draaacos replied to your post: “But, you know, I think I’ve gotten to the point in my life where like...”
i know it's pointless for me to protest that you're probably not mediocre since I've never seen your writing etc but... you know that being a BNF/famous isn't an indicator of skill so much as luck, right?? (:
I think maybe mediocre isn’t the right word. We might not have the word I’d need in English actually.
On ff.net, where I’ve been since 2001 and have 475 author favorites and 412 author alerts for 34,539 profiles views, my most favorited fic has 113 favorites for 5,722 views. My second most favorited has 104 favorites for 13,206 views. The second most favorited fic has 34 alerts, which is my highest number of alerts. My second highest number of alerts is 22 and that fic has 3,936 views and 73 favorites. My most reviewed fic is also my most viewed fic and it has 88 reviews and 27,897 views spread out over 6 chapters. It’s also going to be 10 years old in August. I’d say the last about 30 reviews have trickled in since it finished. My second most favorited fic is my second most viewed fic. My second most reviewed fic has 51 reviews and will be ten years old in October. It’s also a hot mess of I didn’t think things through wtg 20 year old me.
I should point out that I did delete my most popular ff.net fic Ambiguity (Remus/Sirius Marauders era weirdness) for reasons I don’t remember anymore. It had I think over 180 reviews for like 88 chapters.
Moving to AO3, where I’ve been since 2013 and have 11 author subscriptions for 20,056 views, the fic with the most kudos has 58 kudos for 1,331 hits. My second most kudos has 51 kudos for 1,630 hits. The one with the second most kudos is my most commented on fic with 7 comments. The second most commented fic has 6 comments, 23 kudos, and 444 hits. In terms of bookmarks, my fic with the most kudos also has the most bookmarks at 12. Then the one with the second most amount of kudos has the second most amount of bookmarks with 4.
That said, there’s no real way to correlate all of this data and come up with the most popular fics based on a favorite:view:alert or kudos:hit:bookmark system without Chrome extensions probably. But, at the same time, it’s kind of like these numbers are tiny compared to other people who have been at this for as long as I have been at this. I mean I know that I’m decent enough that even if a fic of mine goes on with like 0 reviews/comments and 0 faves/kudos, eventually someone somewhere will leave one, but when I think of this in terms of extrapolating it into publishing, I figure I’ll be a publish on demand who manages to make some chump change every so often. I don’t mind not being a BNF and I’m not sure I’ve got the personality to be famous, but I know there’s a limitation, and maybe mediocrity isn’t the right term, but I know what I put out there isn’t what people want to consume in mass numbers, which really doesn’t bother me because the joy of creating is why I do what I do in the end.
