Did it work? · 4:48pm Jul 17th, 2018
Forgive me if I ramble a bit here.
I don't really know what to title this blog post, since this is kind of a spur of the moment decision to write all of this after weeks of randomly checking my story stats. I've told myself time and again I'm not writing for views or fame. Even though I like when my stories have done well in the distant past, I'm mostly interested in finishing them and seeing one or two people say they enjoyed it in the comments, or figuring out these tiny puzzles I'd left in.
Pray, Hope and Wander took me about two years of off and on, mostly off, work to finish, so I felt a little more invested this time, I suppose. I knew after so long without any follow-up, and what I assume to be the current state of fimfic, that it couldn't garner the same amount of views the last two stories had. What I didn't expect however were the views per chapter that left me wondering if my story had done enough to grip people.
I don't know if I properly understand how views displayed work for multi-chapter stories, but I understand it as the highest view count of a single chapter. That means that my final chapter (the journal) and one other (the first on day one) have close to 100% viewership. The day zero chapters have a bit less than that, but everything else is maybe 50% of the view count displayed on the story.
The journal format of the others was likely a big draw. People seemed to enjoy it and how the horror was conveyed through it, but most of PHW had a vastly different format. I think either that, the characters, or just the mundanity of some parts of it drove off a lot of viewers, who at least poked their heads into the last chapter for a look. Then again, I don't know how repeated views work. Are just a lot of people rereading these two chapters in particular?
This is all just speculation on my part, so I thought I'd make this blog post to get some feedback. I don't know how many people tracking or bookshelfing the story may have not read the entire thing, and I don't think I can reach those who gave up or skipped over most of it, but I'm curious if anyone can give some feedback.
Did you skip over sections of it? Was there any reason why? If you didn't, are there portions that didn't hook you? Edit: Should have remembered this when the post went up, but did anyone read it day to day as it released?
I'd love to have a discussion in the comments, because for now the answer to "Did this story work?" seems to be "No."
Oh, also I'm going to Bronycon, so see anyone who's reading this there, maybe.
I skipped over literally none of it and have continued to find each installment absolutely riveting.
I read and loved it before it went mainstream.
I'm at work so this'll be short. I enjoyed it read every last chapter, perhaps people were more interested in the darkness part of the story, and were looking forward to the journal at the end to get more clues about what happened once they figured out the first chapters were interviews.
I've read and liked every chapter of your stories. I did read some key chapters multiple times.
Didn't skip over a single entry, and even went back once I got to the last chapter to look for any little tidbits with a new view of things.
I think it largely, if anything, might be reader impatience in wanting to get to the 'big' part of the story so to speak. The logs for me personally were very interesting to see as I love any kind of 'found media' horror sorta thing, but I could see how someone who doesn't could be hasty to skip over it to get to the 'real' story. I've seen similar things happens in other written stories within the same genre.
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Thanks for the feedback, all. I didn't have it up when the post first went live, but did any of you happen to read it as it came out, when I was releasing a few chapters a day? I'm curious how that schedule worked, or felt, as the next one will probably be similar.
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You were proofreading it though, that's like literally cheating.
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I read it when I stumbled across the series and decided to give it a go. I binged each story and read them all in one day, enjoying the format changes and tricks you used in each.
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It's only cheating if someone calls you out on it.
Also, thanks for calling me out on it, you dingus. I retract every nice thing I thought about Pendant, so there.
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I didn't happen to see it until the whole thing was released, although I don't mind reading a story that's released a little at a time.
Honestly that would prevent me from staying up late and reading the whole story in one sitting and being super tired at work the next day. The only time I don't like reading a story that's being released incrementally is when it never gets finished.