Continuing A Story, Yes or No

[Tefler]

My first story, The Neallys, was pretty long. About 70K words over 5 parts. The number of parts was based on changing POVs.

When I finished, I got the urge to update so along came parts 6 and 7. I'm thinking of just carrying the story forward every two months or so, reflecting the passage of real time. The story's been well-received.

I may do it for myself anyway, but I wonder if readers will be interested.

I'd say go for it!

If you take a look at the top lists for each category, the long-running stories often have chapters that are high rated... which means that there's an audience for longer and more in-depth storytelling.

Three Square Meals is just over 3 million words and still going at chapter 126. It's a serial, all focused on the same characters, so I decided not to break it up into separate stories.

Some people balk at the idea of starting a story that large and others love getting stuck into a massive tale. You're getting great scores so far, so I think it's a fair bet that your fans want more!

 

[SeabornFare]

I'd say go for it!

If you take a look at the top lists for each category, the long-running stories often have chapters that are high rated... which means that there's an audience for longer and more in-depth storytelling.

Three Square Meals is just over 3 million words and still going at chapter 126. It's a serial, all focused on the same characters, so I decided not to break it up into separate stories.

Some people balk at the idea of starting a story that large and others love getting stuck into a massive tale. You're getting great scores so far, so I think it's a fair bet that your fans want more!

The 99% factor that a longer series is found at the top is because their reading pool becomes smaller with time, so that the main body of your readers and voters are your hardcore fans.

At Chapter 126, you should have a 4.99, but there are others out there who can't stand what they see as an undeserving story at the top of the list.

I attempted to read your mammoth story, but it wasn't for me, and while I can understand and appreciate the feel-good and familiar quality of characters a person has come to enjoy, I still prefer a shorter, more concise, and better developed story than a long running series that often repeats itself.

By all means though, if you enjoy what you're writing, write it until you don't.

 

[SimonDoom]

This comment is faulted logic. Simon, I’ve seen you comment on many other threads about the story views, and in those threads, you yourself have pointed out that there’s no way to know how many people will finish reading either a stand alone story or a serial chapter because site data only captures how many people opened the link and gives no information as to what’s actually read!

There could be many reasons for a “fall-off”. Changing categories is certainly one valid reason. Readers simply losing interest along the way, as ruddygore pointed out above, is another valid reason. But, the possibility that 400 people read chapters 1-7 is likely another reason, which would indiciate the exact opposite of a fall-off—it would mean there was not a fall-off but instead that the core audience was retained.

Mathematically, this seems more correct, that the core audience is retained. You describe the change from 8k to 2200 and then 400 as “huge”. In a vacuum, the difference between 8k to 400 may seem large, but in correct perspective—that there are more than 2.39 MILLION registered Literotica site users and an unknowable number of anonymous readers—it’s around the accurate figure for an error function for the unknown volatility of reader interest, i.e., the change of numbers is functionally zero considering the reader pool and how much is unknown about reader interest!

There’s no baseline available of the average “expected” readership for a stand alone story, nor is there data on such for a multi-chapter story. Theres no guarantee that the OP story, or any other, would do better in overall readership as a stand alone story. We don’t even know how many unique site visits there are daily. There’s essentially no mechanism on this site to figure out the data, make comparisons and then answer any question of what happened to change readership interest over a multi-chapter/serial.

And mathematically (and, which you left off from my prior post) the biggest stumbling block is that there’s nothing on this site to measure the heteroscedasticity of the stochastic data of readership. Without that, all of this is presumptive. Available site data only trends towards a handful of mild observations, such as the first post of anything tends to get more reads and is the most likely to get comments, as 8letters pointed out above, and that “high” chapters tend to have less unique views. And to a large degree, it seems that these observations are even given too much survivorship bias too (such as “I would have more readers/followers/popularity if I wrote [something else besides what I write]”).

Which is why I’m still left wondering why some author’s here feel that every opinion needs some padded “justification”. We all have an opinion on something; the OP asked for opinions. Each opinion may be valid enough in and of itself, but it’s still just an uninformed opinion; why make it seem like it’s weighted over other opinions by throwing around indecipherable numbers?

Writers ask questions similar to the OP’s because they are unsure. So I find it unsettling when other writers make it sound like they have “things to keep in mind” from a greater, tested data pool than just general and anecdotal personal experience faultily weighted by selection bias. And I don’t understand why there’s such resistance in these instances to just saying something along the lines of, “I personally wouldn’t do [whatever an OP has suggested that’s outside of the norm] because it just doesn’t interest me and I just can’t envision you getting results that I’d personally find worthwhile” if that’s the case. Becasuse this site is a literal behemoth without any decipherable data, and any writer is fighting for an infinitesimally small segment of the multimillions of daily site visitors’ interest in a numerically blind void.

I just saw this comment for the first time and wanted to respond to it.

1. First of all, you're right that we can't be certain what percentage of "viewers" actually read the story to the finish, so we can't be certain how many people have read chapter 1 versus how many have read chapter X when we see a significant drop off in views. You're right.

2. However, I think you are incorrect that we cannot make educated inferences from the data. I think we can if we look at it closely. And if we do look at it closely, I think we can safely say that JPGMVNY's series The Neally's has seen an unusually high dropoff, and that it's not reasonable to explain that dropoff as being a retention of the core readers. It's much more likely that the series has lost readers over time.

