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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 entire thing is fascinating to me. Truth is, I don’t even look at the ratio of hits to kudos on my fics. That number’s kinda meaningless to me, because as a reader, I’ve probably been responsible for AT LEAST dozens of hits on each of my favorite fics – for which AO3 only allowed me to leave a single kudos.

I also open fics on multiple devices to read/reread them. I open tabs for fics I intend to look at later and then revisit them (often multiple times) before I get a chance to actually sit down and read them. These things add up.

Hits without equivalent kudos don’t mean people aren’t enjoying a fic. It might be the exact opposite. It might mean you have people who love your fic so much they’ve read it ten times this month – on their laptops, phones, tablets, etc…and ten times the month before.

Kudos and comments mean A LOT. I know this as a writer who gets overwhelmed and excited by every single new comment, bookmark with notes, tumblr tag, and kudos email. But fixating too much on the numbers is a frustrating and futile process. I know it’s hard to not get caught up in that, but it really shouldn’t be something that you let discourage you from continuing to share your work. 

All of this, and also, literally NOTHING the OP mentions is new, or a trend? 

– There have always been authors deciding to get out of fandom and taking their work down. It happens for a million personal reasons, it happens all the time, and every day there are also people posting their first piece of fanwork, or discovering fandom for the first time. Sometimes you will get a cluster of people, whether they influence each other or it’s just a coincidence + confirmation bias, but fandom is not by any means dying out or withering away.

– That said, your personal friend group/lineup of fave authors/fandom may be declining/getting out of fandom/etc. I’ve had this happen when it seemed like everyone I knew in a particular fandom was suddenly having kids or busy with a new job or otherwise much more involved in Offline Real Life than fandom. It happens. Particular fandoms fade, and groups of people sometimes move on for a while or permanently. But fandom on the whole isn’t going anywhere, and if you stick around you will meet new people/find new authors and fanartists to follow/get excited about a new fandom. 

– People have always ALWAYS whined about not having enough content to consume. It is a lot faster to look at a piece of fanart or read a story than it is to make a piece of fanart or write a story. I can spend YEARS writing a story that someone reads in a weekend! (And, to be clear: I read in a weekend what has taken someone months or years to write!) There is always this imabalance, people always want more stuff. (And more “good” stuff, whatever good means for them, and more stuff in the particular genre/style/mood/rating/etc. that they want.) It does not by any means indicate that there is a dearth of stuff being produced.

– People have always ALWAYS complained that the failure of ungrateful readers/viewers/consumers to give enough feedback/comments/kudos will DESTROY FANDOM. I remember people comparing website hits to emails received back in 2001 or so and predicting dire fates, but what actually seems to take people out of fandom is, you know, stuff going on in their offline lives, whether good stuff (new job! school! having kids! getting into relationships!) or bad (mental health, money problems, etc.). Not getting feedback on your work can be discouraging, and it helps to have realistic expectations for what is a good amount of feedback, but also you are not going to kill fandom by failing to leave kudos/comments/multi-paragraph comments/etc.

If I like what I read the work gets kudos.
If it was nonsensical garbage or a boring waste of time, I’m not hitting that button.
If it’s fucking great, I’m leaving a comment about how fucking great that was.
When I go to a museum I’m not punching kudos on paintings I like and skipping ones I don’t care for.
Don’t measure your work by accolades
Who are you writing for?
Why do you write at all?