Feedback count

[lobelia321]

I am anal, and I am a listmaker. I have kept a list of feedback ever since I started posting fic into fandom. I just transferred my old list to my new laptop, thus merging old fandoms and new, and I am trying to discern some pattern in that strange and wonderful beast called FEEDBACK. I am addicted to feedback (not to be confused with redbacks, which are a particularly deadly species of Australian arthropod:



Okay, that was a somewhat random pun. But fun. And arthropodic!

I'm not going to be beat-about-the-bush on this one. Now that we're all in LJ together, feedback has become a most transparent substance, anyhow (unlike in the old days of yahoo where guesswork and coyness conspired to shroud actual numbers in mystery).

My most popular fic ever was A perfect day (it was the last in a series of fic called the 'saga of Dom, Billy and Orli', and I'm counting all fb received for the entire saga here, too). (I'm also not posting links here; this is not a self-pimping post just a bit of navel-gazery and procrastination as I have a paper to write by 11.30 tomorrow morning, argh.)

A perfect day, fandom lotrps, got 59 feedbacks. (Is that a plural? It is now.) I know that people in SGA have since received insanely more than this but for me, 59 is pretty much the top of the fb pinnacle. And it kept coming in over at least the next two years after initial posting which was sweet.)

Why? Early entry (I was one of the first lotrippers). Popular pairing. Series format so by the time we got to the last story installment, people were gagging to find out what happened in this triangle set-up. My own rating: I love this story. It was the first story in which I tried out what I thought of as more 'lyrical' language. I was finding my 'voice', I think! And the pairing was so cathected for me; it was such a pure and beautiful love story to write. This story was betaed and changed substantially as a result.

Now here's a strange thing: my second-most popular fic is Contraflow, fandom SGA, with 46 feedbacks. Strange because I didn't think of myself as an 'SGA writer', and certainly not as an SGA writer on a par with the lotrps writer I was. But there we are, and isn't that lovely! The pairing was not a specially popular one. And what's more, it was het! Unusual for me. (Het with a twist but het nevertheless.) Why so popular? Episode-related (and that goes down well in this fandom). Had one of the most popular characters in the fandom as one half of the pairing. Who knows? It was betaed.

I'm just doing head counts for now, not delving into qualitative and substantive analysis of what people actually said about the stories.

All the next popular ones are lotrps: The Other Trailer, Boyfriends, Up Shit Creek, Past Imperfect. All to be expected. These are what I think of as my 'star classics'. I love 'Up Shit Creek' especially, and 'Past Imperfect' is a sentimental soft-spot-in-my-heart indulgent fic that seemed to strike a wistful note (rather rare pairing). Can't remember the beta situation; I think they all got the once-over from gabbyhope, my trusty and very un-nit-picky beta of that time, bless her.

And then, whoa! Football fandom! Nemesis!! Totally weird pairing (at the time; now, of course, rather popular...) No beta. Written quickly and angstfreely. Football fandom was lavish! 30 feedbacks!

Backtracking to lotrps: Very popular were my wip series, both written simultaneously and as yet unfinished: Boring!Orli (unbetaed, written off the cuff straight into LJ, total insane crack) and Desert Prince, sheikh AU, full of old-fashioned poetic diction and descriptions.

Still up there with what is for me popular, is One Kiss Later, SGA, which was an SGA quickie, written in response to a challenge, as far as I recall, and with a totally weird pairing that half the feedbackers thought was an origchar (but isn't, just really, really, really rare, *g*). And again: it's het!! Unbetaed.

Unpopular fics: Let's get astrophysical. SGA. 3 sad little feedbacks. But then it's not an important fic in my head, either. Other SGA fics ditto. In fact, most of my SGAs languish around near the bottom of the feedback pile. What a strange fandom.

How does all of this relate to what I perceive to be quality? The problem is that my view of quality gets coloured by amount of feedback so if it gets a lot of feedback, I cannot help thinking, it must be sort of good. So maybe it's more useful to think in terms of fics I love:

A Perfect Day, lotrps (59)
Up Shit Creek, lotrps (41)
Nemesis, football (30)
When We Are Human, lotrps (26)
The Orc's Tongue, lotrfps (20)
Different Tastes, lotrps (14)
Olives in Brine and Artichoke Hearts, lotrps (13)
Spiralling Out, Spiralling In, SGA (12)
Tibet, HP (4)

(I'm not including 'Ichor'; it's too recent.)

Oh, and a fic I didn't particularly love and have re-read only once since posting: 'Two to a Bed'. But this got 21 feedbacks!

I'm trying to learn something from this. So far, I have only learned that I am, apparently, still nostalgic for Lord of the Rings real-person slashdom. And that my love for a story as I write it is not a reliable predictor for its fandom popularity.

