Opinions on story length

[old_prof]

To me it’s kinda disappointing when it is shown as completed even though there could be more stories to tell

Isn't this perpetually the case for any interesting story (plot-wise, not just a stroker).

No one's real life ever has a point where every thread is tied off, nothing is dangling unresolved. If your characters are real, this should be true for your stories as well.

I think a story should resolve the primary issue that drives the story arc, but it may open up a dozen more potential stories. That's good, not bad.

 

[WhoDunIt77]

I'm 90% sure you can change the series to In Progress after it's completed. Starting a follow-up is fine too; people do that pretty regularly.

Thanks, I’ll look for that if and when the time comes then!

 

[WhoDunIt77]

Isn't this perpetually the case for any interesting story (plot-wise, not just a stroker).

No one's real life ever has a point where every thread is tied off, nothing is dangling unresolved. If your characters are real, this should be true for your stories as well.

I think a story should resolve the primary issue that drives the story arc, but it may open up a dozen more potential stories. That's good, not bad.

Thank You as well, I appreciate the input, especially being the newb that I am at this!

 

[old_prof]

Thank You as well, I appreciate the input, especially being the newb that I am at this!

I was there not very long ago. You'll feel comfortable being one of us sooner than you can imagine.

 

[WhoDunIt77]

I was there not very long ago. You'll feel comfortable being one of us sooner than you can imagine.

Thanks, I’m still learning a lot, even though I’m nearing “old dog” territory!

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Uh... yes. We do have a similar follower count. You are even ahead of me by nearly two dozen at the time of this posting. A subtle difference is that I've been posting here for almost 14 months and your earliest story went up here eleven years ago.

So to start with: Murky Water comes in at 16 Literotica pages, which probably means it's nearly 50k words in length. It has 12.3k views and came out 9 months ago, so I imagine that viewership has slowed to a trickle. You could have gotten more viewership by splitting it into four sections. By explicitly putting it up as "Murky Water (1/4)," "Murky Water (2/4)," etc. you'd signal that it was complete while still getting it to spike on the new releases page four times instead of once.

Another important thing you'd get to do is to have four different sets of tags. Obviously you've noticed that readership numbers are much higher in Taboo/Incest and Loving Wives than they are in Sci-Fi/Fantasy or Novellas. Your incest work gets seventy thousand views and your celebrity fanfiction work gets a tenth of that. That is what it is, but one thing that can get you readers is tags. People who search by tags get a grab bag of things across the site, and one of the main ways to search is for tag intersection and tag accumulation. That is, when you put in a search tag, the site gives you other tags that appear with it on at least one story, and you can click on those to refine the search.

You can only put 10 tags on a story, but by having more than one section on the site you can put a slightly different set of ten tags on part 2 and part 3 and part 4 means that the series as a whole will show up in tag searches that it would not and could not if it was all in one pile.

As for my work, my complete novels aren't published here because they aren't porn (I put them on my Patreon instead, because I have fans who like to read my non-porn work). One of my stand-alone stories was converted into a series because it was popular and I received dozens of requests to do so. Every single chapter and stand alone story I have published here has gotten a Red H because I put things in places where I think they will be appreciated.

It's not just about writing better, it's also about writing to the audience you're looking to get. The site itself has constraints on how works are presented, and it doesn't makes sense to try to fight against that.

I am certainly not the most prolific writer on Literotica, and don't wish to be. The three stories a year that I average here are, like you, only those that I decided to share with the audience here and not reflective of my total publishing portfolio. Tradpub still takes up too much of my time.

I do nothing to promote my work here, and care far more about the feedback from readers than ratings or the number of views. If you take a look at the story, "1990", you will see that it was published almost exactly three years ago and has just over 1,200 views. Of note, however, is that more than half of those views (676) generated a vote. That is a vote-per-view ratio that means something to me. The print version of that story, under a different title, has won several awards and is selling enough copies on Amazon alone to keep my dogs in kibble.

I used to publish here by chapters and have been tracking my stats from the beginning. Since converting all of my chapter stories to single, longer submissions in 2023, every one of those stories has seen an increase in views-per-day, votes-per-view, more feedback, and an increase in the rating.

I think I'll keep doing what I'm doing.

 

[Britva415]

Writing is already broken up fractally. Books in a series, chapters, scene breaks, paragraphs, sentences

Words, letters, strokes, serifs

Matrix dots

Toner particles

Pigment molecules

Quantum stuff

Planck's zinger

 

[TheLobster]

Words, letters, strokes, serifs

Matrix dots

Toner particles

Pigment molecules

Quantum stuff

Planck's zinger

You may call my characters flat, but string theory says they've got eleven dimensions!