#but the cheap crappy delivery pizza was entirely gone

[astrabear]

Various thoughts on kudos/reader engagement, which are unlikely to be of interest to anyone but me -

Like many people who are writers and/or tumblr users, I love me some external validation. At the same time, I'm pretty confident in a lot of my skills. So my issue isn't so much "oh no, people don't like my work, I must be terrible" as it is "argh, this is so frustrating, my stuff is good, why won't people recognize that?"

And in fact, looking at my Ao3 numbers, my ratios are very good. A significant percentage of the people who read leave kudos, and a fair number of the people who leave kudos leave comments. The people who read my fics like my fics. It's just that, relative to the other writers I know, very few people read them. I'm seeing responses to my poll saying that "this has a lot of kudos" means 500+ or even 1000+ kudos. I only have two fics that have over a thousand hits. Half my fics don't even have 500 hits. It's an entirely different world.

Like I said, I'm pretty secure in the quality of what I write. And I've come up with explanations that make sense to me for why I have such a small readership (I don't often write the most popular ship; I usually write short, single-chapter fics; I don't generally write things that give readers happy and/or horny feelings; and I didn't start writing until a lot of readers stopped following the tag and just relied on subscriptions and word of mouth. If I'd started in the earlier days of the fandom, when more readers were checking the main tag and also more readers were interested in a wider variety of content, it probably would have looked very different.) Most of the time I'm ok with this. I write boutique fic for a select audience. There's nothing wrong with that.

But it throws me off a bit when I see just how different some other people's expectations are, even within the same fandom. Like I'll see people reblog posts about how you should write for yourself, not care about kudos, etc etc, and I'll think "that's easy for you to say, you're extremely popular" and then apparently they don't think they're extremely popular, because their idea of what "popular" means is orders of magnitude larger than mine. And then the brain weasels creep in and say things like "maybe you aren't writing boutique fic for a select audience. Maybe it's just that no one gives a shit about your fic and you just make yourself look foolish by pretending you have any significance in this fandom" and I have to go read comments until they go away.