The myth of success via porn. · 12:48am May 27th, 2017
I keep hearing people repeat, over and over and over and over, here on FimFic, in other fandoms, among furries, among writers in general, this idea that if you want to become super popular and successful, all you have to do is forget writing the stories you want to write, and instead pander by writing porn.
This is completely not true.
Of course you can be a successful and popular author while writing porn.
You can also be a successful and popular author while not writing porn.
If you sort my stories by rating, here on FimFic, you have to go down to number six to find an M rated story, and that's Ember's which is a bit of an anomaly. It's not the typical "pandering" sort of porn at all. You have to go to number twenty-seven to get to the first "pandering" kind of clopfic. (What Comes Between Day and Night.) That puts my most popular "traditional" clop story after such wildly successful fics as Clair de Lune and First and Last. (Hint, that's sarcasm. They are not wildly successful.)
I actually found it completely fascinating to watch Marshmallow Fluff and Marshmallow Stuffing collect ups, downs, comments, views, etc. recently. Uploaded at about the same time, with the same characters, the same general premise, the same writing skill, roughly the same length... the only significant difference is that one is a clopfic, one is not.
Fluff did better right out of the gate. It got the majority of its up-thumbs on the first day it was uploaded. It also got all of its down thumbs right away, and didn't collect any later. Stuffing did much more poorly initially, collecting most of the down thumbs right away, but initially collecting few upvotes. The rest trickled in slowly over the next several days.
Now both have more or less stabilized, and I think it's instructive to compare them.
Let's start with views. Fluff has 339 right now, Stuffing has 802. Very interesting! If you measure "success" by views, it's clear that the myth is absolutely true, clop does much better than non-clop. Me, though, I don't really care about views. Knowing that people looked at it tells me nothing. Most of those people could have thought it was terrible, or been indifferent to it. So let's move on.
Fluff is on 156 bookshelves. Stuffing is on 246. I find this fascinating, because I got far more "favorite" notifications from Fluff. People obviously tend to set their clop bookshelves to private! Once again, clop does seem to do significantly better. It goes in people's spank banks, at least.
But let's keep moving on. Fluff has 57 upthumbs. Stuffing has 67. Very close here! Stuffing juuuuust has the lead. Clop may give you a slight edge... but if you're talking ratings and rankings, you have to look at the next stat...
Fluff has 6 downthumbs, Stuffing has 12. Twice as many. The ranking algorithm (and people's judgement in general about what is "good" and what is "bad") tends to weigh downvotes more heavily. And indeed, Fluff is rated 39,561st while Stuffing is rated 51,350th.
And here's the money shot. The thing I love best of all about uploading stories is getting comments. I write them for myself, I post them for other people, and it's meaningless to me if I don't get feedback. A highly rated story with no comments will frustrated me far more than a low rated story that gets a ton of commentary and discussion. Fluff has 8 comments, Stuffing has only 4. (If you delete my own comments from that, it's 4 and 3.) Both quite low, but Stuffing really disappointed me. I thought it had a lot going on, I felt I'd done some interesting things, but if anybody noticed, they weren't willing to speak up about it.
Clop gets fewer comments. People are shy. They don't want to talk about it. They look at it, they fap to it, they put it on private bookshelves to fap again later, but they're wary of commentary, they're ashamed of even looking, and they just don't give it the kind of attention I crave. Combine that with the automatic hate downvotes, and I find clop to be in many ways far less satisfying to post than E or T rated stories.
Now I'm going to keep writing it! I'm a dirty minded bugger, and it does obviously have an audience. Nevertheless, clop is not a shortcut to wild success or instant fame. All things being equal, it does pretty similarly to non-clop. Better in some ways, worse in others, but it's not going to automatically be way more successful just because it's clop, and clop is absolutely not a shortcut to the feature box. (Neither of these stories featured. Fluff peaked just a couple of spots below the box, while Stuffing, because its downvotes happened instantly and its upvotes took longer to stack up, didn't come anywhere near it.)
Edit: Bradel actually has an excellent continuation of this that discusses branding, and the ways in which porn doesn't necessarily cross over well with non-porn. I suspect his points are a large part of why so many authors have separate clop/not-clop accounts here. I seem to be unusual on that front. (Just one of the many ways in which I'm a weirdo!) But then maintaining my "brand" by avoiding clop seemed a bit pointless when my stories are so all over the map that I'm not sure I have a brand.
I personally wasn't aware of any such idea.
*Nervous horse noises*
Interesting...
4548418 If you hang out in any of the various writing advice groups here on FimFic you'll see it pop up. Any time somebody's asking how to get popular, how to get in the feature box, how to get attention to their stories, there's nearly always somebody who comments saying "just write clop."
So what you're saying is that your non-clop gets you off better than your clop. Got it!
But that's very true about the comments on clop. I try to comment on stories, but on clop? That's a fairly personal thing, and I'm not as open in my comments on those stories, if I do comment.
I got to 650 followers by writing stories that have no porn in them. I don't even have gay couples in any of them (that I can remember). Oh, wait, there's a gay couple in Catherine the Great, but I haven't put them in yet.
I have a clop in the wings, though. It's done, but I want to do a lot of changes to it. Doesn't feel quite right yet.
In my experience, writing comedy is what gets me followers. My last Dashie story got me six followers in five days.
My dark stories generate a little bit of buzz. My sad stories crank up even more attention.
I almost never comment on clop stories, but I don't mind that people know about the "My bedsheets smell funny" story library. (That title's a reference to a Saint's Row game achievement.)
