Do you post on literotica, how is that?
I posted in like 10 places to get a good data spread. I'll probably only be comfortable with the data when I have about 10 works, but I narrowed down to 7 free platforms, Patreon, and 2 paid platforms. Literotica is in the mix, and it works great. I hate the UI and their general publication system and the day I was about to drop it, I had people coming from there to other sites to check out my works. Literotica only publishes one chapter period a day, and everything requires human review, so it's really tedious. That being said, the stats are the best out of everywhere I post, and it doesn't even seem to matter if the chapter is actually NSFW.
When I take all platforms into account, SH accounts for less than 3% of my engagement, and I've even made sales, which is why I was curious what's going on here. I do have 2 404'd novellas that don't break the rules, and I haven't been able to get an email back, so I'm wondering if that's part of it. I write over 2000/words a day, so even when I took a "break" from my main novel, I'm wondering if half my writing just didn't count for anything here. Royal Road is pretty tough if you're not writing to the meta, and even RR gets twice as much engagement despite me only have 1 of my 4 works there. Heck, even AO3 got over 10 times the engagement I got on SH and there's no algorithm whatsoever.
this exact conversation is a routine thing here. X words per chapter is often argued or suggested over. there is a large "1.5 to 2k" crowd agreeing that's the sweet spot they aim for. the higher the limit or sweet spot, the smaller the crowd.
also, you begin to hear two things.
--- blah blah, phone, blah blah
--- "if you go much over X words, you risk losing reader engagement'
with "reader engagement' sounding like a definition in a college class, lol
you can have the above with "length of paragraphs", too, about the same.
I guess I'm just confused because I personally don't think about word count when reading OR writing. If a chapter is getting too long, which would be a matter of me having something else to do, I'm not thinking I won't read it, I'd just continue later. If I get past the summary, and a whole chapter, then it's not going to be the length of any future chapters that is the determining factor on if I keep reading. In fact, repeatedly short chapters would just feel shallow to me. That isn't to talk down on anyone else's preferences, I just choose to write for the audience I want/know. I could split up chapters four times sometimes, but the narrative I'm building is meant to be delivered in closed chapters. If there's a battle between two characters, that's going to be one chapter, not part 2, part 3, part 4 until it's over.
Publication really is a spectrum in the modern era, but it makes me think of how manga is typically released. As they're usually on weekly, biweekly, or monthly release schedules, and are extremely vulnerable to cancellation, manga magazines typically
start with long chapters. If those chapters were broken down into smaller ones, then it would just take that much longer to explain why people should be interested. If they were web novels, then it wouldn't really matter if it was 2000 words or 10k since the point is to start as strong as possible. Since successful manga may go on for years or even decades, it really starts to show the cracks. Typical manga chapters are short and can be consumed in minutes, and they heavily rely on viewer loyalty. They're limited in the amount of pages that can fit in print, just like standard publication, but more importantly by the physical output from the mangaka (author). No fan of Chainsaw Man, or Naruto, or Dragon Ball Z, would read a chapter and go "it's too long" when it might be one or two weeks until the next installment.
I'm just riffing now, but I guess I'm just saying that I don't particularly care for word count, or a specific release schedule. I think frequent releases mainly benefit the platform, not the author. We have plenty of evidence that the strongest fanbases across mediums are loyal despite consistent or inconsistent releases, so I don't know if I'd change my view on it even
if web serialization is an exception. That's partially stubbornness, partially that I'm just doing it for fun, but also because I notice something with frequent releases. Either the author has a backlog that they're just spreading out, or they're writing their butts off to hit that daily quota. In the latter scenario, I think there's a clear dip in quality. I recently saw someone complaining that a web serial they were reading was 300 chapters in deep, and the plot hadn't progressed in 30-50 chapters. My guess is that the author is just too afraid to end their work now that they got a little attention. I saw another web serial that combined three books into one, likely for the same reason, with the praise being how impromptu everything seemed. Well, I'd guess after consistent releases after three years that the author ran out of a roadmap a
long time ago.
Back to my manga anecdote, a mangaka flying by the seat of their pants isn't uncommon to observe, leading to a lot of retcons and meandering, and that's with a professional company aiding them and only 12-48 short releases a year. I rather just wait until someone cares to catch up on everything I've written as opposed to desperately chase the views. Web serials are inherently long anyway, too long to really care about release schedule so long as something is being released at all, especially when people are dumping out A.I novels without substance that can easily match speeds. I wrote a 32k novella this week, and it's 9 chapters. Even if it was three times as long, the concept of timed releases wouldn't even last a month while still having more content than most novels, so it seems negligible.
Obviously everyone's different, and I'll bite my own bullet, but aside from pleasing the algorithmic overlords, I think most people aren't deciding what series to stick with purely on word count or release schedule. Many works would have completely flopped it that was the case. If GRRM releases his next book after 20 years, will he have less engagement than if he released annually? Yeah, probably. But there are always going to be loyal fans and new fans, and a lot of them aren't going to care about chapter length or release dates.
Given, I picked the worst example, because I don't read ASOIF
specifically because of the shoddy release date. As far as stuff on the web though, stuff with a follow button for free, I could really care less if it releases twice a week or every other week so long as the content is substantial. Which is another reason that I think
strictly algorithm-friendly word counts are a long-term deterrent. I think way more people are likely to drop a series if it feels like they're being jerked along. If Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 are literally the same subject arbitrarily split up because the author hit 2000/words, then it's not for me. If I have a 7k chapter and someone decides to stop reading, that's okay too. There are books that I love that I probably wouldn't if they were delivered 1500 words at a time. Either way, I appreciate diversity in literature, I've just never once in my life said "dang, I wish this chapter was shorter" when reading anything I remotely enjoy.
Although! I will say, having done self-pub fiction online as a 'job' even before giving Scrub a try, at a certain point you just have to do what you're gonna do and not get mired down in the return on something for which you're not yet getting paid. Hard and fast rules are less hard and fast than people make them out to be, and you can do everything 'right' numerically and still flop due to completely random factors. At this point I think of rumination on things like optimal posting time and so on as excuses to procrastinate.
I've never even thought about posting time.
I've got the same 24 hours in a day, and I use them all, so the last thing I'm worried about is the hour I'm posting. Obviously, if it's a money thing, then it makes way more sense to think about, but all the money I've generated writing doesn't account for posting time at all. When I write paid articles, I get paid to write it, not think about when that article is gonna benefit a site's traffic the most. Some people are making
loads of money off their web serials, but the math I've done doesn't make it sensible to jump through so many hoops. I don't even understand how people that have 9 to 5's even juggle all of it.
The meta is mostly smut. With a male MC, either isekai/reincarnation or real world with LitRPG sytems and fastly growing harems. Or with a female MC, the meta is GL, but usually with futas, or the MC is gender bent, or being corrupted and turning into a succubus, etc. That's what it seems to me after checking out many of the most popular stories.
Of course there's many other established genres like cultivation/xianxia, magical academies, vilainess/VN stories, magical girl stories, monster MCs, "reverse morality worlds" (no males, all women extremely horny, ...), BDSM, mind-control fetishes etc.
But I'd call those "half-meta", most of them only have a few stories at most in the top 100, for example. It's all familiar, but not "the default" I guess.
You can write most of those genres without smut too, but that makes your story, let's say, 5x less popular by itself. Or 10x.
Ah, that seems to be true across platforms. Funnily enough, I paused my main SFW novel when I realized that, wrote three novellas to have completed NSFW novellas, and it had immediate results. Problem is 2 of my works were 404'd without explanation here, so it is what it is.
