Factors Which May Increase or Decrease The Amount of People Who Read Your Fic

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Title:	Factors Which May Increase or Decrease The Amount of People Who Read Your Fic
Creator:	mithrigil
Date(s):	February 7th, 2011
Medium:
Fandom:	pan-fandom
Topic:	Fanfiction
External Links:	https://mithrigil.livejournal.com/513392.html
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Factors Which May Increase or Decrease The Amount of People Who Read Your Fic is a post written by mithrigal in 2011.

Factors

• D: Day of Advertisement
• T: Time of Advertisement
• Q: Quality of Advertisement
• P: Pairing and Characters
• W: Quality of Writing
• L: Length
• G: Genre
• S: Smut
• ~: Pretension

Excerpts

For shits and giggles and oh god what the hell am I doing theoretical algebra and statistics for at one in the morning,

Factors Which May Increase or Decrease The Amount of People Who Read Your Fic

Let X equal the amount of people who see the fic advertised, as determined by A (the number of people on your friendslist) + B (the amount of people in any livejournal communities you crosspost the advertisement to) + C (audience outside livejournal as determined by stalking your ljtoys, AO3 and FFN hitcounts)

X = A + B + C

Let N equal the amount of people who click on the advertisement, as determined by several potential multipliers of X.

D: Day of Advertisement

If the fic is posted on a Wednesday, D = 1.

For each day outside Wednesday in either direction, decrease D by one tenth. Fics posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays have a T of 0.9, Mondays and Fridays a T of 0.8, and weekends a T of 0.7.

T: Time of Advertisement

If the fic is posted during fandom’s boom time (between 6 and 10 PM EST for US-based fandoms, 6 and 10 GMT for UK and Continental European fandoms, etc.) T = 1.

For each hour outside boom time in either direction, decrease T by one tenth. So a fic posted at 11 PM EST has a T of 0.9, a fic posted at midnight 0.8, and so forth.

P: Pairing and Characters

Let P have a base of 1 and a limit of 0.01.

If the main character of your fic is the main character of the series, increase P by one tenth.

If the main character of your fic is the ensemble darkhorse or fan favorite, increase P by two tenths.

If, after thorough research of your fic community, you determine the central pairing of your fic to be the most popular pairing in the fandom, whether it is canon or fanon, het or slash, fluffy or snarky, double your current value of P.

If you are writing fic that contains no canon main characters, decrease P by one tenth.

If you are writing fic that features a contentious pairing containing one member of the fan-preferred pairing, decrease P by one tenth.

If you are writing fic that features original characters in central roles and relegates the canon characters to the background, decrease P by two tenths.

If you are writing fic for general audiences, with no pairings, halve your current value of P.

If P at any point dips below zero, resolve it to its limit of 0.01 and consider writing original fiction instead.

Responses

[seta_suzume]:

This is interesting!

I tried to figure this out for 'A Day is Sufficient' since I actually remember what day of the week it was posted (though the hour is uncertain, so I approximated), but, as is usually the case with me, it wasn't even advertised to anyone but the intended recipient. My rough guesses gave me R = 0.5.

Ha ha, well, (since being posted in December) it's steadily climbed to 28 hits on AO3. I should compare it to some of my other fics.

(Oh, how many points do I lose for thinking a lot of it is funny but not knowing (or perhaps even caring) if anyone else thinks so? ^^;)

Ever since posting (or in many cases, re-posting) my arbitrary catalogue of fanfics at AO3, my hobby there is sorting by hits and watching various things rise and fall around each other. (Love is Better Blind I have no idea about, but The Good News staying afloat at 5 out of 62 pleases me greatly)

...um, sorry if I'm not making sense. I'm tired.

alias_sqbr:

I have spent enough time working as a mathematician that I had to stop myself thinking grumpy thoughts about the lack of scientific rigour, but other than that this was fun :)

I realise you were just having fun, but I actually crunched some of these numbers for my own fanworks and there was way less of a pattern than I was expecting. Which of course is just anecdotal data on a small sample and thus proves nothing :D

[anivad]:

...is the Wednesday thing true?

[mithrigal] replied:

In most of the fandoms I post in, I've found that the interior of the week is alive and the weekends are dead, for one reason or another. It probably varies across media.