys enjoy my fics and have said so, I don’t think you have as lasting a relationship with my stories as Harry Styles’s fans do with him. XD;
Again, this is not to say we, as readers, should all go home and not bother to kudo or comment or engage with fic writers. That definitely is a recipe for discouraging what you want to see in future. But this is not the first post I’ve seen that suggests a 20% kudo ratio is the equivalent of yelling into the void, and I’m worried that we as writers are discouraging ourselves because our expectations are out of whack.
I think about this a lot, because it’s important to know what a realistic goal to expect from an audience is, even though I admit it definitely is kind of depressing when you look at the numbers. I was doing reading on what sort of money you can expect to make from a successful webcomic, and the general rule of thumb seems to be that if your merchandising is meshing well with your audience, about 1% will give you merch. I imagine ‘subscribe to patreon’ also falls in this general range.
Stuff that is ONLY available for dollars are obviously going to have a different way of measuring this, but when it comes to ‘If people can consume something without engaging back in any fashion (hitting a like button, buying something, leaving a comment)’ the vast majority will.
And as a creator that is frustrating but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to see how it happens. I have gotten steadily worse at even liking posts, much less leaving comments on ones I enjoy, since I started using tumblr. It’s very difficult to engage consistently. I always kudo on any fanfic I read and comment on the vast majority, but then again I don’t read a lot of fanfic, if you are someone who browses AO3 constantly/regularly for months or years, I could see how it’s easy to stop engaging. I don’t remember to like every YT video or tumblr fanart I see, much less comment on them.
When we are constantly consuming free content it’s hard to remember to engage with it or what that engagement means to the creators. And lol, honestly that sucks. Certainly as consumers we should be better about it. But also like, as a creator be kinder to yourself by setting a realistic bar of what you can achieve.
And IMO, if numbers matter to you (kudos, comments, etc) be honest about the fact that you CAN improve those things by marketing yourself better. The ‘I just produced my art and put it out there and got insanely popular because it was just so brilliant’ is less than a one a million chance. Lots of amazing content is overlooked every day because there is a lot of good content and a metric fuckton of mediocre to bad content. You can only SORT of judge the quality of your work based on the audience it generates, but if what you WANT is an audience there is way, way, WAY more you can be doing than simply producing whatever you immediately feel like. Marketing yourself is a skill and if you want the benefits of it you have to practice it.
I have a professional background in internet marketing as my day job and a moderate hobby business. My definition for “moderate” is “it pays for itself, keeps me in product, and occasionally buys groceries.”
In the day job, which is for an extremely large global company, there are entire teams of people whose entire purpose of employment is to ensure a 3% conversion rate. That’s it. That is for a Fortune 100 company: the success metric is for 3% of all visitors to a marketing web site to click the “send me more info” link.
My moderate business that pays for itself has a 0.94% conversion rate of views to orders. Less than 1%, and it’s still worth its time – and this is without me bothering to do any marketing beyond instagram and tumblr posts with new product.
I know it feels like no one is paying attention to you and you’re wasting your time if you don’t get everyone clicking kudos or commenting but I promise, I PROMISE, you are doing fantastically, amazingly well with your 10% rate. You probably aren’t going to go viral AND THAT’S FINE. You’re only hurting yourself if you’re expecting a greater return – don’t call yourself a failure, because you’re NOT. You’re just looking at it the wrong way. I promise, you’re lovely just the way you are.
This is actually really good to know – helpful.
I keep track of what stories are doing well based on the reading to kudos ratio. I aim for close to 10%…and a story that hits between 5% and 10% kudos, to me, is considered a success. That means 10% of all readers liked the story enough to slap the kudos button. For me – that’s a big deal. Enough to struggle with writers block, re-writes, edits, writing when I’m tired, etc etc etc.
A story with a low kudos ration may get taken down as a “not enough liked it to deal with the stress of writing it.”
I just got some people interested in a story I haven’t touched in 2 years. I checked its kudos ration. It’s almost 7% on a self-insert. Damn. I should work on that story. See?
And oddly enough – sometimes I look not at total hits or kudos, but a kudo ratio to see if a long story is worth trying out. Because you may have low numbers, but if you’re hitting close to 10%…I’mma give that story a solid chance and 99% of the time add to that kudos ratio because that means 10% of the readership loved it.
I think…no, I know that I don’t understand marketing numbers well. I know that 10% kudos ratio seems low. Especially since hitting that kudos button is so easy. But then I think about stories I’ve read where I haven’t hit the kudos button and yeah…ok…I get it. I’m guilty of it too. We all are.
So hey – kudos to the people who leave me kudos.
