Guest Post: Surveying Webfiction Feedback
by Isa
So how did this get started?
Some of you, hopefully most of you, may know me as that completely annoying person who runs fluffy-seme.net. A few months ago I had an experience that I found both deeply touching and extremely frustrating: I met a fan of my writing in real life. This person preceded to turn to her friend and spend 15 minutes talking about how totally awesome one of my serials was, taking pauses only to badger her about reading it. Apparently this is not the first time this person has taken it upon herself to be my personal promotion machine.
Here’s the catch: this same fan has never once commented on anything I’ve written. Ever. So despite the willingness to tell everyone else on the planet what she thinks about my work, she has no desire to tell me… at least not in comment form.
At first I found this odd, but then I thought about my past life as a fanfic writer. The pensive cries on every board/community/posting ground since the beginning of time: why aren’t more people commenting on my story?!?! And why aren’t their comments better?
Common sense tells us that people will comment if something is good. If no one is commenting, that’s because no one really likes it. But those of us who’ve been in the reader’s position (basically all of us) probably can think of many things we’ve read, enjoyed and just couldn’t muster words for.
So I went back to fluffy-seme.net and started pitching a new strategy: let’s ditch comments, let’s create a new feedback system that readers will love using instead of one they groan and drag themselves through. Problem is… well unless you’ve actually been in the writing trenches throwing chapter after chapter into a seemingly empty abyss you don’t really appreciate how ill-suited comments are for the world of fiction. “But it works for blogs!” I heard over and over and over again, an assertion I was unable to counter because there simply was no information on internet behavior. It was the last frontier of anthropology and no one had any data at all.
So I decided to collect the data myself.
Purpose of Research:
Survey was conducted to examine the effectiveness of comments as a feedback system for fictional written content published over the internet.
Respondents:
420 people responded to posts on fanficrants, Weblit.us, Web Fiction Guide, Comic Fusion, and Twitter. 54% were from the US, 10.5% from the UK, 7.6% from Canada, 5% from Australia, and the remaining 22.9% were from a variety of other countries. 42.6% of respondents live in major metropolitan areas, 44% of them in suburbs or rural areas (13% could not be determined)
Respondents were asked to identify themselves as readers or writers of online fiction content. 40.9% identified as readers, 18.5% identified as writers, while the remaining 40.6% claimed to do both equally. For my analysis I refer to these groups as “pure readers”, “pure writers” and “mixed” respectively.
Content Types:
The survey looked at four content types specifically and tried to establish patterns of behavior within each group: Fanfiction, Original Fiction (webfiction), Webcomics and Role Plays.
Results:
1. The Readers
Here’s the big news: readers hate commenting.
I figured they would, but frankly I was surprised by the DEGREE that they hate it. The most telling results were the reasons survey respondents filled in themselves: people don’t comment because they don’t want to take the time to, because they’re lazy, because they would rather work their way through all the parts available and comment once than post a comment to each part separately. All of these reasons suggest that readers find commenting an unwelcome chore rather than a fun way to interact with content.
Respondents also highlighted an important reason why comments work for blogs but not for fiction: It seems odd to post a comment on a story that’s old. Comments are real-time reactions while stories — even with live writing, CYOA, and polling games — are essentially static. Comments work for blogs precisely because one does not have to go back to post 1 in order to understand, enjoy and comment upon the most recent update. This is not the case with fiction.
Pure readers have more difficulty expressing themselves than even occasional writers: 49.1% of readers identified this as a major reason for not commenting versus 19.2% of writers and 38% of mixed.
These readers are less likely to respond to guilt or bribery, but more likely to comment if they sympathize with the struggling author: 13.8% would comment if they felt bad for the author where only 2.6% of writers would.
2. The Writers
Pure writers, on the other hand, are natural networkers: 51.3% identified themselves as very likely to comment when they know the author, versus 35.5% of pure readers and 42.7% of mixed. They are also more likely to comment when they are asked by another writer or when they are hoping to get comments on their own work.
Beyond their self interest though, pure writers are a bit more ’survival of the fittest’ than pure readers or mixed: they are less likely to comment to support under-represented genres.
