Fanfic moaning

[galadhir]

It's very odd how it always seems to go this way: You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

I'm currently doing the first thing of those. I think 'Visitation' is really good. And more than that, I'm actually enjoying writing it to the extent that I am excited about it and rotating it in my head like I used to do with stories back when I was a proper writer. But I post it and... crickets.

Meanwhile I've just come off what I thought was a rather pointless piece of kid-fic, and that was getting twenty comments per chapter.

And it wouldn't matter so much if I had any idea what made one more popular than the other. Is it just that this one is in Xichen's pov instead of Jin Guangyao's? Is it that JGY is dead in this one, and it might take him a few years to come back? IDK. I cannot have become a worse writer in the space of the two weeks between one fic and the next, so it must be the subject matter and not me, but it is a bit baffling and discouraging.

Never mind. Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me. Whether I continue to post it or not is another matter.

Comments

[seleneheart]

Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me.

Good for you!

I can't even tell you what makes fic popular - I've had these same thoughts, many times.

[shipperslist]

You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

Lol yeah. One of the best fics I've ever written got crickets despite some people performing Great Interest when I talked about it. And then there's my tongue-in-cheek sterek thing that's going on 6K kudos and counting. Like. Why.

[watervole]

Erm, am I missing something? Visitation seems to have 20 comments and a fair bit of kudos too. Or did you link to the wrong fic? (Didn't read it, as it's a fandom I know absolutely nothing about)

[evilwriter37]

I completely understand this. There are fics that I put my heart and soul and energy into that get almost complete silence, and then fics that I bust out in half an hour or so get more of a reaction. It's just strange how that works sometimes.

Though, I'm currently taking a hiatus from posting, and I think it's helping my writing a lot, actually! I'm glad you're writing your fic for yourself, because writing for an audience can be stressful. I had to relearn how to write for myself, because posting was just causing too much anxiety.