CAKE to the people who leave me a comment. Even if it’s just a whole bunch of ❤ ❤ ❤ <3.
me, every single time i get a kudos on ao3: someone liked my writing. one real irl human being read something i wrote and enjoyed it. they thought it was good enough to read to the end and click the button. an actual person. they liked it.
you, a reader: i really like your story but you probably don’t care about in all the ways i like it
me, a writer: you realize you could talk about how you like my story for HOURS and i would be riveted at literally every individual moment
i keep seeing comments/tags/post lately about how fic authors should always try to respond to comments to show love and appreciation to their fans, and i just wanted to take a moment to shout out to all those authors who can’t do that, whether due to other commitments, limited time online, or any number of mental or physical reasons that make it hard to reply. and i fucking hate this ‘it only takes two minutes’ and ‘it isn’t hard to reply to reviews’ mentality. you don’t have a clue HOW fucking difficult it can be for some people.
the great fandom secret is that no one is actually entitled to your time – and as much as we writers thrive on feedback and appreciation, please also remember to look after yourself, and put yourself first ♥
nice comments on their fic, even if it’s just a smiley face or a “loved this!”
kudos on their fic
people who come into their askboxes to talk about their fic
photosets made for their fic
fic rec lists with their fic
fan art made for their fic
playlists made for their fic
Gonna have to disagree with the “even a smiley face” part. A smiley face is not a review. It takes zero effort to leave one. Maybe some younger, just-starting-out tween writers are cool with that, but old curmudgeonly ones look at such stuff as a waste of time, especially if you get a “Review Alert” and find out it’s a single emoticon. So no, fanfic readers, smiley faces are not the best thing to drop into a review section.
What reallymakes fanfic authors happy is when you take the time to kindly inform your favorite author whyyou enjoyed reading what they wrote. Remember: You’re never under any obligation to leave a review, either, so don’t let an author “bully” you into saying something.
I had a reviewer that, for months, left only smiley face reviews. I would get a new review from her every few weeks. It’s the only reviewer I’ve ever had who’s done this, and at the time, I thought it was a bit odd.
And then one day I got a message from her. A pretty darn long message, actually, where she complimented my work and in depth. She also thanked me for helping her work on her English. It turns out her first language is actually Spanish, and she was learning as she was reading my stories! She simply didn’t feel comfortable communicating to me in English, so she waited to personally give me a review until she felt more confident in her skills. But in the meantime, she didn’t want me to think she didn’t appreciate what I’d written. That’s amazing and incredibly thoughtful!
That’s why I never look down on any comment I get. I never know who’s reading on the other side. Do I love in depth comments and reviews? Absolutely. No question. I adore them! But having been in fandom for quite a while – I’ve been writing in fandoms since 1998 – I’m also aware that not everyone feels themselves capable of that as a reader. And I never want to dissuade someone from leaving whatever comment they can.
Earlier this week, I ran a Twitter poll on comment replies and invited discussion on it. The objective was to find out whether people expect replies to their comments on fics, whether it influences their engagement or opinion with the fic/author, and how/why.
As you can see, I received 154 votes and the results were overwhelmingly in favour of nice, but not necessary…
…but the variety of elaborations really surprised me, and it was very interesting to sift through replies. Here are some of the key points. All quotes are pretty much directly from what people sent me in response to the poll.
1. The bottom line is: most people, as commenters, do not expect comment replies.
Even if they say yeah, it’s nice. They don’t expect it.
This was usually for one of two reasons, the first being that authors are simply not obliged to reply (or to do anything, really).
It’s definitely a no from me. I don’t consider the OP has to take all that time to reply when they already gave us the fic in the first place.
Since authors have their own lives, I wouldn’t know what they’re feeling etc. Getting a reply to a comment is a nice surprise imo.
The author has already done their part in writing and sharing and they don’t owe you anything for enjoying their work. If they want to step away after that then so be it.
this is really cool and worth reading if this is something you worry about (like i do) or even just if you’re interested in fandom etiquette~. i have historically been bad at replying to comments because it makes me anxious (note: everything makes me anxious, and i love receiving comments), but i do like making it so that people don’t just feel like they’re talking to a void when they’re commenting, so i want to get better at it.
Advice to people considering this sort of behavior: dont.
Just don’t. If anything you’ll be waiting longer while the author beats their head against the desk.
Or at worst make them delete the work because I know that’s what I’d do
Two years ago this same thing happened
I got about 10 messages like this on every fic I had. On all FF, AO3, and Wattpad.
It made me go into depression because writing was a source of relieving stress, but instead it became stressful because of the demand for a new chapter.
That is why nothing by JercyFics15 has been updated for a year.
This is bad behavior, please, authors, just delete comments like these. As a reader I’m thrilled for updates but not at the cost of making you uncomfortable.
So I stopped updating Dear Captain America because someone started harassing me about updating it like this. They were commenting on my other stories telling me that I owed it to them to work faster. When I told them that they were making me feel bad they acted like a street harasser and told me it was a compliment and if they were willing to take time out of their schedule to read my work, the least I could do was update it more often and I needed to respect their time.
It’s the only time I’ve deleted a comment that wasn’t either a spoiler or someone giving away someone’s personal information online. It made me feel like crap about that story, which is coincidentally the most difficult thing I’ve ever worked on and required copious, copious historical research AND comic reading, on top of teaching myself ciphers, rereading 1984, and learning about a bunch of scientific subjects.
Fan writers literally do this for nothing. We don’t expect a lot in return; we’re not expecting to get paid or famous. We write out of love, but the LEAST we can ask for is for you to not be shitty to us.
You couldn’t pay me to put up with this kind of nonsense; don’t expect me to put up with it for free.
Don’t be the type of asshole commentor that does this. Just don’t.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 