Series With Different Chapters In Different Categories

[Kasumi_Lee]

What are people's thoughts on writing a story series in which different chapters fall under different categories? I don't have any plans to write such a series at the moment, but I'd be interested to know people's takes on the practical considerations. There are any number of category combinations one could imagine that could form a coherent story series, and some combinations might work better than others, but the real concern is that fans of one might be alienated by the other.

Tags are useful for letting readers know what kind of story they're going to read so they aren't blindsided, but if they read chapter one in a category they like and then see that chapter two falls under a different category they don't like, you might lose those readers. But then some prospective readers who hate the chapter one category but love the chapter two category might not give the series a chance at all, or if they do, they might skip chapter one and all the important back story.

Has anyone tried writing a multi-category series like this? Is it OK to have different chapters of the same series in different categories as long as they all tie together into a single narrative? Or is it better to keep all the chapters in the same category and just rely on the tags and chapter descriptions to guide readers?

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

I've considered this, but decided to stick with the main category I started with. Most chapters in the series fit that category, although some probably don't, and I figure that's where my readers are and the folks who are following the series but aren't following me know where to look to find the next chapter.

I have seen people do this, so I know it's okay and I assume it works for them, but I'm scared to do it 40 chapters into my trilogy.

I just figure that I'll lose a lot of folks if I jump a category.

 

[SimonDoom]

You CAN do it, and many do, and some will tell you that it works. I don't ever do this, for artistic and practical reasons.

My artistic reason: I like an erotic story to have an erotic focus. I don't see the point of writing a series where one chapter is EC and the next is BDSM and the next is Incest. I've read some stories like that and they seem unfocused and unsatisfying to me. If I want to cover those three erotic fields, I'll write three different stories. I think some authors get wedded to a character or a couple of characters and they want to put them through a lot of different kinds of erotic experiences. I don't do that. I'm not interested in that. I just move on to a new story and write new characters. My advice to authors is not to get wedded to characters this way and continue with them once their natural story is done. Move on.

That's just me. Other opinions may differ.

The practical reason is that while it MAY work, it almost certainly will result in lower views and ratings, because you will be trying to move a particular reader set through stories that don't interest them.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I’ve read several. If the story is cohesive, it works.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Here's my thought: it's a fine idea if you already have a following that's large enough to support your ambitions. If you don't, don't do it. Stay in one category, even if your story is going to move through multiple erotic ideas.

As an example, BreakTheBar's story The OF Girl is about a guy who discovers that his fellow intern is an OnlyFans model who's trying to hide her identity. He then stumbles into a polyamorous relationship in the course of getting a girlfriend and helping his intern friend with her content. Many other sex adventures ensue, and none of them require massive leaps of faith once you accept the initial premise. That story has chapters, I think, in E&V, EC, Anal, Group Sex and Romance at least, and the story isn't any worse for it. The reason that works, though, is that BTB has a pretty significant following and a successful Patreon and The OF Girl is a subsidized work through Patreon. That it's posted on Lit at all is because the work is already paid for by his Patrons.

My experience, dropping chapters 1 and 2 of a series in Romance and chapter 3 in Erotic Couplings, was that it was a terrible horrible no-good very bad idea and I regret doing it. I don't think there's a significant difference in quality in my chapters, but chapter 1 has a rating in the 4.5s and 2800 reads. Chapter 2 has a rating in the 4.6s and 2400 reads. And chapter 3 has a rating in the 4.3s and 484 reads; it has the second-lowest readership of anything I've published despite being in one of the most active categories. My 750-word story in the same category has 3x the reads, and my 750-word reflective essay about my poorly-rated 750-word E&V story only has 30 fewer views than the third chapter in that series. I absolutely shot myself in the foot by changing categories and I hope dropping chapter 4 back in Romance where it belongs will help fix that, but it's also possible I've just killed my readership for that series entirely.

 

[Cagivagurl]

IMO... It only works if you have a large following.
Many readers (who don't follow you) May only read in the one category... If that's the case, they miss the next chapter and lose interest...
I tried it once, and all it created as confusion. I received many emails asking what happened to the missing chapters...
My advice is... stick to the one category...
Even if you don't think it'll fit...

