Seems like we all have excuses for why we don't CC
more often. They may be excuses but they also have
a very strong standing.
This is indeed the FAN FICTION Mailing List and not
the ORIGINAL STORY Mailing List. If you get any CC
you should be happy rather than angry when you don't
get it. In fact you should be thankful that the
admin doesn't put a stop to non fanfiction stories
being acceptable to the list.
Point in fact there are two extremely basic reasons
however that you don't get CC. 1) Being an original
story, no one has any foreknowledge of the story
background. This is also the reason why a lot of
actual anime fanfictions based on less than famous
series tend to receive very few words of praise. 2)
Being an unknown author people will not go out of
their way to read your story and then further
comment on it. There are countless new stories and
new chapters of old stories that come out each and
every week, and not just on this list. There is
simply not enough time for one person to read every
single story that comes out and still manage to do
their jobs / school. This time is decreased even
further when the reader is also a writer themself.
Now because of these two reasons combined with the
lack of time for reading, is it any wonder when an
original or (for the most part unheard of) anime
finds little audience for it? I'll tell you for
example my own experience.
In general I read around 50-100 new chapters of
fanfiction every week. This includes selected
material from this list, large fanfiction archives,
and private author websites. At first (when the
amount of stories I already had found and liked
were relatively few still) I read everything I
came across that didn't have lemon type warnings.
Eventually though the amount of stories that I
liked grew to an extravagant number and forced
me to change my policy. When you know of over a
thousand stories you already would be willing to
read further (which haven't been classified as
dead or completed yet and even more that have
been), you don't really readily look for any more
stories to read. I decided that from then on I
would only read new stories from author's I had
already and liked or used subject matter I had a
very strong fore-knowledge of. So basically that
meant that on this list I generally slimmed down
to only reading the Ranma stories like many others
here. Eventually I found even that was beginning to
overwhelm me and I stopped reading Ranma alternate
world / continuation stories and only read
crossovers with other series. Finally, I came to
the point where I only read new stories if I had
already read all of the new chapters for current
stories and I had some free time leftover.
I am not arrogant enough to believe that my
story holds true for every single person on this
list. I am smart enough however to believe that
it or a close fascimile is actually quite a common
thing.
Responders prior to myself have already given
some great suggestions on how to actually receive
some CC, and I'm going to add one more now. The
first work you should send to this list should
be either Ranma, Sailor Moon, Dragon Balls,
Slayers, Tenchi, Pokemon, etc. It is only after
you've already hopefully set up a readership
circle that you should start sending the original
stuff or the unknown commodities. Once you have a
readership backing you'll probably receive a lot
of praise if your writing is good. I don't know
about everyone, but personally I find that I'm
more likely to read an unknown story/author if I
see a lot of good reviews already in place.
Will this trick work? It should, in fact it
should work so well you'd be amazed. My first
stories I wrote were all original. From '96 until
around early '99 that's all I had written and my
current website of that time got a grand total of
27 new visitors during that time (not counting
repeat visits). I buckled down and wrote a couple
of chapters of a Ranma series.
Within a month I had gotten over 100 new visitors.
When the new visitors rate stopped increasing
(even though total hits continued to rise) I
decided to up the anty and added a Buffy /
Highlander crossover to my story list and the new
visitors rate went through the roof.
Considering that I don't know of more than one site
that actually has a link to my own and I haven't
advertised it outside of a few small site
descriptions over at AOL Hometown I feel a tad bit
of satisfaction in knowing my newest site's nearing
the 1k "new" visitor mark (987 when I checked
yesterday) and has already surpassed the 20k "total
visits" mark. I personally point all of this
success, however trivial others might count it, at
these simple plays toward the audience.
Yes, for personal satisfaction nothing beats the
ability to write an original story well and have
praise sent because of it, but for audience
satisfaction nothing beats writing a fanfic for
one (or more) of the already popular series out
there.
http://user.aol.com/akraen
Akraen (S. Metcalf)