3. The standard ratio of views:votes is around 80:1 to 100:1, although individual stories can vary. The ratio is less for shorter stories, and it's somewhat less for late chapters in series, but not as much less as you would expect. It's reasonable to suppose that the vote number is lower than the number of reads, even though it's clear in some cases (such as with Loving Wives stories) that viewers are voting on stories without reading them to the end. I think it's reasonable to suppose, moreover, that the number of readers is significantly less than the number of views, but also significantly more than the number of votes. I base this, in part, on my own behavior. I click on many stories that I don't read. I also read many stories that I don't vote on. I suspect many others are the same way.

4. Consider Tefler. He's the gold standard for reader retention. His latest chapter -- number 124, published nearly 4 years after chapter 1 -- has about 10% of the views that chapter 1 does. He has an extremely loyal, enthusiastic following. His view:read ratio is probably about the lowest of any author on Literotica.

5. Something you can see with Tefler's stories is that view numbers have more or less stabilized over time. They fall a little, but not much, from one chapter to the next. Sometimes a subsequent chapter has more views than a previous one. That's true of most series, including mine.

6. JPGMVNY's story does not follow that pattern. View numbers appeared to stabilize around chapter 6, at about 25% of chapter 1's view numbers, but then they plummeted for chapter 7. Chapter 7 has about one quarter the views of chapter 6. I don't think that can be explained as retention of the core readership. That makes no sense. It's much more likely that many of the readers of chapter 6 decided not to read Chapter 7 because it was in a completely different category that was of no interest to them.

7. There's nothing wrong with doing whatever one wants to do. But if you care about numbers -- views, scores, whatever -- I think the data does yield useful information from which you can draw (rough) conclusions.

8. One thing I DO think is foolish (just my opinion) is to keep writing a series because you get addicted to receiving the high scores that late chapters in series tend to get. I think there may be some of that on this site. All that the high score reflects is a dwindling, self-selecting readership of fans. It seems to me that a rational author would rather have 10,000 fans and a lower score than 5,000 fans and a higher score. That's one reason I think that, all things being equal (admittedly, they never are), it's better to keep writing new stories than to perpetuate a story unless you have a reason to do so.

 

[JPGmvny]

I just saw this comment for the first time and wanted to respond to it.

1. First of all, you're right that we can't be certain what percentage of "viewers" actually read the story to the finish, so we can't be certain how many people have read chapter 1 versus how many have read chapter X when we see a significant drop off in views. You're right.

2. However, I think you are incorrect that we cannot make educated inferences from the data. I think we can if we look at it closely. And if we do look at it closely, I think we can safely say that JPGMVNY's series The Neally's has seen an unusually high dropoff, and that it's not reasonable to explain that dropoff as being a retention of the core readers. It's much more likely that the series has lost readers over time.

3. The standard ratio of views:votes is around 80:1 to 100:1, although individual stories can vary. The ratio is less for shorter stories, and it's somewhat less for late chapters in series, but not as much less as you would expect. It's reasonable to suppose that the vote number is lower than the number of reads, even though it's clear in some cases (such as with Loving Wives stories) that viewers are voting on stories without reading them to the end. I think it's reasonable to suppose, moreover, that the number of readers is significantly less than the number of views, but also significantly more than the number of votes. I base this, in part, on my own behavior. I click on many stories that I don't read. I also read many stories that I don't vote on. I suspect many others are the same way.

4. Consider Tefler. He's the gold standard for reader retention. His latest chapter -- number 124, published nearly 4 years after chapter 1 -- has about 10% of the views that chapter 1 does. He has an extremely loyal, enthusiastic following. His view:read ratio is probably about the lowest of any author on Literotica.

5. Something you can see with Tefler's stories is that view numbers have more or less stabilized over time. They fall a little, but not much, from one chapter to the next. Sometimes a subsequent chapter has more views than a previous one. That's true of most series, including mine.

6. JPGMVNY's story does not follow that pattern. View numbers appeared to stabilize around chapter 6, at about 25% of chapter 1's view numbers, but then they plummeted for chapter 7. Chapter 7 has about one quarter the views of chapter 6. I don't think that can be explained as retention of the core readership. That makes no sense. It's much more likely that many of the readers of chapter 6 decided not to read Chapter 7 because it was in a completely different category that was of no interest to them.

7. There's nothing wrong with doing whatever one wants to do. But if you care about numbers -- views, scores, whatever -- I think the data does yield useful information from which you can draw (rough) conclusions.

8. One thing I DO think is foolish (just my opinion) is to keep writing a series because you get addicted to receiving the high scores that late chapters in series tend to get. I think there may be some of that on this site. All that the high score reflects is a dwindling, self-selecting readership of fans. It seems to me that a rational author would rather have 10,000 fans and a lower score than 5,000 fans and a higher score. That's one reason I think that, all things being equal (admittedly, they never are), it's better to keep writing new stories than to perpetuate a story unless you have a reason to do so.

Thanks for the comments. I agree that were the choice between continuing The Neallys or writing new stories and new characters, I'd choose the latter. I intended to stop at Part 5, entitled, "The End of the Story." But I realized what was happening to the characters on a particular day, Aug. 2, 2019, so I did a quick update. Then one character was neglected, so I moved her along as well as other characters. I plan on updating every few months. I've added a note to the end of Part 6 that Part 7 is in "Romance." Part 2 was MF, but for arc purposes I left it in Lesbian Sex. But I decided to make the switch for Part 7 and probably will stick the remainder there. If only a few like the updates, that's OK. Writing them is the only way I can find out what happens.

But I've published other stories as I go so it's not a choice. I write to find out what happens to people I create. I pay attention to my scores, sometimes obsessively; indeed, I'm doing a complete re-write of one with a sub-4 when people, rightly, criticized the original. That I can get 12 people interested enough to vote on Part 7 makes it a success. And now I have to find out what happens for Christmas at the Neallys'.

Again, thanks for the comments.