Feedback stats

[indri]

I've just been sorting out my overfull email account. As a few people have recently posted about feedback, I took special note of any I had received in my two years of fic writing. And then, what with me being confined to bed with the flu and me being a numbers person, I wound up doing a mini study of my own.

Here I'm defining feedback quite broadly to include email, LJ comments, BBF discussion, requests to archive, feedback left at archive sites and award nominations. I have not included recs made by others in their LJs or websites as I have no way to count these. Nor have I made any attempt to distinguish between "You rock" single-line feedback and mini-essay paens of praise that make me go weak at the knees.

If I just add all these kinds of feedback up, then I can say that, before I got an LJ, I'd usually get 17-25 pieces of feedback per fic. Of the fics I've posted since getting an LJ, I received 30 for "Descent" and a record-breaking 39 so far for, God help me, "Shagging Harmony Kendall". I expected good feedback for "Descent", because it's the piece I've worked longest and hardest on, but the strong response to "SHK" has rather taken me by surprise.

Now, either I've got a whole lot better-known in the past year or LJ is skewing the stats, perhaps because LJ friends are much more likely to comment on one's fic. So if we recall peasant_ 's suggestion that each piece of feedback probably represents 100-500 readers but apply it only to my pre-LJ stats, then I'm looking at a readership of 1,700 to 12,500. In all likelihood, a few thousand people may be reading my stories, given that peasant_ may have been defining feedback more narrowly.

I haven't written enough to gauge to what extent feedback depends on pairing, theme or rating. What is clear is that feedback is in no way proportional to effort: I spent a year on "Descent" but only got twice as much feedback as I did for an hour's work on the drabble "Doomed".

Some oddities: my most-archived fics have been "DeNile" and "Foreign Devils" (4 times each) but the only fic nominated more than once for a fic award has been "A Good Man" (3 times). "Foreign Devils" did poorly in terms of total numbers but the feedback I did receive was exceedingly fine and resulted in a few friendships. I received almost twice as many emails about "Shagging Harmony Kendall" than for any other fic, ever.

So there you go, that's my baseline.

Comments

[indri]

Ah, you must be a paying member of ffnet.

Symbiosis, which garnered heaps of gacking here on LJ, and is by far and aware my most recced fic, has never recieved even one piece of feedback anywhere else

Maybe you should swing by and tell roseveare. She's a bit down at the moment and it may be partly my fault.

Interesting that the 1:100 ratio holds up.