I published my first story here in mid-October and just recently published #4 and #5. I really tried to come up five unique stories to get started as this is my first outlet of any kind of writing. After getting the stories online I have been a little surprised at the voting, the number of downloads, and even more so, at the feedback that has not been received.
I read somewhere that the voting can fluctuate wildly and to be taken with a grain of salt. That is, a story can be well-written and executed, but if it doesn't contain the elements that the reader wants or expects it won't get a good score.
Correlated to the number of votes seems to be the number of downloads. Once a story is published it quickly falls down the "recent" list on the homepage and is doesn't have any exposure. I published one of my five stories a chapter at at and that kept pinging the story back to the top of the list with each new addition.
One of the less-than-10 comments I received was a question about the ending of a story. The reader asked a specific question about the direction, and if the story was going to veer that way he would cut his losses and stop reading. If not, he was enjoying the story and would wait for the ending to published. (It did not go the queried direction and the reader presumably continued to read the story.)
The rest of the comments have been very benign. A few have been "Thanks, I enjoyed it." (Which, don't get me wrong, are great to hear!) And a couple have been sent to call out typos in the story text. And then a few have been sent behind the safety of Internet anonymity. One basically asked me if I was really that stupid to end a story a certain way.
If you're still reading thanks for your patience at my rant! I guess the above should be expected in this kind of forum.
-DF