No, this is not a complaint on scoring.
All of my books get a 6.something on the first day of submission.
From there they continue to increase through the 7s and into the 8s.
I understand the 1s and 3s on the intital batch. I get it, trolls abound. but the 4s,5s and 6s make little sense. If people dont like my writing style, why read them in the first place just to give low scores?
Confused.
Shad
I get it, trolls abound. but the 4s,5s and 6s make little sense.
In my opinion, it goes like this;
First there are trolls. Then there are fly-speckers, followed by the nit-pickers. Then come the sane ones.
The 4s, 5s, and 6s are the usual fly-speckers and nit-pickers.
Different people score on different values for different reasons. Some people worry about grammar and spelling, some people don't. Some people vote only on the story line while some people vote on more aspects. It all comes down to personal appeal of the story to the reader.
It's been my experience that the first two groups to vote on a newly posted story are those who want to 1 bomb you and those who follow your works, then later you get the casual drive-by reader who comes across the story by semi-chance. The 1 bomb haters down vote while the regular voters tend to up vote and the casual readers tend to be a little more critical of the story.
the trolls, I dont mind in the sightest.
the lowballers, I guess I will have to chalk it up to not understanding the mindset.
Shad
One interesting aspect of scores I noticed some years ago is: when I revise a story to remove typos and spelling errors as well as making the story a smoother flowing read the scores slowly rise over time, while the ones I'd not revised yet stayed the same until after I revised them, then they started to rise as well. That's one of the reasons I encourage readers to tell me about errors and typos. Then I fix them as soon as I can. However, as soon as I can will often means some time later as I put the correction in the queue and get to it when I can.
when I revise a story to remove typos and spelling errors as well as making the story a smoother flowing read the scores slowly rise over time
That is promising. Meaning the scorers know what they're doing.
That is promising. Meaning the scorers know what they're doing.
I take it as some of the later readers do.
I don't score stories for authors, my impulse is to help other readers find stories they might like, or might not if the score is low. I don't often give low scores, if I really don't like a story I stop reading it. I suspect the majority of my scores are a 6. If I really like it, I might review it, and then an 8 or 9 are normal.
One contributory factor might be that you don't just churn out the same story each time.
I can imagine a few readers might have tuned in to your latest story expecting swords and sorcery then, finding it started with the kidnapping of a young girl and bearing in mind the story codes, voted it down because it didn't appeal to them. However, if they decided to stop reading, they would be missing out on what's turning out to be a very good story indeed and vastly different to their first impressions.
Since you're not paying for that opinion, it's my zero cents' worth ;)
AJ
Aj.
Hmm...
I hadn't considered the changing story types as a reason.
Hehe, that actually makes sense in a strange sort of way.
I did try and keep the first couple chapters short and post them together so that my readers could see that all was not as it seemed.
Sigh. maybe I didnt succeed as well as I hoped.
Shad
Sigh. maybe I didnt succeed as well as I hoped.
That may seem so but I'm not sure you should feel that way. It's a very good story so far, it's just not what your current reading audience expected. So what, you may loose a few of them for now but you will gain a different set of readers that are not so into the "sword and sorcery" type. In the end you should end up with a bigger and more varied group of readers. Don't bother with the score either. It's over 8 and that's considered very good here on SOL. The few lower scores are probably from the "sword and sorcerer" fans that feel a little disappointed because of the lack of, well, sword and sorcery, not because the story is bad.
For me, I like it when an author broadens his horizon in different types of stories. It bodes well for the expectation of future good stories.
One contributory factor might be that you don't just churn out the same story each time.
As long as the story description and codes are correct for each story I doubt the story type will change the scores because I write a number of different story types and in a number of different styles yet get roughly the same scores for most of my stories and the ones that vary a lot depends more on the applicable codes.
I haven't (to my knowledge) read any of your stories yet. The scenario that you have proposed might be the reason why as I look at the New Stories page for stories to read, and if I don't know the author, don't even look at stories that don't have a minimum score of 7.xx. That includes stories that don't have the score turned on. Too many good stories to read to do otherwise.
Having said that, I will look up your stories on your page and see what is there.
Jim