Cagivagurl

 

[ElectricBlue]

I reckon category hopping loses readers overall. It does depend on the story, obviously, how well it's written and if you have followers who read your stuff wherever it might be. But categories seem to be so tribal nowadays, with readers not wanting to wander off their preferred turf.

It also gets down to "smorgasbord" stories, where writers try to pack everything onto the same characters. I'm not convinced that always works - I think it's a major contributor to the endless unfinished stories on Lit. I prefer standalone stories with limited kinks in each one - a decent meal rather than a bunch of cocktail sausages and snacks.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

I see EB and Simon saying similar things about not liking stories that cross genres. I know this is erotica first, but when I started my series, I wanted to tell a story about the characters - the sex was something they did, not the entire focus, and the plot is significant outside that. I can get the whole endless unending series issues, but not all series are like that.

If anything, I wanted to tell a story first, and the sex is just part of the overarching story. Now, far be it from me to contradict two colleagues who beat the shit out of me and my stuff, but I think you can do a story that hits multiple different categories but doesn't end up being some kind of sit-com where you've got the whole "what crazy hijinks are they getting up to this week?!" kind of thing going on, that I agree is annoying.

 

[YmaOHyd]

What's a smorgasbord story IMO varies pretty widely. A romantic relationship that eventually involves sex in public, experimentation with butt stuff and light BDSM, and maybe a threesome -- that's, like, six categories, because pretty vanilla sexual activity is spread across a bunch of spaces and there's not a great catch-all. And I don't think that's the fault of the author trying to pack too many kinks onto a single group of characters. That strikes me as a pretty normal sexual relationship between horny adults -- the threesome might be tough to put together but it's a common enough fantasy, and the rest of it's the kind of thing I'd expect a couple to make it through in a year of sex and dating.

A story that has all of that same stuff except it's between a vampire and a werewolf can just live in Non-Human, fully and completely. It's not any less of a smorgasbord, but it has an umbrella to live under. If you're jumping from food fetish to incest to cheating wives to monsterfucking -- yeah, you probably have a scope problem.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

If you want to be popular, don't do it. If you have a story that naturally spans categories and your faithfulness to your art outweighs your need for hot feedback, then go ahead.

The majority of readers here read for a particular kink, or at least a particular kink on a particular day. Annoy them at your own peril.

 

[PennyThompson]

So, my main series started in Sci-Fi & Fantasy, but I quickly realized it didn't really feel right there, so with chapter 3 I switched to Erotic Couplings. I figured since the story mostly involved one character having sex with one other character, that made the most sense. Later on when there were some scenes with three characters, I moved those chapters into Group Sex.

My impression is that series readership pretty much inevitably looks like this (sorry for the MS Paint graphics )

The first chapter will get a large number of views, and then views of later chapters will quickly level out to a smaller but more consistent number of readers who found your series, liked it, and stuck with it.

For whatever reason, my series views looks more like this:


And those bumps happened when I switched categories! I'm not saying I found some kind of view boosting hack for stories or anything, that definitely wasn't my intention. I was just trying to find the category that made the most sense for each chapter. But I don't think changing categories hurt me or punished me in any way!

@THBGato says I'm a special snowflake and shouldn't be trusted though, so "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

 

[YmaOHyd]

@PennyThompson That's very cool, thank you!

I looked at the data for The OF Girl, and here's what it looks like:

So pretty much a lot like your initial impression chart. The big jumps and stuff are:

• the first time it goes into the Group Sex category and it becomes clear that John/Sabrina/Gemma are going to become a stable threesome
• the first time it goes into Anal
• the second time it goes into Anal
  • The first spike is Gemma doing butt stuff for the first time, the second is Sabrina, the titular OF girl, doing butt stuff for the first time
  • I don't have an explanation as to why viewership triples or quadruples, except that it's built up for people who are reading the series and spends a lot of time on the front page/HoF pages of that category
• a gradual climb at the end that I think is about descriptions
  • There's a run of Group Sex chapters towards the end that feature a climb in views before they drop back down to baseline. Those chapters are all fivesome chapters. The three chapters prior (GS and two EC) are all basically about non-sexual work stuff. The three GS chapters all talk about fivesomes in their descriptions. After that it's back into character drama, and the final spike is a chapter with the descriptor "the long-awaited Becca threesome" or something like that.

