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.
Interesting discussion on the conversion rates of views to likes in fandom. I mean, in an ideal world, it would be great if more people responded and told creators how appreciated their work is, but the numbers are what they are.
Imma get real here for a second: I actually do some digital marketing as part of my dayjob, and I absolutely applied those skills when I started out in the Undertale fandom. Because I’m creating a pretty niche product (incestuous, kinky skeleton porn, for the most part) I had to work pretty hard to make myself visible to the fans who wanted to see my stuff. I’ll probably never have a piece that’s as famous and popular as, say, ‘Flowey is not a good life coach’, but I have a pretty solid, stable fanbase and as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, my views-to-kudos/followers-to-likes ratio is about 10% as discussed above.
A part of my success is also just down to luck. I came into the fandom just a little after its peak, at a time when hungry fans were starting to broaden their searches away from the most popular artists and writers and look for people doing good-quality-but-content-specific type things. I also had a pretty popular artist reblog one of my fics earlier on (Which I never thanked them for, but sup @sanspar :3) which garnered me a whole bunch of new readers.
So when it comes to being recognised as a content creator, both luck and hard work got me to where I am now. The luck part can’t be replicated, although that’ll hopefully find you on its own, but are there any authors/creators who would want me to talk about the digital marketing thing and how to build your own personal fanbase? Just remember that realistically, no matter how many followers you get, probably only 10% of them will ever engage with you regularly.
Its actually really nice to see a post like this acknowledging that it really is difficult to engage consistently. This is actually something I struggle with a lot, I feel like Im morally obligated to reblog and comment on every fic I read, but sometimes that’s difficult to do. Sometimes it feels like so much work. Which Im sure sounds ridiculous to most, but when you’re trying to make unique thought out comments for each of the 100 unread AO3 emails you have about fic updates, and then theres going through the things you liked on tumblr and theres 1000s of them and theyre all stuff you “were gonna reblog later” and it gets overwhelming. The end result being that i dont read fics so i dont feel guilty about not commenting because I wasn’t in the right mindset for it.
One thing that I’d love to see added to AO3 is some sort of per-chapter kudos or “like” of some sort. It would help keep the views-to-engagement ratio accurate. Not only would it give authors motivation from people who don’t comment on every chapter, but it would help them figure out what kinds of chapters are getting the best response. It would give a far more accurate engagement score on multi-chapter fics, which are usually the most engaging story-wise, but require more planning and long-term work. It could really help keep author motivation up when tearing their hair out over longfic.
I’m not sure what the best way to do that sort of feedback is – a per-chapter kudos or something else – but I think it’s needed.
Published
ugh 