Perspective · 11:44am Jan 7th, 2015
I got a message from someone whom follows A Nightmare Come To Life, and summarizing what they had to say was this, and I quote (verbatim).
Whether your stories entertain just a small group of people or grow in popularity to rival Past Sins by Pen Stroke, your story matters. By entertaining just one person, you still have made someone happy for some time.
And that in my opinion is the greatest feat that someone can accomplish.
SO, it inspired me to do a little digging. I took two stories I have read; Past Sins and Fallout: Equestria and decided to compare the number of favourites they both have to ANCTL, strictly speaking, disregarding the impact on the fandom as a whole.
Past SIns has (at the time of this post) 10,248 favourites while Fallout: Equestria has 5676 (also at the time of this post). ANCTL just broke 1000 favs. While the numbers pail in comparison, I decided to put them in a pie chart to better illustrate the comparison and perspective of all three sets of numbers.
This is what happened.
Now, look at that. Fucking look at that. ANCTL has nearly a tenth the favourites of Past sins and a fifth of the favs of Fallout: Equestria. Just let that sink in.
Whether or not the like/dislike bar looks like a Sith lightsabre, if it has two likes and 100 dislikes, what matters is the two people that HAVE enjoyed it, and that's all you should consider.
Did you also acknowledge just how much longer the other two have been around?
2706363 I did make it clear that I was strictly comparing the amount of favorites.
2706386 I understand that, but I'm trying to pick out whether or not you have an average favourite score to time published result that's actually higher than the others.
I'm not going to bother with the math, but I think you might.
I totally get that. I only had 18 likes to 9 dislikes on my very first story for several months. It was discouraging. But those people who liked talked to me and privided excellent support. We laughed and cried. They kept me going. 7 stories later I have 100 followers and my first story has over 200 likes. Said story turned into a very successful trilogy. Patience and good observational skills paired with listening to those with advice pay off. Never give up. If you stumble grit your teeth and get back up into a sprint. Kick it in the ass and go, go, go!