Your best story with a terrible rating

[MillieDynamite]

If you didn't get down voted and shouted at, you were doing well.

Can you suggest a way to do that while preventing the imps of Loving Wives from wrecking my work and making it popular? I had the story up for several months and only one vote resulted. Despite much advertising on these boards. Ugh.

 

[EmilyMiller]

True, I suppose. Two of my stories were published on exactly the same day, last Thursday. The one in EC is at 9.3k views and 81 ratings. The one in SF/F is at 588 views and 9 ratings.

That’s not atypical.

Em

 

[EmilyMiller]

I believe Erotic Coupling is the one that is bigger. By story count at least.

You get less views per day.

It has lots of stories as it’s a “I don’t know where else to publish this” category.

Em

 

[SyleusSnow]

It's a 750 so organically gets a low score, but I thought Left Behind packed in enough story to deserve a little better than 3.43.

It's got a hate fuck, adultery, handcuffs and a cat o' nine tails. I mean... c'mon, people!

 

[Candy_Kane54]

Lady in Red

Its rating is only 4.56 with 81 votes and 27K views in the Incest/Taboo category. It's a story about identical twins who are in an incestuous relationship with each other, written from the POV of one of the twins. They meet a woman at a lesbian club and enter a relationship with her, eventually falling in love with her. We find out through a series of flashbacks that the woman they've fallen in love with is their birth mother, who had been raped when she was young and got pregnant from it. She gave up the twins at birth for adoption, which happened to have occurred on her birthday which was how they had all been at the club celebrating their birthdays the night they first met.

I also threw in a couple of kinks which was probably over the top so too many readers were probably disappointed that their kink wasn't the main focus of the story. If I ever try I/T again, I'll focus on the I and leave out the T.

 

[EroticCupcake]

I posted a story in Romance where MMC walks away from sex because a one night stand wouldn't be good for anyone. Lesson learned.

 

[Cagivagurl]

We all know that ratings are a bit of a mess and open to both the vagaries of audiences and plain old abuse. [not sour grapes, I have over twenty Hs]

Given this, if you had to pick the one of your works which has the most egregious gap between story quality and rating, what would it be?

For me, it’s pretty easy. A Hard Day’s Night is probably me at close to my current best; at least in the short story arena (it’s 11k words). The tale’s rating is suppressed by the [IMO appropriate] category I published it in, but nevertheless it’s not a 3.98 (or even a 4.48 if you make allowances for the 0.5 Loving Wives “tax”).

How about you?

Em

I have several stories which I thought were reasonable. That didn't score so well.
I have several which I thought were awful, that did OK.
I try as much as I can to ignore scores. I realise what I write will not please everybody.
Scores do not always tell the true story. I think we always know when we've written something at least half decent.
If I'm happy, I've achieved my goal...

Cagivagurl

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'd always thought Their Summer in France didn't get a fair rating when it was first released, but it's since climbed to 4:48 so I can't complain.

 

[alohadave]

My Daughter's Friend

A 750 story that is sitting at 3.94/108.

It's a stream of consciousness tale with no quotes used. Rather than my normal over explaining, I leave things less distinct.

The comments are encouraging, if not the score.

And someone went and gave it a 2 star. Thank you kind voter, you've really made my night.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I've got 5 stories which are scores under 4.0. (out of 42)

Goodbye, My Hot Young Wife is in the Loving Wives category and I maintain 3.33 is a good score for LW, so it doesn't count. But if it does count, it wins.

Two of those stories were in the 750 word competition (Breaking Even, Shawna's Leaving Party) and probably suffered from me trying to set a specific mood rather than a full on erotic scene. Shawna got voted down because a whole bunch of people didn't understand it (I maintain it's not that difficult as longs as you're paying attention to the Trans category - I think more than a few people came at it through the 750-word main page and got confused)

Amazing Chest Ahead was written for the Geek-day competition and was predicated on the idea that fans of the video game Dark Souls wouldn't expect the hero to successfully have sex before meeting a gruesome end. Still, lesson learned, it's not Erotic Horror if the horror stops the erotic from happening.

How my mother met you - surprisingly on 3.98 despite the fact it's an incest category story where hero nopes out of the incest hard. It ended up as weird amalgamation of incest as horror, with a (mild) BTB ending. It was an early story. I didn't know what I was doing. But I still like it, so I'm going to give it the win as a consolation prize.