As I have stated before, I write to quiet down my brain, so I don't try to write one type of story or another to simply generate fame. If I let fame be my guiding principle, the stories I'd write would be as boring as any bargain-bin movie, over calculated, fan-pandering trash.
If you want to write clop, do so. But don't do it just because it'll get you views. Write clop only if you really want to. You'll feel like a phony jerk otherwise.
You got me wondering because I love numbers. :B
The highest-rated story on my clop account would be my 31st highest-rated story if it were on my main account. Now, that's Five Virgins and a Sex Fiend, which is incredibly pandery (and also not very good, I just reread it today), but also not technically a clopfic.
The first one that's actually M-rated sex would be 38th, but that's also my clopfic collection. So if we wanna get really, really technical about it, my highest-rated actual clop-fic-singular is BEST FRIENDS (oh wow, I didn't know it was rated that high!), which would be... well, 39th. Bit of a gap there. But still. :B
Now granted, even I will tell you, I ain't great at writing erotica. Most of what I write isn't meant for prurience, but because I think horse sex is funny. So I guess this doesn't prove anything, save that I'm really into numbers and telling people about those numbers and I'll shut up now. D:
4548456 Whereas I haven't gotten anywhere much with my attempts at comedy. I think people do best at what they're best at, recursively enough!
And I hear you on writing to shut my brain up. Not always, but often.
4548466 Numbers are interesting.
What if I want to write clop? Well, maybe not clop, I suppose there's a difference between clop and erotica. Or maybe there isn't; some of my favorite fics are "clop" in the sense that they have graphic sex scenes, and that they often deal with romance. I'm not a fan of the kind of clop that comes with a smutty anthro cover; I prefer something that comes from—or at least seems to come from—a writer who went in with a purpose other than raking in views. I'm an ideas man, what can I say?
4548473
My overall thesis here is that really both stories did pretty similarly. There are no shortcuts to fame.
The "just write clop!" thing is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, is all. I'm tired of hearing people say it when it's so obviously not true.
4548475 I think it is much tougher for a new writer to get attention through fics that aren't clop. I don't think it is a fact, since I don't have the numbers with me, but there seems to be a much more active market when it comes to clop—even from authors who have not established themselves. Considering my two most popular fics (by a large margin) are clop, I find it hard to deny this hypothesis.
4548479 Eh. I see what you're saying. I suppose it depends on what your goals are. Writing clop solely to become popular is a fairly souless thing to do, and writing stories you don't actually like is a great way to write lousy stories.
The best way to get attention is to write good stories.
Porn is way more of a double edged word than people admit
4548487 Suppose you have ideas you want to put into a fic, and you want it to get attention—but if you aren't established then there's a very good chance your fic will get lost in the shuffle. Now, what if you put those ideas into a clopfic and chose to meld the two together? The chances of getting feedback have probably gone up, especially if you want to also appeal to a hungry market (and markets are people, after all). So maybe you'll wait to write the uncut cocaine of what you want until you have established yourself. (I'm talking "you" as in generally speaking, not you you because... well... you know.)
4548494 Well, you can try it and see, but I wouldn't, personally.
Remember, many people are going to be embarrassed to even admit they read the story! How does that increase your chances of feedback?
4548426 *judgmental bughorse noises*
4548491 Agreed. I've only dabbled once. Didn't do much in the way of bringing in all of the likes and fame.
I have three privated clop shelves and If I remember correctly I put Marshmallow Stuff on two of them and left it there for awhile without touching it. I ended up reading Fluff but I was hesitant to because it was a "sort of sequel" to something I hadn't read.
I didn't much like the ship personally, maybe it's because I didn't read "Luna in the Sky with Diamonds". I firmly believe in APV (All Pairs Viable) over OTP (One True Pair) so it's possible you "sold it" better on the original but it didn't feel right to me in Fluff. If I had to describe it I'd say it metaphorically felt like someone playing with dolls and having them kiss. The characters were perfectly in character and the writing was clean without any distracting errors, but there wasn't much but superficial romance in Fluff so I didn't like it much.
I didn't want to initially comment because I didn't want to critique a story for being a superficial fluff fic when the title made it seem fluff was the point.
... I don't really "do" the whole bookshelves thing. For a long while there I was using my "Favorite" list as something to come back to and still have a lot of unread stories on it that I probably really should move over to "Read Later", which I am now actually using for it's intended purpose.
What I'm saying here is I add "clop" stories to both "Favorites" and "Read Later", the former after I've finished reading them from the latter and found them to be enjoyable enough to save. I guess I'm just an outlier (a word Chrome did not think was real) who doesn't use the bookshelf system provided for us.
I've also never really got the whole "alternate accounts" thing. It's not like it's that hard to find out which accounts are run by the same person and unless you can RADICALLY change your style and authorial voice it'd be easy enough to pick up on who wrote what. I find it to be tiresome to have to hunt down a different account when I want to see sexy stories written by an author who's style a like that they've hidden away in a separate account. (And in one case having to back my way out of a "clop account" into the more "kid friendly" account.)
I guess I'm just the sort of person who doesn't feel "shame" about writing (and reading) sex so I see no reason to divide accounts.
But everyone is different and it's interesting to see how the various people look at things such as this.
4548979
However, you have to find the clop account in the first place. Style and authorial voice are easy to recognize once found but not easy to find via search features. This limits the people able to tie clop writing to the non-clop account to people that are probably okay with clop in the first place.