Again, this is an ongoing series that started in September 2022 and is Patreon-supported/sponsored.

 

[PennyThompson]

@PennyThompson That's very cool, thank you!

I looked at the data for The OF Girl, and here's what it looks like:View attachment 2514720

So pretty much a lot like your initial impression chart. The big jumps and stuff are:

• the first time it goes into the Group Sex category and it becomes clear that John/Sabrina/Gemma are going to become a stable threesome
• the first time it goes into Anal
• the second time it goes into Anal
  • The first spike is Gemma doing butt stuff for the first time, the second is Sabrina, the titular OF girl, doing butt stuff for the first time
  • I don't have an explanation as to why viewership triples or quadruples, except that it's built up for people who are reading the series and spends a lot of time on the front page/HoF pages of that category
• a gradual climb at the end that I think is about descriptions
  • There's a run of Group Sex chapters towards the end that feature a climb in views before they drop back down to baseline. Those chapters are all fivesome chapters. The three chapters prior (GS and two EC) are all basically about non-sexual work stuff. The three GS chapters all talk about fivesomes in their descriptions. After that it's back into character drama, and the final spike is a chapter with the descriptor "the long-awaited Becca threesome" or something like that.

Again, this is an ongoing series that started in September 2022 and is Patreon-supported/sponsored.

Your data is a lot more professional looking than mine, but I'm glad you've seen the same thing

 

[Bamagan]

What are people's thoughts on writing a story series in which different chapters fall under different categories? I don't have any plans to write such a series at the moment, but I'd be interested to know people's takes on the practical considerations. There are any number of category combinations one could imagine that could form a coherent story series, and some combinations might work better than others, but the real concern is that fans of one might be alienated by the other.

Tags are useful for letting readers know what kind of story they're going to read so they aren't blindsided, but if they read chapter one in a category they like and then see that chapter two falls under a different category they don't like, you might lose those readers. But then some prospective readers who hate the chapter one category but love the chapter two category might not give the series a chance at all, or if they do, they might skip chapter one and all the important back story.

Has anyone tried writing a multi-category series like this? Is it OK to have different chapters of the same series in different categories as long as they all tie together into a single narrative? Or is it better to keep all the chapters in the same category and just rely on the tags and chapter descriptions to guide readers?

With the caveat that some category purists here get downright tribal, I don't think there's any reason you can't do that successfully, at least with the right story.* Many stories here can fall into multiple categories, even if they're just following one main character through a few scenes. If the story is long enough, it's easy to imagine it weaving through several 'erotic genres' before it climaxes (if you'll pardon the pun).

*Success is a rather slippery thing to define on this site, and since almost all chaptered stories see a significant dip anyway, it's not certain that category-hopping has a large impact on the views of later installments. I am not surprised that the graphs above show a spike in views when the story gets put in front of new eyes, but it doesn't look like that necessarily generated a lot of new reads, since the overall pattern of slow decline seems to hold.

My long-running series stayed in one category, but some of the chapters could easily have been placed in others. It exhibits the same basic pattern as the graphs above, albeit with smaller bumps, despite not getting served to new audiences, which I generally attributed to day of week/how long it stayed on the first page of the hub list. I think, if I did it over again, I'd probably have put some of the chapters in Fetish and Nonhuman (there are anthros aplenty). That being said, some of the readers commented or messaged me to say that they kept reading even when some of the sex scenes were outside their main interests (and a couple even blamed me for giving them new interests, which tickles).

 

[OldDog_NewTricks]

Being the new guy in the room, what is the general consensus of which one category would fit a series that may touch on activities that could belong in other categories? Erotic Couplings sounds like a good bet or possibly Romance or Mature depending on the main characters.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Being the new guy in the room, what is the general consensus of which one category would fit a series that may touch on activities that could belong in other categories? Erotic Couplings sounds like a good bet or possibly Romance or Mature depending on the main characters.