 

[AchtungNight]

Courtney Crowe ( https://literotica.com/s/courtney-crowe )- an exotic dancer who decides to take advantage of her objectifying customers in the worst way possible. Set up two of them for a false sexual assault allegation and emotional distress lawsuit. Clear case of psychological erotic horror, ended on a disturbing cliffhanger. And yet never got past a 3. Maybe I made the protagonist a little too over the top sociopathic. I don’t know.

 

[Stimtheone]

"Terrible" might be subjective in this case. Not the worst rating since I do agree the epilogue of another series did not give as much as it should, but it was necessary. But, DE's Epilogue is just wholesome sex with pleasant finality, the playable happy ending of a rather intense story and yet it only has a 4.2 rating. The only one to score lower is the epilogue of JD which is now sitting at a 3.33, but I kinda agree that it doesn't have much other than some sparse, unrelated events that might as well be their own story and SHOULD.

Still, that 4.2 is the second lowest rating among all my stories.

 

[RetroFan]

I've mentioned this one before, but my story series 'Body Swap With Sister's Boyfriend' which I published in Incest/Taboo in 2019 was not written to be taken seriously, it was not Shakespeare or a work of classic literature, just a bit of dumb fun where a gamer nerd swaps bodies with his bossy twin sister's dumb jock boyfriend. Hilarity and hijinks ensue as the bumbling duo try to live each other's lives and just about everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Plus, it has nice scenery with its setting in Brisbane and the Gold Coast of Queensland, Australia.

Obviously Kafka Komedy isn't everyone's taste and nor would the story series with its immature and slapstick humour appeal to everyone, but even four years later I'm still surprised about how much offense it caused and how much vitriol and anger this work attracted, not to mention low scores, only one chapter going above a 4. Without intending to, I seemed to create Literotica's answer to the infamous 2001 shock comedy film 'Freddy Got Fingered' and even now the odd comment comes through telling me how much both I and my story suck. One commenter even expressed in a comment since deleted by the site administrators that I should commit suicide by firearm, which seems a little extreme for me simply writing a story he or she didn't care for.

Since then, I have tried - and failed - on a number of occasions to make the IT crowd laugh, but while I have received negative comments for my efforts on these stories, nothing comes close to the seething hatred that 'Body Swap With Sister's Boyfriend' attracted.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

https://literotica.com/s/the-talk-14

This has my lowest rating, at 2.90 (and that after a recent 5*), and I have never posted in Loving Wives. I have quite a few more that are rated below 3.50. In the case of "The Talk," I may have hugely misread the likes and dislikes of the Romance category readership. Although it's always possible that I should just be a better writer, and am not.

 

[djrip]

You know the one...

An Eye For Love is my story about an undead amnesiac being guided by a talking eye she found and keeps in her eye socket. Little too weird for some readers. It's got my second lowest rating and my lowest views, but I think it's one of my best. It's my most literary anyway.

 

[EmilyMiller]

You know the one...

An Eye For Love is my story about an undead amnesiac being guided by a talking eye she found and keeps in her eye socket. Little too weird for some readers. It's got my second lowest rating and my lowest views, but I think it's one of my best. It's my most literary anyway.

I think it’s a gem.

Em

 

[Comshaw]

My lowest-scored one is "The Basement Widow". I've cited this one before because some of the scores came from the fact the title was misspelled. It's supposed to be "The Basement Window". I get that readers would be upset with such a stupid mistake. But from the comments it wasn't just that but the contents that some objected to.

It has a complicated, convoluted storyline about a wife getting stuck in a basement window and how the husband uses that to get her to voluntarily have sex with one of his coworkers.

I thought it was a good story and got a few comments about how those readers enjoyed it. But I also got the normal troll "He should die in a dumpster fire for letting someone else fuck his wife" comments. Oh and did I say it was posted in Loving Wives? Yeah.

Comshaw

 

[Gamblnluck]

My lowest rated story had 33,941 views, 1262 votes for a score of 2.78. I had 243 comments, most of whom condemned the story.
What did I do so wrong to get such a major reaction? I read the characters in another story in a slightly different manner than others. The original author presented the cheating wife as being emotionally disturbed. I saw her mental illness as a reason for her actions. I wrote a sequel from her point of view.

