I am already one of the most popular *current* generation Ranma fics. But I'm chasing the historical ones now. It's like saying Force Awakens was the best *recent* Star Wars movie, but it's still nothing compared to Empire.
Okay, after reading through this thread, I get where you're coming from, but your behavior on this thread (the first thread you started on this site) gives this impression: self-entitled hubris. I'm not trying to be a dick, okay? I'm just saying this based on my own experience as a former fanfic writer (2010-2015), and I hope that my experience can help you gain a some perspective on your own situation.
Mostly because they're tired of how hard I've been trying to push it.
When I was starting out on my writing journey, I wrote a Ghost Hunt/Death Note crossover fanfic (The Whitechapel Case) and posted it in FanFiction.Net, thinking it was gonna catch fire, but it didn't. It didn't because it's a crossover. Its target audience was a cross-section of two fanfic audiences in two of the smaller fandoms out there, and the direction of that story went totally different from Ghost Hunt fanfics from the first chapter onwards. In that crossover fanfic, I was focusing more on Oliver Davis's side of the fandom, the male lead of Ghost Hunt, while the majority of Ghost Hunt fanfics focus on the female lead Mai Taniyama's side of the fandom in her relationship with Oliver Davis in their ghost-hunting cases, so of course it wasn't going to reach anywhere near the amount of readers as, say, mytruthaboutlife's Haunting Life, which is the most famous Ghost Hunt fanfics in the fandom on that site. Yet in spite of those hurdles, I few readers I did get were telling me that my crossover fanfic was one of the best fanfics they've ever read, which really pumped up my ego and inflated the importance I placed onto my story, and that's when I started craving more attention, and it consumed me to the point where I was spamming people's inboxes begging them to go read my story, and it was a mixed bag. Many people were nice enough to give it a shot and read it, and I received some really encouraging response, but others didn't try to stroke my ego but gave honest critiques that I just couldn't handle, b/c I didn't have the writing experience to handle it yet. But more telling, of the one that didn't read it and responded, some of they told me to fuck off (and rightly so), some of them telling me that I came across as really desperate. That's when I came to realize that I was getting in my own way, being my own worst enemy by attention-whoring my story and myself into oblivion.
Do you see what I'm trying to get at here? First impressions are important, especially when you're trying to reach out to potential readers outside of your niche. You don't wanna come across as so single-mindedly desperate, so focused on getting yourself out there, that potential readers outside of your fanfic audience will get turned off from giving your story a chance b/c of how you present yourself. And based on how you've presented yourself in this thread, based on how rude you've been to people on this thread in spite of their willingness to give you advice on what you could do to expand your audience beyond the one you have now, do you really think this is a good first impression you wanna have? I don't think so, which leads me to my last point.
Nearly without fail the readers I have say it's among the best - if not the best - fanfiction they've ever read. Some say it's better than stuff like Worm. Probably 10% of my readers say they come from outside the Ranma fandom, and they have validated time and again that the story is welcoming to people without fandom knowledge. And so I find myself in this place where, impostor syndrome says "don't believe them, you're not that good, nobody outside Ranma wants it" and everybody loudly says "but yes you are" all over my discord, all over the comments. It puts me in this place where I am like "well okay let me try to do something real with this" and then the boot of reality comes crashing down without even giving it a chance, with the assumption that I must just suck, and the basic disrespect to repeatedly misgender me as the icing on top. I don't know how I managed to be cursed with both a giant ego and zero self confidence simultaneously, but here I am. I want to believe what the reviews and the readers say, but it's like "Well if I'm so good then where the hell is everybody? Is it a marketing thing? Is it a "hit the bottom of the well" thing? Do I believe the hype people are saying about me? Do I not?"
I'm in an extraordinarily vulnerable position here, eating anti anxiety meds like they're M&Ms, just to wade back out to get my teeth kicked in some more in the hopes of getting one or two nuggets of wisdom that will help me catch even 1% more of a wave I've waited my whole life for and will likely miss anyway.
Honestly? I've been thinking about this a lot today:
* To be one of the most-frequently *recommended* stories in Ranma spaces, so that new people coming into fanfic (especially new folks coming from the anime reboot) continue to discover the story. So that it becomes "a classic" that routinely generates a comment or two a day across all platforms after it finishes serializing, to keep the flame alive.
* To be a supportive love letter to the trans community, and let it provide the sort of emotional hug that the trans folks who read the story (90% of my audience) routinely tell me it provides. Ideally, to hear from the people it gave good feels to.
* To be recognized as "a work that transcends what fanfiction is supposed to be," which I know is fuzzy, but like... "one of the better fanfic writers out there."
And in order for all three of those things to happen, I need critical mass. I need more people to be aware of it.
There's a particular thing with Ranma, and serious Ranma fic specifically - it is *very* popular in the trans community for obvious reasons, and a *lot* of trans people use it as a way to help them understand their feelings and crack their eggs. Especially given our current climate in America about one political party demonizing trans folks, I can imagine there's a lot of kids out there who are gonna find it on Netflix and realize they've found a place where they can come home. I want to be there for those kids.
You're basing your success, the validation you've received from the readers you have, on something that is wholly out of your control: 1) the viewership reaction to a new reboot of the Ranma 1/2 anime, 2) trans kids and trans people in general who see said anime and therefore might go on read your story, and 3) and the first impressions of other people you've been marketing your story to up to this point. You cannot control any of that, let alone the crazy political atmosphere around us, but your readers have inflated the importance you have've placed on your story to unhealthy levels. Please don't do that to yourself. It's not healthy for you. If you wanna set your story up as a good message to the people you're trying to reach, if you want to have future Ranma fans to find you and your story, then all this fuss about marketing your story starts with how you present yourself.
Marketing your story starts with marketing yourself first, giving people a good impression of you as a writer, so that they might give your story a chance. You can't control whether or not readers decide to read your story, but you CAN control how you present yourself. If you're trying to be a good role model for those kids when they come across your story, if you want potential readers outside of the audience you have now to take you and your story seriously, then presenting yourself in a positive and respectful and mature light will go a long way, trust me.