When in doubt probably Erotic Couplings. If your characters fit Mature, then that; otherwise, if your focus is going to be character drama and you intend to have chapters with no sexual activity I'd go Romance.

 

[YmaOHyd]

And just to throw this out, this is what views look like for Annabelle Hawthorne's Home for Horny Monsters, which is like the platonic ideal of a single-category story series. It's been going for near-on eight years, every entry is Hot, and she dominates her category like no other writer on the site. From the second half, there are three notable viewership spikes:

• Chapter 77 -- a contest winner, big plot stuff happens and the end of a book that ties into another series she wrote
• Chapter 93 -- built around a conversation between sarcastic succubus Lily, the avatar of Death and Regan, a young girl dying of cancer. I strongly suspect this one escaped containment at Literotica and was sent to people who know folks dealing with dangerous/terminal illnesses, based on some of the things Annabelle said about it later.
• Chapter 116 -- features the elegiac death scene of a major character who was one of the stars of a separate series

Other than those three second-half spikes, it's a pretty exact match for Penny's graph.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Being the new guy in the room, what is the general consensus of which one category would fit a series that may touch on activities that could belong in other categories? Erotic Couplings sounds like a good bet or possibly Romance or Mature depending on the main characters.

Erotic couplings is the best place for stories that you want to get lost and never read. It has the worst submissions to views ratio of any category, including all the dead categories like non-eroric and letters/transcripts.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Erotic couplings is the best place for stories that you want to get lost and never read. It has the worst submissions to views ratio of any category, including all the dead categories like non-eroric and letters/transcripts.

You keep saying this, but what's the basis? Has anyone other than 8letters crunched the numbers?

My EC stories do no better or worse than stories in any other category. My second most commented on story is in EC, and has almost identical stats as my most commented story, which is in Mature. It never occurs to me not to post something in EC.

My death category is Group - those guys don't respond, don't react, don't comment. Never again.

 

[PennyThompson]

My EC stories do no better or worse than stories in any other category.

Same, my highest-rated story is in EC, and my second-highest view count is in EC.

Though I don't do Incest or Loving Wives, it seems like those are both far and away larger audience than any other category?

My death category is BDSM - those guys don't respond, don't react, don't comment. Never again.

Well yeah, they're all tied up! (Runs away )

 

[GrushaVashnadze]

If you have a story that naturally spans categories and your faithfulness to your art outweighs your need for hot feedback, then go ahead.

This is what I did for Alison Goes to London - and I have no regrets.
For the grand sequel, Young Cunts, I went for the novel category, as none of my chapters really fitted well into any particular category. Fewer readers, but excellent response.
I am the sort of person who writes first, then worries later about how to sell it. Maybe I don't get as many readers as I might otherwise - but those I get love it.
[shrugs]

 

[BobbyBrandt]

As a writer, I would never split a story into different categories. It couldn't be done in mainstream publishing and shouldn't be done anywhere else. You should know when the story is complete (if not sooner) what genre you are targeting. This practice is simply a byproduct of Literotica supporting chapters of incomplete stories being published prematurely. It's poor literary style. Period.

As a reader, I would RUN from any story that is encountered with parts in different categories here, regardless of which ones they were. Tacky and amateurish are two terms that would come to my mind.

Finish the entire story before publishing any of it. If you think it spans different categories, publish it in EC or even N/N if long enough to warrant it.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

You keep saying this, but what's the basis? Has anyone other than 8letters crunched the numbers?

I've given all the math before. I'm not going to repeat it just because you need to conveniently ignore it just to say that I'm wrong. Not my problem.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

As a writer, I would never split a story into different categories.

I would. I have plans for a couple of stories that do. It's not like mainstream where the categories are broad. The categories here are mostly specific kinks. Many writers have difficulty fitting their stories into one category or another (or several others). There are many threads here by writers asking for such advice to prove that. Many stories span categories. There is no artistic reason not to split a story across categories. There is only the popularity/score protection reason not to.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've given all the math before. I'm not going to repeat it just because you need to conveniently ignore it just to say that I'm wrong. Not my problem.

Where's the data? It's a genuine question. I don't ever recall seeing data, so it's not a matter of right or wrong or disbelief. Point me to the post which proves your point.