Ramblings: On Posting Chapter 6 (Patreon)

I posted the first half of Chapter 6 on Thursday night. It's now been up for a full weekend; here's some thoughts:

1. I invest -way- too much of myself into this! I only mean that half-seriously, but I honestly sleep terribly that first night wondering what the feedback's going to be. Which is crazy; the internet's a terrible place to seek validation!  I really need to learn to post these thing on a workday morning before heading to work.

2. Uptake's been... disappointing, but not unexpectedly so. It's only just crept past the 1,200 view mark at the time of writing this which is, relative to the other posts around it, pretty poor.

3. It's a big ask for a reader to pick something up with part 1 of chapter 6 of the second series of a story: it's not surprising view count is low.  Still, it's somewhat disheartening, considering the work put into it; I still think it's some of my best writing to date.

4. The reviews were nice! Though most of them came from you wonderful patrons, it always remains encouraging to get feedback. My takeaway of low read count + solid number of reviews is that those who like Constant, really like it; but it's not picking up many new readers at this point, which leads to....

5. My style of writing isn't popular. More on this in another post, but I wonder whether the way I'm writing Constant now simply isn't what a lot of people are looking for.  My writing is verbose and descriptive--probably overly so--and long. Not everyone's reading FM one-handed, but those looking for fapping material in Constant have a long way to go between erotic scenes.  

A good thing that came out of this is that I decided to post to TGStorytime.  Putting chapter 6 up there on its own didn't make much sense, so I finally decided to go all the way back to the beginning and start the first sweep of edits to harmonize the whole story.  More on that later--it's been a big job so far!--but uptake over there has been great.  The way TGS reports word count is misleading, as it's an amalgamation of reads across all chapters: a bunch of small chapters will generate far more 'reads' than single, large ones. Nevertheless, as of writing this, the first six chapters of Constant are revised and posted, and it's just passed 13k views, which is pretty awesome. Those views skew heavily towards the earlier chapters: the Prologue has over 2500 views, but the last part of chapter 6, only 124.