Re: Features and Giants (Also, longblog is long) · 8:13pm Oct 24th, 2012
Disclaimer: The following blog is unfiltered stream-of-consciousness from a person who is aptly described as opinionated and soapbox-inclined.
There comes a time when you find yourself pausing to reflect. For me, this is one of those times. Only I'm going to share! Isn't that nice of me? We're about to find out.
I've been writing for about thirteen years. Started out with terrible teenaged self-gratification insert-fantasies, like many, and thankfully most of them have been lost to the ravages of time. I do still have the originals of some, though, which I keep around to remind myself of just how bad I was when I first put feet to this road.
Rather in contrast to those years, though, I'm relatively new to writing ponyfic - and further to publishing work at all. View from the Window is the first story I've ever released, actually. I indulged in a little naiveté, and had pretty high hopes for it; hopes that, to be blunt, it hasn't satisfied. But this isn't the story's fault (the author arrogantly claims).
I could go on a tangential rant about the why and how of that, but conveniently, somepony else did that for me recently and I guess I will, because inconveniently that blog went to the land of wind and ghosts.
Basically, the way that story features work is a bit of a load. That's the short of it, and it's hardly a new idea, but now it's actually come to bear on me, so I'm whining about it. Wee.
I would love for View, and really just Reverie herself, to be more widely seen than she is, because I've come to absolutely adore her. I didn't go into it knowing I would - some of you may nod, some of you may cringe, but chapter one of View from the Window was posted the night of its writing. I had, and continue to have, no real plan, no clear direction, no points laid out on a story chart. Those of you who are reading are learning about Reverie and seeing parts of her life only a day or two after I do. Since I'm a filthy liberal arts major, and a mushy romantic on top of that, I happen to think that this situation lends a sort of special honesty, or sincerity, or...the word I want won't come to me. This happens more often than you may expect; some would probably tell me it's because I know and/or use too many.
I always wanted Reverie to be read about and known, perhaps loved, by others. To that end, I went to the trouble of carefully timing the initial story release so that it would pass moderation and post to the front page on a Friday evening; prime-time pageviews and all that. And if nothing else, this ended up introducing me to bookplayer, which was no small pleasure, I'll unabashedly note. I'll just go ahead and say I sense a kindred spirit.
View never made feature, of course; nor did I really expect it to. This was because, even before I started writing my first words of ponyfic, I'd come to understand how feature works. You have a few options: you can write comedy, ideally with cheesy adorable romance; you can write a hardcore mature-tag dark gorefest for shock value; or you can go meta, and lampoon various tropes like, say, making a series about an alicorn mary sue. Slightly less sure bets are crossover fics with popular material (i.e. Halo), or riding the coattails of established fic (i.e. Fallout: Equestria, Conversion Bureau, etc).
View from the Window is a slice of life. It has a little comedy, a little tragedy, a little romance, but it doesn't hit the express exits to featuretown.
This is why I went and did Operation Shameless Self Promotion; actually, I did two of them. The first one ended up turning into a serious story, which I'm polishing up, and ought to be posted sometime in the next...week, maybe? But the second one ended with Rainbow Dash: Alpha Mare. I went full on trope-fest: cheesy bad comedy, terrible repetitive jokes, and sloppy makeouts. I was quite satisfied that it crossed the T's and dotted the I's. So at 6 AM on a Friday Morning, I posted it, so that it would go up about 12-14 hours later for prime-time frontpage.
Except that ended up going to hell. That week, at least - maybe still? - the moderation queue was such that guessing how long it would take for something to post was made impossible. I ended up saying screw it, and posted it at 8 AM the next Wednesday morning, hoping it would go up sometime that evening...or Thursday evening. So long as it made a good viewing position, it would do okay. I sensed feature potential.
It took forty three hours to post. Went up around 9 or 10 AM Friday morning, and was buried by noon.
As I had been recommended to do, I added the story to Shipping groups to increase exposure (even accidentally adding it to the Twilight is Best Pony group >.>). As of right now, Alpha Mare has...oh, hey, look at that. 666 views. I see what you did there, universe. About 600 of those were from the first week. Basically - if it hadn't been buried, I feel confident in saying it would have featured, and I would have shamelessly promoted myself, for the sake of ostensibly better stories. But it was buried, and those views didn't pile up fast enough, so Alpha Mare only made it about halfway up the popular list.
