How do writers gauge the success of their stories? I've heard of writers asking people to go to their story and vote a high mark for some sort of reward, like a picture or something. I've seen stories I enjoyed get low scores and I've seen bad stories (to me) get high scores. I have seen some low scoring stories with quite a few downloads and some high scoring stories garner surprisingly few downloads. What's it all mean?
I am trying my first long running story and the score after the last chapter I posted dropped 4 points, which tells me how it was received,.. not that well.. That is one time when the scoring system is useful. Scores should not be too critical to a writer, but they are indicators and when scores rise or drop from a chapter, we deduct how that chapter was received. So voting on chapters works as a gauge for us writers. Feedback is really important. Tell us what you like and don't like. Tell us writers our errors and bad habits and tell us when you love our stuff and we'll bust our asses to write more. "Tell me no secrets, tell me some lies." The number of downloads gives us a good idea of how many readers our story is entertaining. One thing I will never understand is when a reader writes and says the story sucks after 20 chapters. Why are they still reading, or sending feedback? It would be great if this site would post the scores received for each chapter so we writers could go back and determine where the strong ones were, as well as the weak ones, and maybe work on them. Thanks for reading this little mini-rant.