Story Comments

Cheery don't let the lack of comments dissuade you from posting. As I say in my profile, it took a lot of prodding and some downright bullying from a friend to get me to post my first story online. I was convinced there were a 1,000,001 things wrong with it and that no one would like it. I was lucky in that I got an overwhelming response, but I've posted others that have had hardly any response. That 1st story was The Spank Shop 1. It was actually intended to be a standalone and now I've done 18 of them and even had someone do a story using it. So keep on writing and posting.

Thank you for your encouragement, Seegee - although others may curse. I shall continue, somehow caught a bug that needs feeding and I'm loving it!

What can be condemning are the declining number of readers of a serial. Lots on the first episode declining to less than half on the second installment and so on.

Reminds me of the saying of the great Neil Innes -

"I've suffered for my Art, - now, it's your turn."

Maybe, subconsciously, that's the reason I don't do serials - I couldn't deal with losing half my readers by the second installment.

I'm guessing, though, that probably half of the people who click on ANY story quickly figure out that it just isn't up their alley and go on to read something else instead. For a stand-alone story, this isn't apparent. For a serial, it is, since they never check out the second installment. And simply because one person doesn't like a particular type of story doesn't mean someone else won't.

So keep posting, and good luck.

I can understand losing readers after each episode, but what I don't understand is a serial which has, say, 60 reads for part one, 22 for part two, then 47 for part three! Steadily declining readership I get - but not the seemingly random numbers.

I attribute that to people who don't know how to count - they simply don't know which number comes next.

Linda raises an interesting question; maybe it's because some readers stumble upon an episode in a serial using the Lucky Dip facility, or on the other hand it could just be one of life's imponderables!

Can't be that - the Lucky Dip only throws up part one of serials. I suppose if the serial is validated, some people might just go for the spanking or sexual content, and not actually care about the story?

I think that's it, forget the chase just skip to the kill.

It could also happen because parts 4 and 5, say, appear days or weeks later; reader opens part 4, likes it enough to click back (using the handy lnk from part to part) to part 1 and reads their way through - hence part 4 got 2 views for one reading. Or is this hopelessly idealisitc of me?
Didn't Einstein have a theory about this?

It could be that some people are using the search facility and searching for a specific set of criteria which means that only certain parts of a serial are returned by the search, and then only bothering to read those parts. It's not how I would go about it but I can't speak for others.