And seeing I'm on a roll with the navelgazing, fics wot I learned most from:

•'Moon Madness'. What I learned: That I could write and finish a story in English, not my mother tongue.
•'A Perfect Day'. That I could use language inventively and crazily. That I liked writing about moral choice. That fic was interwoven with my own life experience in complex beautiful ways. That I could force a pairing and convince readers who had been dead set against that pairing to begin with. That I could convince people!!
•'Olives in Brine and Artichoke Hearts': That I could be funny. That I could write around a theme (food). That I could unfanon a character. How a very strict pov works.
•'Up Shit Creek': How to write a metaphorical orgasm. Again, that I could be funny! Who knew?
•'Different Tastes': How to write a story with almost no subjectivity and very few secondary clauses. How to make the words 'They fucked' be sexy. How to write a very non-metaphorical orgasm.
•'Average': How to write a character I hated and discovered that I couldn't hate or mock him once I'd been inside his head and adopted his pov. This was perhaps one of the most important lessons I have so far learned. This fic was a deeply moral experience for me.
•'When We Are Human': How to push fanfic into the boundaries of orig. How to ride on the back of formal experimentation and thematic focus. How to think myself into arthropods and love it. This fic stopped me writing for months, and I notice that I stopped learning from any of the fics I wrote for a long time afterwards. I had hit some limits and I didn't know where to go from there. I kept thinking, 'how can I ever match this achievement?' I was so proud of that fic! eyebrowofdoom said a really helpful thing, along the lines of 'did I want to write experimental fiction from now on, or did I want to go on writing -- and I can't remember the term she used but in effect, fiction with people that one can empathise with'.
•'Spiralling Out and Spiralling In' and 'Essence of Kerosene' and 'Aliens Did Not Make Them Do It': How to get myself out of a writing slump by doing formal writing experiments à la Raymond Queneau.
•All of my football fics: How lovely rps is and how it can fire me up.
•'Ichor': How to write a fic over a period of years and revise and revise and revise; how to print it out and cut it up into strips of paper and sellotape it together; how to play around with structure and chronology; how to devise a logical structure, using themes and goals. How to keep going even though I was often dispirited that I would ever get this finished.

What I learned from feedback: Gosh, what? I would have to go back and read the actual feedback because I learned not from merely counting it. Off the cuff, though: I learned that I could make people laugh. That I could make people care about characters and pairings that they hadn't cared about initially. And various other things that are embarrassing to write down. That popularity has to do with quality but also with right-time-right-place and carpe-diem. That having a fic betaed can be good for its popularity but that this is not an iron law. That lotrps was a feedbacking paradise!

:-)

Comments

[cupidsbow.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating; I've never thought of doing this, but maybe now I will.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

You are kind to find this fascinating. Well, I am certainly fascinated myself but then it's my own navel... ;-p I warn you, though: once you start counting your feedback, you can never stop! Argh.

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating! I haven't kept precise counts of feedback-comments, but like you I find the spread odd: that fairly trivial fics seem to hit the prevailing mood, or strike a chord, and get much more feedback than fics I've laboured over for months. I've had ridiculous amounts of fb (as in, 'lots') on my PotC Tarot; on the co-written Very Secret Diaries of Jack Sparrow; on some fics that are mainly vehicles for sex scenes (not quite PWP because characterisation and progression always makes it more fun). I've had barely any feedback on long and complex fics (one, posted as a single novel-length off-LJ thing, had quite a few comments about 'oooh, looking forward to reading this', but hardly anyone came back after reading). I'm not convinced that this means the longer / more complex fics are worse, just that they don't engage people as quickly and easily.

One of the first things I noticed in SGA fandom is how the most popular authors routinely get multiple pages of comments, even for fairly slight fics. Which is not to say that those slighter fics are less good, but perhaps they wouldn't get as many comments if they were posted by someone who didn't have a stellar reputation.

Comment not going anywhere but I've shared my random thoughts!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Well, I am amazed that people find my own navel so fascinating, ;-P It must be because it reminds them of their navel... *gg*

It's not that my trivial fics get lots of fb and my angsty ones don't; that's not the pattern. In fact, my most popular fic is also one of my own best beloved and was relatively well worked over. It's just that well-working-over isn't a guarantee. I do respect readers enough to think that lots of fb means something (but what?) but it doesn't follow that little fb means the fic is rubbish. Also, it's true: if you're popular or you're in a new and enthusiastic fandom, you'll get read. I was popular in lotrps once (*sigh*) so maybe that's why I got consistently high fb for a few months there...?

But then I surprisingly got a lot of fb in a fandom where people didn't know me as an author (SGA). Anyway, my head hurts now and I've been at a conference all day so farewell, till soon!

Also: it's SUNNY!!!!!!!

P.S. I do noticie that I am a slave of popularity myself. If I want to read a fic and I'm scrolling through sga-flashfiction, I'll choose ones that got 80plus comments orver ones that got 2-4. So...

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

I'm interested that you interpret my trivial / laboured-over distinction as trivial / angsty. I often labour longer over the more cheerful ones: angst at the touch of a button, happyhappy more demanding :)

I blame the author.

Know what you mean about reader mentality: picking fics that have most comments. Though sometimes (not so much in SGA admittedly) this can just mean tedious controversy.

Not only sunny but I have caved and have new meds. Disconnect is strong.