Random Notes on Publishing Here

[Otto26]

I wish I'd done two, fast, throw-away stories and submitted them in different ways and explored all the possible formatting options available so I could work out all my mistakes in advance. In fact, I'm going to do this just so that I'm fully educated about what can and cannot be done.

I wish I'd spent one more week walking through the process of publishing my story and correcting meta-data for the submission process.

I think breaking a large story up into chunks is the way to go. It's the way I'll publish in the future. For a number of reasons. First, small chunks are easier for readers to process and read to completion in a timely fashion. Second, it bolsters my appearance as an active writer. Third, publishing to novels and novellas takes away your eleventh story tag. Better to publish to a specific category, even if the story changes categories from installment to installment. Fourth, having multiple chapters/installments published increases the chances of a reader stumbling across your series.

Queuing stories up to publish on a schedule is a great way to go. I'm very glad the site permits this.

I'm definitely going include the laundry list of contents at the beginning of each story. I think this will decrease the number of dissatisfied readers. Maybe. I'm going to try it. I've noticed that readership of my other works got a boost. Stories similar to my current release got a boost in votes, dissimilar stories got some downvoting. I think some folks didn't pay attention to the categories the stories were published in.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I wish I'd done two, fast, throw-away stories and submitted them in different ways and explored all the possible formatting options available so I could work out all my mistakes in advance. In fact, I'm going to do this just so that I'm fully educated about what can and cannot be done.

This is good advice. Do an apprenticeship first with a dozen or so short, standalone stories, with simple themes, simple plots. Shake out your technical stuff, get the basics right - grammar, punctuation, especially dialogue punctuation.

Most importantly, learn your own style. With only one or two stories, you probably don't know what that is yet.

Learn to walk before you try to run. If you start telling your first big story before you're ready, you're not going to do it justice. There are exceptions to this principle, but not many. Lookin' at you @MelissaBaby

 

[gunhilltrain]

I wish I'd done two, fast, throw-away stories and submitted them in different ways and explored all the possible formatting options available so I could work out all my mistakes in advance. In fact, I'm going to do this just so that I'm fully educated about what can and cannot be done.

I wish I'd spent one more week walking through the process of publishing my story and correcting meta-data for the submission process.

I think breaking a large story up into chunks is the way to go. It's the way I'll publish in the future. For a number of reasons. First, small chunks are easier for readers to process and read to completion in a timely fashion. Second, it bolsters my appearance as an active writer. Third, publishing to novels and novellas takes away your eleventh story tag. Better to publish to a specific category, even if the story changes categories from installment to installment. Fourth, having multiple chapters/installments published increases the chances of a reader stumbling across your series.

Queuing stories up to publish on a schedule is a great way to go. I'm very glad the site permits this.

I'm definitely going include the laundry list of contents at the beginning of each story. I think this will decrease the number of dissatisfied readers. Maybe. I'm going to try it. I've noticed that readership of my other works got a boost. Stories similar to my current release got a boost in votes, dissimilar stories got some downvoting. I think some folks didn't pay attention to the categories the stories were published in.

There's different schools of thought about this. Some people will publish a 40 K stand-alone story; others will go to chapters. It's a matter of print versus screen reading I guess. The longest stand-alone story I've done was about 11 K words.

I'm not sure you need a laundry list at the beginning on each chapter. The tags should be sufficient and you can have different ones for each chapter. "Some folks didn't pay attention to the categories." Yeah, isn't that a surprise!

"The number of dissatisfied readers." That's like the MTA worrying about dissatisfied subway riders. They're just going to be there, and many of them just want their daily dose of porn, I guess. You can't think of it as a "concierge-type" service that you are providing. Many of them don't know or care much about what they are reading.

 

[Otto26]

Weeding out readers at the beginning may prevent them from expressing their dissatisfaction in voting. "That's not what I expected. I wasted my time. I'm going to give this a low vote to express my discontent."

Related to this, it was interesting to see readership retention numbers. My story was published in 5 chapters spaced one week apart, each being published on a Thursday. The first installment has roughly 3K views. The next three chapters each have roughly 1.8K views. The last chapter, which has been up for 6 days at time of writing, has roughly 1K views. I think that the last chapter will go up to 1.8K views over the next 8 days and the last four chapters will, broadly, have the same number of readers moving forward.

Those numbers have a lot of noise that I can't filter out. But, broadly speaking, it looks like I lost a little less than half of my readers after the first chapter and the ~1.5K that stuck around decided to stick around until the end.

I had 25 distinct actions on my account during this time period. These consisted of readers following my account or favoriting some chapter of the story. I had a few more actions during this time period that were not directly related to the story (people who favorited or commented on older stories).

I used my Author Profile to communicate with readers, updating them on publishing status and so forth. Everyone who favorited me or followed me got a response thanking them for the action and asking what, in particular, had caused them to take the action. I got one response from this effort. That person is currently reading the un-published epilogue and some other material related to the story that I shared with them. I'm planning to make this a regular feature in future story releases and will be upfront with readers that if they communicate with me they'll get access to additional material. I'll be interested to see how this works out.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Those numbers have a lot of noise that I can't filter out. But, broadly speaking, it looks like I lost a little less than half of my readers after the first chapter and the ~1.5K that stuck around decided to stick around until the end.

That's absolutely typical. If you've got a better retention rate than that by chapter three, that's a sign of a better story, I reckon.