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Joined January 2012
It's been exciting around here. As a writer, I made Equestria Daily (finally! 
), which was way cool. As a reader, I got to read the end of Anthropology (finally! 
), which was six fifths as cool as my previous utterance. The author, JasonTheHuman, also wrote an end-of-story blog post. Then my written-in-one-session story and the clopfic I've been working on came out, and neither of those are making EQD, even if they weren't against their rules. And then there's this blog post. Anyway, all those events bubble around in my head, and this comes out:
Pink and Famous is, as anyone can tell, semi-autobiographical. The part about a desire to have fame is what I made up. The part where I'm a pink pony who throws parties is taken from real life
Nah, just kidding. I wrote it after Bronycon, where I saw Lauren Faust get presented with a giant picture and also saw the EQD and Everfree Radio staff host some awesome panels. Obviously, we're talking about different levels here. Lauren's genuinely a celebrity and the EQD guys are internet famous and JasonTheHuman and TAW are great fanfic authors. Me, I'll settle for any of those. And, irrespective of how big I get, I love all of you, my favoriters, followers, and commenters. Seeing the "1 new notification" pop-up, or coming home to a big number next to the little flame is always cool. Thank you so much.
Anyway, TAW's post has one opinion on how to be both Good and Popular. It's a fine opinion, but I've heard the exact opposite sound just as plausible. And then I realized that what William Goldman said about the movie industry is true of fan fiction as well.
Nobody Knows Anything.
Obviously that's not meant to be taken literally. Contrary to what President Obama says, hard work and intelligence matter. And I'm certainly not comparing myself to JasonTheHuman and TAW there. In movie terms, they're Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood, and on a good day, I'm, um. . . Kevin Pollak. But if I wrote something of the quality of Anthropology, or wrote with the consistency of TAWs stories, would I have their success?
Nobody knows.
Is it a matter of timing, like My Little Dashie and Cupcakes?
Nobody knows.
Is it pure luck? Why did Spiderses become the controversial trollfic that made EQD and not, say, A Tale of Good?
Nobody knows.
Really. If you look at a lot of the feature box stories, especially if it's a first-timer, the author comments will be a long the lines of "I didn't anticipate this many people liking it!"
I had a point with all this (I think), which is this: I don't know how Pink and Famous did well and my other stories didn't, but I prefer the former. So I've just got to keep going. I'd like, someday, to be big enough, say, to be in Wikipedia. (Hey, if Fifty Shades of Grey can do it. . . ). Or at least TVTropes. But I don't know how.to do it, and I don't think anyone else does either. I've just got to keep working.
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Comments ( 4 )
IMO, it shouldn't matter how many people enjoyed the story, it's how much the ones who did read it enjoyed it.
>>243082
That's true. If someone liked one of my stories so much that they wrote me, and we hit it off, and found out we had a bunch in common, and wound up moving in together, that would be cool too.
>>243135 I'd totally write you if I could figure out what to say XD. But, if you ever do want to see if we have anything in common, add me. On Skype @Sonofbelz. Generaly everyone so far who's done it has become my good friends, fairly recently too. Btw, loved Lyra's Human 1 & 2 (Ugh I sound like a fanboy but it's true.)
I think I disagree. Unlike movies and books, we have an incredible amount of data at our hands. We can look at all the authors on fimfiction, and trace their entire careers, and look at what they wrote, when, how many people liked it, how many people disliked it, whether it was in the featured box, whether it was on EqD, and figure it all out.
The whole system almost works. A really good author who's persistent has a pretty good chance of becoming well-known. The two sticking points are the EqD pre-readers, and the fimfiction featured box.
I can't comment on the EqD pre-readers, not having much experience with them or data on them. My opinion re. the featured box is that it should not exist - basically, it randomizes views. Without the featured box, there would be more of a chance for word-of-mouth and ratings to determine what got viewed. The purpose of the featured box is to get people to read what's popular instead of what's good, which is a doubtful goal even if it worked well. It works pretty well at that for the slots for old stories.
It doesn't work very well at all for new stories. I've been keeping track of what's in the featured box and how long it's in the featured box for the past week. Some bug in the featured-box algorithm ensures that any new story that gets in the featured box will stay there for 3 days, even if many other stories are more popular during that time. If you write a great story, and it comes out one day or two days after other new stories got into the featured box, you're screwed. Your story has to be good, but it's more important that you get lucky with the timing, and that you have a title that jumps out at people when it appears on the leaderboard.
Over the past week, stories that have been featured accounted for 21% of all views. That's considerably fewer than previously. Or else, I have a bug somewhere in my code.
However, it's not irrelevant - you still have to get into the featured box to become famous. And getting featured is still largely random.
Another factor is where you are in the approval queue. The mods approve and push through a big bunch of stories when they are able to do approvals. The last story approved may sit on the front page for half a day; the first story approved may get half an hour. I haven't looked at this yet, but I bet it has a big impact.