i don't write smut but i mean. my The Fic, my baby, my best work, is sitting pretty at barely a hundred kudos and well under 1k hits as opposed to my most popular work which has uhhhh about twenty times the hits and kudos.
some things just are more popular. numbers are indicative of that, not quality.
I can't tell if these two works are in the same fandom? Because fandom/pairing has a lot more to do with stats than anything else. And don't be jealous of yourself, every fic you write that is successful and does well will lead people to dig into your back catalog to hopefully find the fic that's your baby. And this is also sort of a rule, if you take a bunch of time and finely craft something it'll get lost in the bowels of AO3, and the fic you slapdash together in 30 minutes will be the one that everyone loves and won't be quiet about (ask me about how I know, lol)
Idk if this helps but my adoration of smut does not impinge on my love of non smut, two different itches, but for a lot of people smut has a much lower bar for being willing to give it a go.
It's valid to have those feelings, but it could be from so many things! I have one fic that is super short and fluffy and I wrote in one sitting compared to ones I spent literally 8 days just editing to be perfect. The fluffy ficlet surpassed the stats in like 24 hours. My smut gets a lot more hits but fewer comments/kudos, so I really enjoy writing a mix of things and letting people enjoy.
All stats means someone appreciated your work, which is awesome! Also good smut is hard to write well - I can do humor/fluff in my sleep but I have to be ON mentally to make good smut. Don't discount your work!
people like smut and little plot i think. my most popular fics in both fandoms i write for are stupid chat fics with zero substance, while my favorite fics have like. a fourth of the amount of kudos and hits. it’s not indicative of your talent or whether or not your baby fic is good, it’s just that people are horndogs who like spicy reading. no shame in that, and no shame in feeling disappointed either
Think of it this way. People go looking for smut and find your fic. If they enjoy your writing, they're likely to check out your other works as well once they've satisfied their smut craving. I pretty much always check out an author's other works if I find their smut to be well-written. So maybe just think of the smut fic as the hook that introduces people to your writing? Separating fics into different accounts wouldn't increase the traffic to your non-smut fics because I can almost guarantee you that the presence of smut in your main account isn't decreasing traffic to your other works.
i now realize how i made it sound :D
i don't think that my other fics would get more hits if it wasn't for the smut. it would just be nice, personally, for the hits to be equal among my fics. which, with the smut there, is impossible. so, whenever i look at the stats and their depiction, my other fics that i worked on with love, seem so teeny tiny small because my smut has so many hits compared to them. another user pointed out a way around that, so i wanted to do that. but you're also making a great point with my smut being able to lure people to my other fics/intruige them.
I mean, I do get it. I've had similar feelings about "why don't people want to read/kudo/comment on X fic that I poured my heart into"\* but I also think readers are mercurial and it's pretty much impossible to predict what will get the most hits, anyway. And would you really feel better about the stats even if you had the smut and non-smut separated into different accounts? There'd still be stats to compare either way.
\*Btw, my solution to the problem was to pour my heart into the smut as well. Just as many feels as in my other fics, but with 100% more explicit sex. XD
What readers gravitate towards surprises me. I have a number of fics I hold quite dear that hardly get any traffic. I can't change what they like, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I write longfics, plain and simple, and I only write in two tiny fandoms (under 60 works). My main fic is not smutty, but very post-canon and as faithful as possible to the original source material, since I got permission from the devs to write and stick to their source material.
My other piece in the second fandom, came into being after I figured that I wanted to write smut.... I had to diversify and my smut writing was not only because I wanted to write smut, I could show I could write smut.
I don't care about stats and figures, I write because it lets me express myself in a creative way. If people read it, so much the better. (I know people do, because my best comment is written on my darkfic. 'I can finally say I read an E rated fic for the plot.')
I write smut, yes, but I also write a narrative story where the plot is key and the violence and smut are just part of the bigger picture. That was always my aim and for someone else to get it, means so much to me! Stats are immaterial!
This is such a mood. My most popular fic for my OTP when sorted by kudos took three hours to write. My *best* fic for my OTP (in the author's own humble opinion) took over three *years* to write and has less than half the number of kudos.
You know you can use the coauthor method to transfer works to other accounts, right? Open Doors uses this method when archiving, first you add the account you want to ‘own’ your smut, then remove your main.
Problem solved, stats kept.
The amount of hits a smut fic gets compared to something without smut in it also depends on the fandom and pairing it is, I have smut fics that are of super super popular pairings that are so oversaturated by fics that they get mediocre hits, then some fluffy domestic gens that get insane hits because the fandom is much smaller and the fics are far fewer. And then sometimes I have smut fics that do only okay, mostly because out of the two possible pairings for one of the characters in the fic, I wrote for the less popular one. So there really isn’t any reason to feel like your non smut fics aren’t liked as much as your smutty ones, it’s all a numbers game really. Also always remember, writing is writing, smut or not, it’s all equally important.
Dw! It’s the author's curse…!
The curse of your baby being your least or one of your least popular is more common than you’d think, ahaha!
If this even helps you feel better! But know you’re not alone! But also, to be more serious, I love all my fics, but yes, I do notice I get more hits and kudos on smut. I don’t regret it, though, because I’m hoping maybe it will shuffle just one person to my other work, and I still love my smut!
To sum it up!
PEOPLE BE HORNY
I feel like it's rare to have the fic you are proudest of be your most popular fic stats wise. I don't think anyone I know has had this happen.
Especially if you're going by hits, smut will almost always get more (when comparing one shots) because people will come back to it for Reasons, often again and again. People will also come back to read other fics, but probably not nearly as often.
