Come and wail about AO3 with me

[birdsofshore]

I noticed today that my Smoochfic, Hungry, has been read 5000 times on AO3. 5000 times! Who are all these people? It feels very strange to know that people are reading my fic, which is quite a personal and even, in a way, private thing to me, and I have no freaking clue who they are, or if they liked it, or anything.

I never even wanted to be on AO3! I am such a Luddite, I was going to stay on LJ forever and ever, where it is safe and warm and cosy and I know (kind of) everybody. I blame those wicked hd_smoochfest and hd_erised mods! *shakes fist and blows kisses simultaneously* But now I am on there, I want to understand it.

Some random questions:

Why do we put our fics on AO3 (if we do)? To get more reads / comments? I can't imagine anything else I post to AO3 would get this number of reads; I presume it's because it was in the Smoochfest, which is an adored, popular fest. But for all those thousands of reads, I got erm, I think 8 comments on AO3, and 5 of those were from people I know on LJ anyway, who probably would have read it if I'd just posted it to LJ only. I don't know. *shrugs* I suppose I don't really care how many thousand people have read it, if I don't know whether they liked it?

Bookmarks. What's that all about? If someone bookmarks your fic, does it mean they are halfway through and want to come back later? Or that they liked it a lot and are marking it as a favourite, to read again?

Finally, how do you stop feeling paranoid that only a few people commented because they all hated it? Hungry had Angry!Ron and Mean!Gryffindors in, and I get the feeling that was not so popular with everyone. Maybe 5000 people CLICKED on it, and 4952 of them then BACKBUTTONED because they loathed it?

You see, AO3 is really not good for me. It looks all shiny and tempting, with its stats and all those readers waiting with open hands, but it's perplexing and makes my brain hurt.

Anyway, those 5000 clicks can be two fingers up to Mr Birds who thinks there are only about 20 of us deviant Drarry-lovers in the whole wide world. He thinks the handful of people I talk to on LJ are the only ones who could possibly be weird enough to be into it, and that we have all found one another and are clinging together like this purely by luck :DDD.

The other thing that cheers me up is thinking that maybe Draco was one of the 5000 clickers. If so, I like to think that this would be his reaction:



by Microbluefish on Deviantart

Comments

[calrissian18.livejournal.com]

I LOVE AO3 SOOOOOO MUCH!!! But not for the Harry Potter fandom at all. Nothing really happens there in that land and I thought it was just me but, checking in with others, no - nothing really happens there in that land.

AO3 for a stupidly active fandom like Teen Wolf is the greatest thing that will ever happen. People there are like, have a Kudos, have a comment, I have soooo many of them, why not toss a few your way? I understand it's pretty great for Star Trek too but I can't speak to that personally.

I got an invite to AO3 in June 2012 so I could have a nice, grown-up looking site to post a bang fic and not have to split it into parts (the way I would've had to on LJ). *crickets* Then I didn't use it. At all. Because HP fics do *blows raspberry* nothing. They go there to die be archived. The only fic that's done any damage there is my smoochfest fic and that's because it was in a massively well-read fest, otherwise nothin'. Then I started posting Teen Wolf fics there in Feb 2013 and now I use it ALL THE TIME.

I even read fic pretty exclusively on AO3 now because I love the formatting and all the options. As for having your fic read there: in only that fandom, there seems to be the same give and take as on LJ, people engage. HP, yeah, there's no point in posting your fic there. It doesn't really matter to me if my HP fics are there aside from the purpose of having a masterlist (which I still don't have *headdesk*).

The Bookmarks option is the same as Favoriting. There's a specific 'Mark for Later' button for fics that you would like to read/are in the middle of reading and mean to come back to. It's also brilliant for WiPs because you can subscribe to them and get updates emailed to you every time the author adds to it. You can subscribe to authors too and download fics and it just has very neat options for things but without the horrible formatting or obnoxious teenagers of ff.net.

I've found - and this might just be me - but AO3 also seems very hooked in with tumblr. Or maybe it's that Teen Wolf fandom on AO3 is very hooked-in to tumblr (as that's my only real experience there) but that's great for someone who's trying to figure out tumblr, like myself!

[birdsofshore]

Ah, that's what evilgiraff said up there! She writes for Star Trek. I hadn't realised it was fandom dependent. All I know is that it seemed like an awful lot of reads for fuck all comments. But *shrugs* even a few nice comments can make it seem worthwhile.