So now we come to the point. Oddly enough, I was actually always working towards one. Pat yourself on the back if you've stuck through my diatribe this long; 980 words and counting.
There's one other way one can make feature, one that sidesteps all the other requirements: to stand on the shoulders of giants.
Fillies and gentlecolts, I present to you GhostOfHeraclitus.
He started writing recently as well, a little after I did. Just today he posted his second story, which you'll see up there halfway up the feature box.
Now, let me make this abundantly clear: it deserves to be there. It's one of the most evocative pieces I've read in a long while, and is a fantastic bit of writing. I haven't yet read his first story, perhaps to my discredit, but given its over 6,000 views and 771-12 like ratio. It also featured when it was posted, and I expect it also deserved it.
My point is why these stories featured, and how the system works. Basically, Ghost was advertised in blogs by Bad Horse and Varanus. Between the two of them, they have almost 1,000 followers - among them myself. And if the rest are anything like me, they know that when those two make note of a story, you go look at it.
So all said and done, Ghost himself has picked up almost 300 followers, which is just about enough to push features on its own. This was basically why I put together my shameless self-promotions - to get a feature, draw some attention, and put together a following for the stories that I know won't feature on their own. Stories like View from the Window, and a fair few of the others I have in the pipe.
Now, again, to make inordinately clear, Ghost deserves all of this. Not that I would expect Bad Horse and Varanus to hold up someone who didn't, but his work speaks for itself. This is an example of a method that works; a good writer, relatively unknown, gets the nod from others who are, and everyone wins.
My point within that point, such as it is: for those who do get that boost...how many don't? And this is the crux of many an angry diatribe about the feature box: for every good story that makes it in there, how many fall short? Or how many are artificially kept out of it because of the mechanics? (Granted I'm not any kind of authority on those.)
Now, I'm not entirely unassisted here myself. When I first posted View, it was noticed by bookplayer, who linked it to her following, and I saw immediate results in that. I'd wager a fair few dozen of its 113 readings are drawn from that, and I'm plenty pleased by it. (By the way, thanks for linking View again in your recent post. So much love.)
It's just that when you see another good writer smash the feature and get that wide acclaim, you can't help but remember that you want it for your stories, too.
I'm also kind of mad jealous that Ghost gets Bad Horse and Varanus to pre-read for him.
So! Here's your diatribe of insight into this author's mind. There's usually more lights on in here, honest...
Bit of trivia: this blog post is 50 words longer than View's first chapter!
And now, I'm going to go see if Reverie feels like chatting some more. Because 300 followers or none, I'm still telling her story.
THat's right you tell that story!
I'll keep reading!
Man, I have so many things to say to this post:
First, you might want to check out an old blog post of mine where I covered some of the same ideas, with a bit of self-help advice. The comments have some clarifications, especially my back and forth with Bad Horse.
Second, the night you published View was the night I first made the feature box. I already had 177 watchers, and that got me about 50 new ones. It was a fluffy, romantic ship fic, but then that's what I write. I'd written plenty of ship fics before that didn't make it. And I've written ship fics since that didn't make it. The stars aligned- The front page froze with me half way down, and I was the only story there with a nice big picture of cute ponies. I had Twilight right there in the title (the feature box always seems to tilt towards Twilight,) it was shipping, so I could spam the shipping communities. I could never have done that on purpose.
Third, those 177 watchers I had before getting featured, and the thirty or so I've gotten since then: I owe most of them to The AppleDash Project, and shipping AppleDash in general. As I said in the blog post that night, a lot of my watchers are watching a list of authors I recognize- all the AppleDash writers in fandom. And The AppleDash Project has a little secret I've never mentioned before- It's gotten over three hundred referrals from google. Because apparently people google "AppleDash fanfic," and having AppleDash right in the title turns out to be a good way to get google to throw you in there.
(Okay, some of them are also probably because I wrote what is, to my knowledge, the only aged-up ScootaDash fic. That got some attention, too.)
Anyway, my point there is that you can build an audience without the feature box. It takes some luck, or an ability to keep writing fics that people are going to be searching out, but you can do it.
445683
That blog post of yours: I think you get the ribbon for conciseness over me.
More generally: I do hope I didn't come off as too terribly preachy/whiny/woe is me. Mostly I just felt like decompressing so that other written stuff could rent the space, and hey, I have a blog now, so...yeah.
Also View chapter 6 has words on the page now. Woo!