 

[Stimtheone]

My lowest rated story had 33,941 views, 1262 votes for a score of 2.78. I had 243 comments, most of whom condemned the story.
What did I do so wrong to get such a major reaction?

Did you post in loving wives?

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Apart from my 750 entries, one of my lowest is Mummy Porn, which is in BDSM because it's about a mother getting back into doing kink after giving birth. It was written shortly after 50 Shades came out and the media were full of discussion of what 'mummy porn' appeals to 'yummy mummies' etc. My friends and I agreed that the perfect kink scene would start "yes I'll hurt you, but you have to have a nap first!"

When I posted it I was unaware how many readers were into incest and would assume a story with 'mother' as a tag would involve that, even in a different category. Until I got comments like 'interesting, not what I expected and the score suggests it wasn't what others expected either.'

It's slowly risen from 3.x to 4.3 as people read my other BDSM stories and find it.

 

[Gamblnluck]

Did you post in loving wives?

Yep, both my story and its precedent were there. What I did was add an ending. To tell the truth, I liked the original. I just saw a reason for the behavior of some of the characters. My other stories in LW have done very well.

 

[EmilyMiller]

"Burn the Bitch" (posted under my alt JazzyG in Loving Wives). It's a satirical look at the lovely tropes in the BTB subgenre of LW. It was written with the intent of ENRAGING the BTB crowd and drawing their comments, and it succeeded. Last time I checked, there were over 80 comments nestled inside the range of "This isthe best story ever, please marry me" to "You need to be killed."

I view the comments as an integral part of the work, so I've left them all tbere

It does seem that one category has dominated this thread. Who knew that Novel and Novellas was such a wretched hive of scum and villainy?

Em

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I do have two stories think are better than they are rated.
I worked my ass off on this both and really thought they were special. I'm not going to mention them buy name, but I think they both may have the same issue.

They are both in CD/Trans because that is the main theme of the stories. I'm not going to mention specific ratings or name the stories because that isn't pertinent to my question.

One includes some mild BDSM, Mistress/Sissy stuff with a cock cage. significant group sex, and a cheating wife.
The other starts with a significant I/T segment before it switches the the CD/Trans part of the story.

Again, CD/Trans is the main theme of both stories.

I'm wondering if my mixing genres like that is an issue.
I did think about breaking them into chapters and publishing the sections separately, but that would have ruined the overriding story arches, so I chose not to. besides, I think I write better in longer story formats.(These are both Novellas)

I guess the real question I'm asking is, does mixing genres like this cause problems. What experiences have you had with doing it?

 

[EmilyMiller]

I do have two stories think are better than they are rated.
I worked my ass off on this both and really thought they were special. I'm not going to mention them buy name, but I think they both may have the same issue.

They are both in CD/Trans because that is the main theme of the stories. I'm not going to mention specific ratings or name the stories because that isn't pertinent to my question.

One includes some mild BDSM, Mistress/Sissy stuff with a cock cage. significant group sex, and a cheating wife.
The other starts with a significant I/T segment before it switches the the CD/Trans part of the story.

Again, CD/Trans is the main theme of both stories.

I'm wondering if my mixing genres like that is an issue.
I did think about breaking them into chapters and publishing the sections separately, but that would have ruined the overriding story arches, so I chose not to. besides, I think I write better in longer story formats.(These are both Novellas)

I guess the real question I'm asking is, does mixing genres like this cause problems. What experiences have you had with doing it?

I often end up with mixed genres and scratching my head about categories. Like Fishing Trip is mostly lesbian, albeit with some fetish / BDSM elements. But then I tacked on yet more fetish and an MFF threesome. It was an early story and I was in kitchen sink mode.

I explain the combination process in A Litliker’s Guide to the Emiverse.

Now I would have kept the different elements separate.

Em

 

[Devinter]

Amazing Chest Ahead was written for the Geek-day competition and was predicated on the idea that fans of the video game Dark Souls wouldn't expect the hero to successfully have sex before meeting a gruesome end. Still, lesson learned, it's not Erotic Horror if the horror stops the erotic from happening.

... That was quite the ride. I gave you a 5, despite the fact that you forgot to cut the creature's tail for the bonus weapon drop.