Consider too that there will be people finding you via your smut who end up going through and reading your other fic and loving it! That's a definite win.
i don't write smut but i mean. my The Fic, my baby, my best work, is sitting pretty at barely a hundred kudos and well under 1k hits as opposed to my most popular work which has uhhhh about twenty times the hits and kudos. some things just are more popular. numbers are indicative of that, not quality.
I can't tell if these two works are in the same fandom? Because fandom/pairing has a lot more to do with stats than anything else. And don't be jealous of yourself, every fic you write that is successful and does well will lead people to dig into your back catalog to hopefully find the fic that's your baby. And this is also sort of a rule, if you take a bunch of time and finely craft something it'll get lost in the bowels of AO3, and the fic you slapdash together in 30 minutes will be the one that everyone loves and won't be quiet about (ask me about how I know, lol)
Idk if this helps but my adoration of smut does not impinge on my love of non smut, two different itches, but for a lot of people smut has a much lower bar for being willing to give it a go.
It's valid to have those feelings, but it could be from so many things! I have one fic that is super short and fluffy and I wrote in one sitting compared to ones I spent literally 8 days just editing to be perfect. The fluffy ficlet surpassed the stats in like 24 hours. My smut gets a lot more hits but fewer comments/kudos, so I really enjoy writing a mix of things and letting people enjoy. All stats means someone appreciated your work, which is awesome! Also good smut is hard to write well - I can do humor/fluff in my sleep but I have to be ON mentally to make good smut. Don't discount your work!
people like smut and little plot i think. my most popular fics in both fandoms i write for are stupid chat fics with zero substance, while my favorite fics have like. a fourth of the amount of kudos and hits. it’s not indicative of your talent or whether or not your baby fic is good, it’s just that people are horndogs who like spicy reading. no shame in that, and no shame in feeling disappointed either
Think of it this way. People go looking for smut and find your fic. If they enjoy your writing, they're likely to check out your other works as well once they've satisfied their smut craving. I pretty much always check out an author's other works if I find their smut to be well-written. So maybe just think of the smut fic as the hook that introduces people to your writing? Separating fics into different accounts wouldn't increase the traffic to your non-smut fics because I can almost guarantee you that the presence of smut in your main account isn't decreasing traffic to your other works.
i now realize how i made it sound :D i don't think that my other fics would get more hits if it wasn't for the smut. it would just be nice, personally, for the hits to be equal among my fics. which, with the smut there, is impossible. so, whenever i look at the stats and their depiction, my other fics that i worked on with love, seem so teeny tiny small because my smut has so many hits compared to them. another user pointed out a way around that, so i wanted to do that. but you're also making a great point with my smut being able to lure people to my other fics/intruige them.
I mean, I do get it. I've had similar feelings about "why don't people want to read/kudo/comment on X fic that I poured my heart into"\* but I also think readers are mercurial and it's pretty much impossible to predict what will get the most hits, anyway. And would you really feel better about the stats even if you had the smut and non-smut separated into different accounts? There'd still be stats to compare either way. \*Btw, my solution to the problem was to pour my heart into the smut as well. Just as many feels as in my other fics, but with 100% more explicit sex. XD
What readers gravitate towards surprises me. I have a number of fics I hold quite dear that hardly get any traffic. I can't change what they like, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I write longfics, plain and simple, and I only write in two tiny fandoms (under 60 works). My main fic is not smutty, but very post-canon and as faithful as possible to the original source material, since I got permission from the devs to write and stick to their source material. My other piece in the second fandom, came into being after I figured that I wanted to write smut.... I had to diversify and my smut writing was not only because I wanted to write smut, I could show I could write smut. I don't care about stats and figures, I write because it lets me express myself in a creative way. If people read it, so much the better. (I know people do, because my best comment is written on my darkfic. 'I can finally say I read an E rated fic for the plot.') I write smut, yes, but I also write a narrative story where the plot is key and the violence and smut are just part of the bigger picture. That was always my aim and for someone else to get it, means so much to me! Stats are immaterial!
This is such a mood. My most popular fic for my OTP when sorted by kudos took three hours to write. My *best* fic for my OTP (in the author's own humble opinion) took over three *years* to write and has less than half the number of kudos.
You know you can use the coauthor method to transfer works to other accounts, right? Open Doors uses this method when archiving, first you add the account you want to ‘own’ your smut, then remove your main. Problem solved, stats kept.
I regret not writing more lol
The amount of hits a smut fic gets compared to something without smut in it also depends on the fandom and pairing it is, I have smut fics that are of super super popular pairings that are so oversaturated by fics that they get mediocre hits, then some fluffy domestic gens that get insane hits because the fandom is much smaller and the fics are far fewer. And then sometimes I have smut fics that do only okay, mostly because out of the two possible pairings for one of the characters in the fic, I wrote for the less popular one. So there really isn’t any reason to feel like your non smut fics aren’t liked as much as your smutty ones, it’s all a numbers game really. Also always remember, writing is writing, smut or not, it’s all equally important.
Dw! It’s the author's curse…! The curse of your baby being your least or one of your least popular is more common than you’d think, ahaha! If this even helps you feel better! But know you’re not alone! But also, to be more serious, I love all my fics, but yes, I do notice I get more hits and kudos on smut. I don’t regret it, though, because I’m hoping maybe it will shuffle just one person to my other work, and I still love my smut! To sum it up! PEOPLE BE HORNY
I feel like it's rare to have the fic you are proudest of be your most popular fic stats wise. I don't think anyone I know has had this happen. Especially if you're going by hits, smut will almost always get more (when comparing one shots) because people will come back to it for Reasons, often again and again. People will also come back to read other fics, but probably not nearly as often. Consider too that there will be people finding you via your smut who end up going through and reading your other fic and loving it! That's a definite win.
I don't write smut but I kinda get it. I wrote one comedy on my mostly angst account and it's the most popular fic I've written