Bad Blood's Future and an Experiments Conclusion · 3:44am Feb 6th, 2019
Hello wonderful readers, and I hope you enjoyed reading the start of Bad Blood so far. I did a little experiment with the heat system as part of its release and I'd like to share the results with everyone here. After the page break you can find the 'Bad Blood's Future' part of the post.
Bad Blood was 17,000 words prewritten, and afforded me the unique opportunity to see if updating a story while in feature could help stave off the inevitable 1-2 day plummet. I didn't know it would feature of course, but it made it thanks to you guys.
So now some data:
Bad Blood was featured for about 5 days or so between Jan 28th and Feb 2nd and stayed near the top for the majority of its run. I was told two things about the feature box:
1. It's based solely on upvote to downvotes
2. Stories over 8k get a boost
So which ones were confirmed?
1. This is pretty much confirmed for me at this point. It's very easy to see by the graph how the initial mass wave of upvotes kept the story's heat so high that it remained unchallenged for several days. Only A Man and His Bar got close in votes after that first wave. Eventually Bad Blood was overtaken by Knowledge is Power, an elder scrolls crossover which had about 220 upvotes on 1st, up from 121 (difference of 100~) upvotes the previous day. Bad Blood in contrast was at 670 up from 595 (difference of 65~). Then again by The King Without a Crown with similar stats (100 per day). This is a good thing as we need stories to cycle out and let in fresh ones.
2. For reference, the chapter Bloodlines was added on January 30th changing the word count from 5k~ to 9k~. It's impossible to definitively tell if the story got any heat boost from updating to a length over 8k. In the first upvote chart for Bad Blood, updating appears at first to have a devastating effect on new readers (aka new upvotes) as it drops off pretty hard on the day I updated it. But this appears to be standard for stories that never updated, so we can conclude that updating has no major effect on new votes, which is an indication of new readers.
Tacet:
I'm Cool, Not Cute:
So, did updating mid-feature keep the story there longer?
Conclusion:
The short answer is no, as we see little to no change in votes when updates occur. The people who like the story, like it due to chapter one presumably.
Updating shortly after posting, however, had an interested effect on engagement overall. There's about a 70-80% reader retainment between first update of ch.1-2 and ch.3, as opposed to the standard 50%, and while Tacet and I'm Cool Not Cute drop off hard after a day or two, Bad Blood enjoyed a peaks and valleys effect. Reader retainment across chapters has nothing to do with feature heat though, and thus, it doesn't help a story stay in feature longer. If anything, it probably harms a story by not spacing out updates that could be used to send it into the bottom three slots of feature.
But readers got more into the story as a result (going off comments), and while that doesn't play into the numbers game, it does play into reader enjoyment and that's far more important. That brings me to an important point.
While all this data and speculation is amusing, I want to warn prospective writers about focusing on metrics. For one, the voting system is binary. We don't know which votes are an 'it's pretty okay' or a 'this is amazing!' opinion. They're counted equally. No matter how much someone tries to optimize for exposure, that will never force people to enjoy what they're reading to a greater extent. What's honestly much more important. An upvote will never be as valuable as real feedback, positive or negative, and that's something to keep in mind. An upvote is just a number.
On top of that, I think data can be really depressing, especially when you start using it compare yourself to others. It can give writers a false sense of superiority, while making pretty decent writers feel underappreciated compared to their peers. I want to encourage anyone reading to try not to put that much stock in metrics like these as a measure of quality/success no matter what they say about your stuff. You're successful when you're happy writing something AND your audience is happy reading it.
Now then, Bad Blood will be going on a minor hiatus and won't be updating at the speed it has for a while. More details can be found here. For those curious, future updates of Bad Blood will contain:
Sex
Herding
Cute bat horses
Monster lore
Cute yet grumpy Scarlet things
So look forward to that!
This makes me feel better for Umbras future.
Never enough of those.
Interesting.
Colour me intrigued.
looking forward to it
I'm just happy, that nearly 100 people saw mine.
Huh, very interesting. Thanks for the analysis. I'm very excited to read the coming updates when they are ready.
I do hope you can continue with the story since I am very interested in it and I would like to know what it ends and I would not like it to be left without continuing
I hate when a good story dies on hiatus.
and then there were eight months of nothing and no end of that in sight.......
Alright here's some feedback: Them some cool numbers ya got there.