[Ungrounded] I'm Done · 7:22am Feb 9th, 2015
I'm pulling the plug. Putting the final nail in the coffin. I'm done wasting my time on a story that only a fraction of a fraction of it's readers care about. I'm putting my efforts elsewhere, where it might be more appreciated. Maybe someday I'll come back and finish what I've started, but for now I have bigger things.
And, y'know, I thought this chapter's reception would be pretty big, considering it being the first story-related chapter I've posted in months, but no. Hardly anything.
I've known this moment has been coming for some time now, but I didn't want to accept it. If any of you remember far back when I posted a blog about the "glass ceiling" for Ungrounded, when it would finally stop garnering attention: I hit it. It's over. There's virtually no new incoming audience, and the present one doesn't care anymore.
I just had such high hopes for this story though. There were still two more arcs left to go through, where I would get to explore Manehattan a little, and even Earth in the final arc. I'm a little letdown.
That's about it from me about Ungrounded. But I have to ask, is there anything specific that I did wrong? Why did so many of you just start ignoring it?
It was the hiatus. I just lost momentum on reading it, then I always had something else vying for my attention rather than one omake chapter, two omake chapter... And then it finally started updating story, and I still had other things vying for my attention. Sorry, man.
The thing (in my opinion) with big stories is that, first, you need to have clear ending and path to it, and second, you need to update regularly or throw the whole story at once. If one or the other is missing, readers will get bored or forget what was happening and wouldn't want to re-read the story. This is basically how I stopped reading "Ungrounded", although it's a nice story. Sorry, but that's how it is.
Basically what those two 2781609 2781749 had said.
What those three said. I've made it a habit to wait on reading fics that don't seem to be updating regularly, simply because so many of them end up being forgotten or cancelled. There are way too many stories on this site to start something that isn't going to be finished, or ones that I'll have to reread to know what's happening when an update DOES come.
2781872 Well, there are stories that are updated like, once a half-year (although they are very, very well done, the level you would expect from printed literature of high quality), but generally weekly, bi-weekly or at least monthly updates are crucial. I have a backlog of almost 1500 chapters to read through and I can't remember why I liked some of those stories to begin with because the stories went on hiatus for too long and I just plainly forgot about them!
I'm trying to focus on my writing, so a lot of my updating stories are kinda falling by the wayside.
To be fair, I rather liked the first arc. Second arc… Yea, I hardly read past this "harmful yet harmless monsters" on chapter 17.
Let's just pretend that story ended on the first arc, and author never blamed readers for story cancellation.
I don't know what to tell you, man. It was a nice chapter, and I'd like to keep reading, but there just wasn't much to say about it. It was more "OK, now I get some stuff that was mysterious before" than "WHAT?!? MIND=BLOWN!", if that's what you were looking for. Solid enough, but not going to get a ton of comments.
Unlike some others here, I don't really care about the schedule much; I favorite way a ton* of stories and even really good ones don't generally bug me if they're not updated very often. What I do want is a reasonable hope of completion eventually, and few or no year-long hiatuses. Slow and steady wins the race, or something.
*Seriously. Lots, and more nearly every day.
Free time is limited for allot of people. I have 572 unread chapters in my fave list and 300 stories in my read later list. It's a big site, dude and people are hesitant to get invested in a story after following allot of good ones from their very beginnings only to see them be cancelled on a whim.... which only leads authors to think that no one gives a shit and cancels them for 'lack of interest'...
Its a self fulfilling prophecy.
When you see 'this story is being tracked by x number of people'. that means X number of people want to see this story finished... they are probably waiting for that to happen before they invest their full time into it. There is nothing worse then getting sucked into a story only to find it's last chapter ends on a cliffhanger because there is no promise that another chapter will ever be released That is why they gravitate around stories that update frequently... and canceling it will just lead to 400 people letting out a sigh the next time they organize their favorites list and delete yet one more dead one from it.
(Readers on fimfiction are spoiled in that regard. I've stumbled across novel quality stories on fanficiton.net that has a 10 year time sink between first being posted and being finished with 3 year hiatus in between, and there are other stories that are still ongoing after being posted in 2006.)
over 250 people read that chapter when it updated, but people tend not to comment unless they have something to say... and most people don't say anything unless its their first time stumbling across a story or if something they don't understand or they don't like happened. Or a combination of the three. If you aren't getting drowned in negative feedback then you are doing something right and every author who has a story that gets spammed with 'your awesome' by a thousand people a week with every update they post is quick to point out how old it gets, and how fast it gets old...
I tend to agree with everyone else. I liked what I saw but I normally have a policy to not start unfinished fanfics. I just follow ones that look promising until they're done and then I read them. It keeps me from having hundreds of stories in progress at once; ain't nobody got time for that!
I suppose I have an admission to make; I'm the worst-case scenario here.
I haven't actually started reading Ungrounded and only just now saw that it was cancelled. When I first saw it on the site (probably the feature box, I don't recall) I saw the description and thought "That sounds like a story I might be interested in!" And put it into my read-when-it's-done folder. I have a lot of stories in there. This is due to long and bitter experiences with getting engrossed in big stories that started out great, but then either died a death of endless hiatus or wound up going off the rails in some other manner.
It's true that there are some lengthy in-progress stories that I'm reading as each chapter comes out. Usually those are the ones that are just so compelling in concept that I was "sucked in" despite my own reluctance, and each chapter posted afterward has continued to be so compelling that it's kept me there. These fanfics are still risky, though, and they sometimes slip away into the read-when-done folder anyway. Usually when I realize that I have to reread the previous chapter before reading the new one because I've forgotten what happened.
So, as far as this story goes. It got the big red X put on the end, so I'll probably never get to it now. But one of the comments above says "let's pretend it ended at the end of the first arc", so I take it the story is broken up into somewhat self-contained sections. Would it be worth perhaps splitting it up into separate books? That's a good way to hook the read-when-complete people, provided the story is able to reach suitable intermediary breakpoints like that. And it means at least some of this work won't end up languishing away in the cancelled pile for the ages.
I read the whole thing up until the last posted chapter. I liked it. Sucks that it was cancelled..