On Time, Dislikes, and Being Featured · 12:06pm Sep 18th, 2013
So for those wondering I don't currently work doing mineral exploration. I did spend ten years of my life doing it, so I do know a lot about it. Just recently however people stopped investing in mineral exploration in my area and I had to find another job so I'm now working at a warehouse. This weekend we are doing inventory which means that I will be staying at work till 9pm on both Friday and Saturday and working part of Sunday. I will try to get enough chapters written on Thursday to keep my update scheduled going but obviously no promises.
I also got my first dislike last night. To be honest I was really surprised how long it took, yet I found myself wondering why specifically whoever left the dislike left it. I just hope that it wasn't a long time reader (of less then a week :P ) who didn't enjoy where the story was going. I am sad to realize that I will never know.
Bronze asked how this story isn't featured. It's actually quite simple as far as I see it; This is a fanfiction of another fanfiction involving a bunch of OC's and the a plot similar to a HiE story. Currently I only get around 250 unique hits on the story a day, way short of what it would take to be featured. Most of that is due to the story name and description giving a very good idea of what the story is about so people who don't like the idea don't read it. That just happens to be a pretty decent percentage of the people on this site. That said, I do have 56 favorites which compared to the number of readers I feel is very high.
Finally, what do people think of the new cover for the fic?
I'm actually thinking, will you keep updating the cover as you go along? Would be pretty neat, especially since you're making images for the chapters anyway
I like the new cover, it's cool!
I had the dislike thing happen to me as well, one of my stories went quite a while before getting a downvote, but another of my stories (posted yesterday) got one on the first day, I think it's all a matter of reaching the wrong audience, in your case I guess you were just reaching the right one.
I can tell you exactly why you didn't get featured. You had more than sufficient likes and especially comments to make it with the current fics on the box.
The reason why was your first post was 1202 words long. Any fic below 4000 takes a penalty which is progressively worse the lower you go. It is POSSIBLE for a 1202 fic to make it but it is exceedingly hard. Hence your initial heat was insufficient. Then one day later you added 1755. This brought the total to just below 3000 and if you had reached about 55 likes on that second day you would have hit it. On the third day you went over the 4000 mark. Now if you were a new fic with 4000, you would have made it with 23ish thumbs up the way it was. However your heat was diluted over three days and you came fairly close(at least in the top 15 vying for the 7 spaces) with the 37ish you had at the time but not close enough.
In essence it wasn't "gamed enough." If chapter one had been 4,000 words and comprised the first 3 chapters of the story, or if you posted the first three chapters within a single day instead of over three, you would have made it easily.
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That is certainly an interesting look at how the system works, though when you put it so simply I fell a little bit cheated. Here I was sure it was just because I didn't get 1000 views or something. I guess that it will be pretty much impossible for me to get featured now because I'm not getting many new readers, so I won't get many likes so I'll just keep on sinking into obscurity.
Except, you know, that I happen to show up on the recent updates part of the site once every day
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Actually it is impossible because you are 7 days old. Feature is really only possible in the first 4 days and it rarely happens past the second day. The only time I have seen a 3rd day fic make it was when it ended up with a second major rush from say being placed on EQD.
Yes I put way too much time into figuring out exactly what it takes to hit the box.