Serials

Riddle me this, Batman. Why do some readers start reading a serial in the middle, or worse, read the end first. As Woody Allen said to the hooker, "I want a spanking and a blow job--in that order. The order is very, very important." I have a new serial, just published, and I see all kinds of folks reading parts 4 and 5, or just 5 and not 1,2,or3. If you do that it makes no sense, not to mention a huge spoiler. I wonder. Maybe I should have put a warning or a spoiler alert in later parts that the story will be incomprehensible without reading the first parts first.
Has anybody else noticed this?

Yes. I've got a serial where the middle chapter has far more views than the first.

No, I can't explain it.

Goodgulf

I think that I may have the answer as I do this too. We kinky types have very specific tastes and often I will quickly scan parts of a serial to see if it is something that I am interested in. The number of reads of anything in the library is somewhat overstated as just opening the story counts as a read even if the person immediately closes it because it doesn't appeal to them.

The synopsis helps cut down on this scanning but often it doesn't give enough details for you to decide. For example, if a person is interested in females who are in their teens or twenties getting spanked but when you check the story the woman in the story is in her fifties then that person would close the story and not read it.

I can easily see why preferences would cause a reader to drop a serial after scanning part 1 and in fact it's obvious that many do. What is less clear is why someone would read the end before starting at the beginning. In my recent serial, the end is nothing like the beginning (or even the middle).

The only thing I can think of is if the story has already been validated, and there is an indication that actual spankings take place in the second or third part of the serial - or other validated events occur in subsequent parts which do not occur in the first part. A reader may therefore skip to those parts that he/she knows contain the elements he/she likes, and choose not to read the first part(s), which typically set up the "meat" of a serial. As a reader, I don't find this at all satisfying, but maybe some others do.

I guess this is still possible even if the story hasn't been validated, since most serials work the same way - things are set up in the first few parts, while the spanking action often takes place in the subsequent parts.

That's all I can come up with, other than to say I have noticed the same thing with some of my own serials. I've pretty much given up trying to figure this stuff out.

I have basically quit writing series because many read the beginning and then the end and that's it. There seems to be little interest in the middle, especially if validation shows there are no spankings involved. This being said, I also find that putting at least a week or more between installments also helps to help viewers find the 1st part before #2 comes out. There has been days on site with over 30 new stories appearing at once, which is great but makes missing a story if one is an occasional visitor easy to do.

Series are hard work for the writer and should be appreciated for that work. In one defense of why viewers do not stay in order is perhaps this scenario....they do not have time to read the first parts or miss them on the latest story listing when posted. They see Part 3 appeared and think they should check it out, then flip to part 2 to get more background and finally to part 5 because part 4 shows no spankings....

However it works for a viewer I guess we have to be happy we have viewers, they are like customers in a retail store. Without them we would likely not write as much.

No one has ever started in the middle of one of my serials.

Well, if you check some of the serials out there, you'll notice that the first one is usually the highest read for a few days. Then I believe some people read the synopsis and pick and choose. That's the reason why several may have 340 reads, and the others 144, etc... As a few people here already said, it's basically preference in the long run. If one part has a big white circle (No Spanking) you can bet it won't have a high count. At least not as high as the rest.

B

This is certainly true - but definitely not satisfying to an author who believes that plot, character development. etc, are important elements in making a story interesting. For some readers, it's only about the spanking.

I sometimes get attracted to an already started serial for some reason and then as soon as I realise it is a serial I go to the start if I wanted to keep reading, but even a partial read counts as a look, so that could explain some of it.