By tonight I should be home at my own computer, with my own bed there nearby being ignored as I avoid sleep.
Just some bits and pieces from the con that I’m putting here because I’d like to get more information about them and don’t want to forget.
Regarding the current state of on fan fiction, specifically on FimFiction. Heard 1000 views is pretty good these days when many thousands were the numbers for big success back in the day. Also, what kind if bump (if any) do people get when a story gets shown somewhere? EqD, Seattle’s Angels, Presentperfect reviews, etc. The ever present question of where do people get their recommendations about what to read? Front page, reviewers, word of mouth? Does anyone have blackmail material on Knightly so we can get this last question in front of everyone on FimFiction?
Whoops! I thought I had scheduled this to go up Monday morning. Oh well, spoilers: I got home. Left for the 7 hour drive home at about 9am. Got home about 9pm. Not a fun trip. More tomorrow after sleep.
The City of Doors 
Present Perfect
August 15, 2017 at 7:27 am
Pascoite keeps tabs on what EQD does these days. My reviews can bring anywhere from 50-100 new views, I think. RCL features can throw stories into the popular box, at the very least. I hope Seattle’s Angels has an effect, given they’re trying to get more eyes on underviewed stories and all. :B
Pascoite Fics
August 15, 2017 at 9:50 am
Back in the prime of EqD, getting posted at all virtually guaranteed 2000-2500 views. Nowadays, it’s heavily dependent on tags. Something with genre and character tags that are less popular may only get 200-400. The most popular ones may get 1000-1500. Most of mine get 500-1000. For other sources, it’s very dependent on how well-known the author is. Like if SA features a story by an author with a ton of followers, it doesn’t bring in many views, since most readers were already aware of the story. Something by an unknown author may get quite a few, because it’ll be the first many readers are hearing about it. I don’t track those other sources much, so I can only tell you what my experience has been with my own stories. A TRG feature (which doesn’t exist anymore) would get me about 50 views, RCL got about 50, posting it on reddit gets about 40, a review from Present Perfect or Titanium Dragon is around 30. Making the feature box varies a lot by how many days you stay in there, but on average, it’s good for around 300-500. Most of those numbers are pretty reliable. The only ones that aren’t quite additive are making EqD and the feature box at the same time, since there’s an overlap in audience there. The story’s age makes a difference, too. If SA features a story from 4 years ago, it’ll have a bigger effect, since a lot of people have joined the fandom in the intervening time and hadn’t seen it before, whereas featuring something that just got published a month ago isn’t reintroducing newer readers to something they weren’t around for.
Based on those numbers, I don’t know where people are getting their recommendations anymore. It doesn’t seem like the audience has shrunk by enough to justify the reduced readership of individual stories. I know there are more and more stories out there every day, which dilutes available readers, except that doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Unless those readers are just more and more doing manual searches to find what they want, I don’t see why the recommendation sources are having less effect, but they are. I do know Seth has been lamenting that he should have been doing a better job of advertising EqD all these years, as for a while now, most of his new traffic has been referrals from the site’s Facebook page. And he commonly gets emails from people who love, for instance, the Drawfriend compilations and wished they’d known about them a long time ago. And those things have been around for ages. So my best guesses are: there are just fewer readers (though I don’t see a ton of evidence that it’s the primary factor), or readers just aren’t looking for recommendations (or aren’t aware that they exist).
So yes, it’s tough to get 1000 views these days. Only about half my stories are getting there, and the ones that do aren’t clearing it by much.
Griffin
August 15, 2017 at 2:45 pm
Yeah, since I heard that sort of thing at the con (from you probably) been thinking about how one might find out about where people are getting recommendations. Not a easy problem since I don’t have the mind reading array in orbit yet.
Present Perfect
August 15, 2017 at 5:56 pm
…i fkn tol u m8