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Showing results for tags 'readers'.
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Reaching out to Myr, I’m wondering where I can find these stats. I’m still confused about the way the numbers are presented. Some examples comparing a story similar to mine in length: the other story has twice as many views as mine and yet, the other story’s chapter views are considerably below mine. My chapter 1 views are much higher than the subsequent chapter views. I can understand that. But, why does one chapter in the middle have way more views than adjacent chapters? And, who and why are people making comments? It seems as if some are serial commenters because I see them making comments on several stories. Forty different people, so far, have reacted to one or more chapters. Is this a meaningful stat? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Taking a random look at published, publishing (ongoing) stories on the site, you can't help but reach the conclusion the number of readers is very small. The best an author might hope to achieve, is 1000 page views per chapter. Certainly, when you look at these numbers casually you see some large numbers, but look a little closer. A series author jdonley has written over 800,000 words in four books over several years and the number of readers is around 1000 page views per chapter per year. The numbers only look big over time. Take a well know author personality, Comicality, the numbers are ten times smaller and he has been writing online for over twenty years and writes about writing. I suppose if you add up all the numbers multiplied by the number of stories, you get some high figures, but divide them by chapters, by years, and it's miniscule! One book, on going, over ten years achieves 100 page views per chapter per year. Conclusion, the site online community is very small in terms of readership per author per book, what it achieves in site numbers overall is through the number of authors publishing as displayed on the front page. 100 page views per story chapter multiplied by 100, 200, or 1000 stories adds up, hence the site can support itself, advertising and premium membership. For the author, you need to be realistic, you may receive several chapter comments and a few (not very balanced for the most part) reviews, if you complete your story. You can have some contact with other authors and readers, which is not to be underestimated and can be valuable, but if you are thinking you will achieve any sort of real readership (as in a print addition from a publishing house) you are mistaken. In brief, being realistic, it is a lot of effort, hours of writing, a big investment, for very little return. Of course, nobody will tell you this and you can convince yourself you will get, or have, a large readership, but the numbers tell the real story.
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Recently i came across a story on a different site and liked it so i started reading more from the author. The site on which i was reading was a free site that operates on donations. When i reached a certain part in a story, it asked to go to the authors site for a special chapter. I did so. When i wanted to read the special chapter however i found out you had to be a member of the site. I went ok lets see if they offer free membership, turns out they dont. So i figured the special chapters probably has no bearing on the story. However as i started to read the next chapter it referenced a key event that happened in the special chapter. At this point, as a reader, i became a bit angry as if youre going to tease an special chapter you should tell us if it has any influence on the story. I felt cheated because it involved the engagement of two major characters and the next chapter its like oh yeah they got engaged. They also had a crossover between stories and would just say after so and so happened. They would make these allusions to events in the first chapter in each story involved after the special/cross -over happened. My question is as an author do you feel that it is right to do that to a reader just for the sake of money? And to readers how would you have reacted?
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I read a writing tip today that seems sort of obvious... "Try to leave out the part readers tend to skip" (Elmore Leonard). But what part is that? It had to vary, but there's probably an overall consensus about the types of scenes or story elements that readers gloss over, skip past, or just stop reading. So share your thoughts to help GA authors improve our craft!
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Hey all I just rediscovered GA after years and years away. I used to spend countless hours here in late high school and college. I loved sci-fi stories by the likes of dkstories and Christopher Lydon - especially Mists of Fate/Shapers Chronicles and The Falcon Banner (thought I’ve read all of them). Any recommendations for new writers here who are carrying that torch? Also does anybody know what ever happened to Dan and Christopher?