3. Webfiction Readers
In general, webfiction readers are webfiction writers. They were in fact the ONLY group where the majority of respondents identified themselves as writers. For all other content types (except Role Plays), readers outnumber writers 3 to 1. In webfiction there are only about 1.27 readers per writer.
Because webfiction readers are writers themselves, they are more likely than any other group to send a heads up to an author when they spot a typo. They also comment more often: 69% commented on average. Webfiction authors may envy the pull of fanfiction and webcomics, but these formats appear more popular because they attract large numbers of “lurkers” or silent readers who post a comment only once or twice, while webfiction audiences are smaller but more likely to discuss the work with the author in the comments (32.6% versus only 20% of fanfiction readers, 26.5% of webcomic readers and 32.3% of role players).
4. Webfiction Writers
Webfiction writers are dedicated to webfiction. They were the only group that preferred writing something other than fanfiction (73.7% write their own original stories vs. only 48.9% who write fanfiction).
Despite numerous essays on the topic, webfiction writers really are not all that interested in making money off their writing or getting noticed by traditional publishers. They are slightly more likely to find places that can offer these possibilities appealing than writers in other content categories, but their principal concern is exposure, exposure, exposure. Webfiction authors want to be read by people they know in real life and by people they don’t. Most added comments that reflected a more pragmatic approach to the publication of their writing: sure making money and establishing a legitimate publishing career would be nice, but many have promised this dream before and few have delivered. In the end writers understand that the only true path to success is readership.
5. What motivates active commenters?
Interestingly, active commenters are not interested in cultivating discussion about the work (unless they are webfiction readers, in which case they are slightly more interested in it). Their motivation isn’t that different from other commenters: they’ll comment if they love what they’ve read. Therefore, what separates a frequent commenter from an occasional commenter is a willingness to articulate the fact that they would like to read more of the story. Less frequent commenters may feel this way, but they are more comfortable with leaving it unsaid.
Conclusion: What this means for webfiction
A few weeks ago Ergofiction did a couple of series on underrepresented genres in webfiction, echoing an all too common critique: that webfiction is (perhaps unfairly or unrealistically) heavily slanted towards certain genres. Series that cannot be classified as Scifi/Fantasy seem to struggle to find footing with a webfiction audience. While hardly conclusive, I believe these results have shed a little light on exactly why that might be.
Webfiction is an audience filled with rivals. In some ways this — like a large scale writing group — can be an excellent tool to hone talents and receive thoughtful critiques, but in other ways the lack of readers without their own agenda hinders the growth of the format as a whole. As webfiction authors devote themselves to their craft and their own stories and characters, they are less likely to take chances on stories outside of their interests and perhaps (though the research collected no data on this) outside of their personal network of friends within the webfiction community.
Since comments are still the primary mode of feedback through which an author judges her worth, this can make the webfiction community seem clique-y and conformist, even if this is not the case. It can also skew perception of what stories are good, what stories have commercial potential and what genres are appropriate for webfiction at all. One webfiction author noted during the survey that at times it seems that webfiction readers only read series similar to the ones they themselves are writing.
By and large, webfiction authors write because they believe in the story they are creating. While 8.2% of fanfiction authors and 11.9% of role players admitted that they would give up on a story that didn’t get comments, only 6.3% of webfiction writers felt the same way. Webfiction writers are, however, slightly more susceptible to the influence of comments: 83% say they are motivated by them (26.9% of them extremely motivated) and in general webfiction authors agreed with greater frequency that they could figure out what their readers wanted from comments and that their comments were helping them improve as writers.
A few days ago on Novelr I restated my opinion that in order to succeed the webfiction community needs to stop talking to writers and start talking to readers, start bringing in more readers. And aside from the fact that — yes — this is way easier SAID than DONE, one could argue that more writers in more diverse genres would bring in more readers, wouldn’t it?
Except, given what the data shows, feedback and connection with a readership is the most important thing for writers. So recruiting more writers and cultivating more genres without the readership first requires large numbers of extraordinarily stubborn talent who are willing to publish their work as webfiction without any encouragement or acknowledgement from the existing community. And yet what is the alternative? I’ve seen what happens when good intentioned people try to read/review genres and serials they are not interested in: it gets ugly fast and no one benefits.