yuletide_coal | Crouching Coalie Hidden Wanker

Crouching Coalie Hidden Wanker

Yeah, I know, I have one job here, and I fail at it

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Default deadline Monday Dec 11
Assignment deadline Monday Dec 18

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ngl this sounds like you wanna write for a BNF to get some of those kudos flowing your way too.

DA

but why would you be trying to get kudos by writing for small fandoms? wouldn't you just try to write a fic for a big fandom/popular ship?

DA Big fandoms/ships can be hard to get visibility in. There's so much fic getting posted that any one fic gets overlooked.

I think the sweet spot for kudos is actually in the early stages of a medium fandom -- the first two weeks after a big movie airs, or the first season of a show that's going to get popular. Write multiple things for the emerging juggernaut and even a NNF can do pretty well.

Spot-on. I can build up dozens/hundreds of kudos over time in those smaller fandoms that get very little fic written for just by letting the fic exist in the tag for a while. But anything I write in my megafandoms gets buried within hours of posting, and I have to do tons of self-promoting, linking, cross-posting and howling at the moon to get people to notice it among the thousands and thousands of fics being churned out every day out there.

DA

there's a writer for yuri on ice that puts out not-so-decent work (ooc, all AU's, etc), ngl, but she was able to get tons of kudos since she started writing before the fandom got really big.

so i do feel like kudos dont' always necessarily represent the best work out there lol

I sort by wordcount bc I’m a longfic whore but IME bookmarks are the useful way to sort for quality. Most people don’t use them at all and if they do it isn’t willynilly.

I know some people who use ao3 bookmarks as a "read later" feature so number of bookmarks may not correlate as closely to number of satisfied readers as you might think

No, I’m aware. It’s still the most reliable way to sort when getting into a fandom for me. Once I’ve read it all, I usually agree with the general top 60 or so fics.

All AO3 metrics are useless but it has the most use for me. I say that as someone who hasn’t bookmarked a single fic on AO3. I’m a Pinboard user, which is my first stop when getting into a fandom. Then longfic, AO3 bookmarks and finally by date to see if I missed anything.

+1

I do that.

The absolute worst unreadable dreck my fandom's ever produced is sitting there at 20k kudos because it managed to get traction right when week the show started airing, so yeah, I agree that kudos are not representative of quality. Even if rec lists are kinda dead, I still rely more on recs and word of mouth than kudos/bookmarks/any ao3 stat to find good stuff to read.

ao3 stats were the worst thing to happen to my middle-size fandom. With recs dead new writers can't get traction and the same fics at the top get attention from people sorting by kudos/comments.

NA

This could all be avoided if AO3 had a system similar to Deviantart that showed you the most popular within 24 hours, a week, a month etc.

Is it possible for ao3 to ultimately have this? This would be amazing.

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Same thing happened with Stucky, an amazing amount of the highest fics are from 2014.

100% this. My most popular works have been for fandoms that I wrote something in almost immediately after they started airing. I don't think that those fics are any better or worse (on the whole) than anything else I've written.

In fact, in one of those fandoms, I wrote a fic that I still think is a great story but I wrote it a month after the film came out. It got 10% of the kudos/comments as the story I wrote the first weekend the film came out.

I guess the logic is write for them > they rec their gifts > big fandom stans read small fandom fic to suck up to their fav?

Rec lists are dead now and the power of the BNF with stans that flock to anything they like/do has drastically diminished so honestly if you want the popularity bump you should write for popular fandoms (or tropes) and not popular people.

ayrt

yeah, i think OP is more trying to get their favorite author to read their work rather than looking for kudos

i haven't actually seen a BNF rec their gifts? tho a fic gifted to them does have some sort of way of more visibility since someone could technically go through their gifts on ao3 and read it like that

ayrt

Usually nowadays it isn’t as performative as the real BNF days. The popular person (a MNF at best by old standards) will flail on twitter or tumblr and talk about/link their fic and thats it. Maybe they’ll add it to their pinboard.

You can search your fics (or a popular fic) url/title on twitted and tumblr to see the modern BNF/MNF rec. If you don’t follow the BNF/MNF then you never see it, which was not the case if you shared a fandom with a BNF even 10 years ago.

I think popular fandoms beat a popular recip, but I wrote for a fairly popular recip two years ago (not astolat-levels of well known, but lots of tumblr followers) and I definitely got a huge kudos bump after they recced their gift.

Hah, a BNF-on-Tumblr recced a fic by a NNF friend of mine and it got 1200 kudos in about eight months. Every single other fic of hers still has half that amount or less.

If your friend has other fics with 100s of kudos, they are not an NNF.

Don’t agree. The fic can be popular while nobody knows your name. Lots of authors are one hit wonders, plus the death of true BNF culture has turned notoriety into ‘the person who wrote Fic Title/trope description of fic!fic’ while leaving ‘Name wrote the tropey description of fic!fic’ behind.

You’re a NNF until people remember your name, which is rare as fuck these days.

Agreed. I've got about 10 fics with >250 kudos (two over 1000) and I doubt anyone would recognize my name outside of Yuletide circles. Plenty of people don't inside, either.

There are plenty of NNFs in megafandoms with hundreds of kudos. No one would ever remember their name, or rec them to anyone else, but they have the kudos nonetheless, and often on more than one fic. It's the inevitable side effect of big reader pools.

It gets drowned out. Plus if the BNF writes a post that goes "thank you for my lovey fic" with a link, it's like an ad going to a big audience.

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