Jul
10th
2014
What makes a good author.. · 2:55am Jul 10th, 2014
I saw a blog by Thorax and wanted to do one myself.
Many times people will say how some authors are the best on the site due to their quality. Then some will say due to how many followers. I call bull on that.
One thing I always see is when some of these authors have over 1000 followers. That's nice... But some of them took like 70-100 stories. If my name was shown on the front page so much I could get that too honestly.
I think good author = large follower count doesn't matter. I think a good author is judged by story/follower ratio.
Of course, that's just my opinion.....
There is a correlation between being a better author than average and having many followers, but it's effectively a fact that follower count isn't a guaranteed indicator of a good author.
Story/follower ratio is good way to go about judging if an author is good or not.
But for me, it doesn't matter if you have any followers or not. If you could get me to understand the meaning and purpose behind why you wrote the story and why you wrote each scene in the story the way you did and get me to have a clear picture of where you're going. You could have grammar mistakes or what not as long as it is readable and I could understand it despite its small errors, I'll still regard it as a good story and that author as a good author.
But then again, my opinion...
you have some really good points here
I would think the same, were it not for the fact that some people follow for many reasons other than because they like someones story. Look at my friend Stiggerzz, who has nearly 300 followers because he's hyperactive in group threads, blogs often about funny shit and only has two (low-rated) fics to his name.
Then you look at kkat, who only has a stupid amount of followers because he wrote Fallout:Equestria (1 story, 2000+ followers)
Then you get truly gifted writers who write damn good stories (objectively), like Pearple Prose and Pascoite to name a couple, who have many, many stories but only ~400-500 followers. Or DSNesmith, who wrote the best damn story of all time (The Age off Wings and Steel) and only has 120 followers.
tl;dr: there's no way to judge someone's talent except by reading their material.
I don't have a clear opinion myself. I still consider myself an amateur despite being on this site for two and a half years.
I'd say that I'm lucky to have people even read my stuff