Random Stats Contemplation

[toujours_nigel]

So my top two stories are:

Food of Love (10,007 words, 6293 hits, 17 bookmarks, 66 kudos), a pre-canon, post-Hogwarts R/S getting-together story that features domesticity, cooking, and Sirius overdoing gift-giving. It remains, to date, the happiest HP story I have written, and very possibly the only happy one I have ever completed. It also has a gem of a liveblog done by lilliburlero. 

Noone Here to Save (511 words, 2796 hits, 14 bookmarks, 135 kudos), a Captain America AU in which Bucky Barnes does not tumble to his death, and he and Steve Rogers get together.

Now, both of these are old stories, Food written in late 2013 and the other a year before that, but I guess the moral is that writing happy fluff in bigger fandoms is the way to go? I don't much care about popularity, which is just as well since I'm unlikely to achieve it, but that's... interesting.

One Mahabharat story, Nathbati, is among the top four for hits (2133), which is surprising, but again it was an Yuletide story, it's an old story (YT 2011) and there has been an influx of new Mahabharat fans due to the horrendous Star Plus show.

In interests of transparency, I ought also to mention that four Renault stories happily clear the 1000 mark for hits, which given the size of the fandom is very nice indeed. And of course the lead on comment threads goes to conditions best suited of all to unreserve, which I shall bygods prod both myself and filia_noctis into finishing. *g*

Comments

[greerwatson]

Those strike me as quite impressive numbers. And you're a good writer; you deserve the kudos.

I'm not sure there's a moral in this, though. If one is a hit-hunter, one should steer clear of Yuletide? Or is that an immoral?

[toujours_nigel]

Well, I rather like those stories, especially 'Food', but what I'm trying to say, really, is that writing in big fandoms obviously enough results in more everything: hits, kudos, arguably bookmarks. There are stories I've written in smaller fandoms that I've worked at harder and liked better, which have (proportionately speaking) garnered more feedback/hits/whathaveyou, but obviously the raw numbers are conspicuously less.

I'm not sure there's a moral, either. Certainly not to steer clear of Yuletide, since that's how my smaller fandoms get hits at all. *g*

[greerwatson]

Certainly, if we go to the opposite end of the countdown, my fics with the smallest count are mostly for the rarest of fandoms. Of the four stories I wrote for Yuletide this year (none of which has that many hits, but they've not been up that long), there's no question that the one I wrote for you has been the most popular, with 150. Or, to put it another way, Renault fans read Yulefic.

Contrariwise, the story I did for Elizabeth Goudge's The City of Bells has only 36 hits. (To tell the truth, I think I'm actually surprised to see it's as high as that.) And I wrote a Madness ficlet in 2011 that's still only up to 92: it's based on an old pop song by Nena that, I suspect, most people have largely forgotten.

All depends on the fandom, really. As you say.

[lilliburlero]

This post made me think what I actually do want in the way of feedback. Apart from abject adoration, natch. No, abject adoration just about covers it *g*

My most popular fic in hit-count terms is all Shakespeare's Histories stuff but the hits-to-kudos counts are appalling, so I guess people are backbuttoning out of there like nobody's business (one of them is a rare-pair headcanon dump called 'Good Men Porn', so it's nobody's fault but mine, I guess). My most kudosed fic is my 2013 Yuletide effort, canon-compliant Antonia Forest school-story gen with some femslashy overtones, otherwise Charioteer fic from working-class perspectives seems to do it for people. I think this latter is something the fandom wants and gets relatively little of, rather than something I'm actually particularly good at. The fics that I put most effort into/think are my best do seem to get more comment threads started than others, so that at least has a bit of logic to it.

But if I were really going to popularity-hunt, I'd probably try writing stories for actual, you know, money.

[greerwatson]

But then you'd be forced to write stories that would actually, you know, $ELL.

To real people, that is. Not us fannish types.