Oct
5th
2019
The Love and Times of Sunset and Twilight Update · 3:43am Oct 5th, 2019
I just went through my latest story to make some revisions, so if you liked it and want to experience it even better than before, or you haven't read it yet, now's your opportunity. Also, I'm just curious. Do any of you know why the story's so low profile currently? It hasn't been doing poorly, per se, with it's 11-3 like-dislike ratio, and about 300 views. It just hasn't been receiving much attention compared to most of my other stories.
I've noticed the same issue plaguing most of the entries to the contest this year. I got less than 200 views on mine until fairly recently when it got a bit of a bump, and even some from authors with a few hundred or even a thousand followers haven't done much better than yours--this makes me wonder if there's, quite simply, some bias in the general public against the sort of stories where their beloved waifus break up. I can't quite see that myself, but I also can't see over a dozen established authors all publishing stories that flopped, so... yeah, hard to say.
Another possible factor is that that story got published really close to the contest's deadline, and a lot of other people posted their entries around the same time. So if people on the site were looking for Sunset-centric romance stories, there was probably a fair bit of competition.
That being said, when it comes to assessing a story's performance, I'm frankly just not sure there can ever be anything but speculation. There's certainly no foolproof formula for popularity, not that I'm aware of.
However, just looking at your story... not much really grabs my attention? I know from the short description, genre tags and title that it's a shipping story, and from the cover art that it's SunLight. But that's kinda about it, really? Okay, that's not entirely true; I also know that Sunset's crushing on Twilight, and that she's nervous about asking her out. But... I don't know about you, but I don't look at a single one of those things and think it's something I've never seen before.
Now, I haven't read your story, so I'm not going to say that the story itself is generic and uninteresting. But the way you pitch it doesn't convince me that it's not, and that might play a role in why not very many people read it. I don't know that there's much point in fixing it now, since so many of a story's views come in right away, but it might be something to think about for the future. MagnetBolt has a blog on getting featured better that might be worth looking at.
5132479
I suppose that's very possible. I do tend to have more unique premises to my stories than most, so I guess it's not that surprising when my premise is rather generic, it doesn't do as well. That's a problem with fanfiction sites. Even if a story is really good, if it doesn't pop out as interesting at first glance, people won't bother to read it. I guess that's an issue with all stories, but with fanfiction in particular. I guess it's time to be more clickbaity.
5132549
It is always time to be more clickbaity