Guest-Post: Fluffy-Seme Will Be Back – With a Vengeance!

A year and a half ago I was a frustrated webfiction writer: free from writer’s block, proud of the content I was producing, happily gabbing with the rest of the community on Twitter, but frustrated all the same.

Readers don’t leave feedback. As a veteran fanfiction writer I was used to this. Like most of us, I had learned to be happy with the weekly coo of ‘I love this! Please write more!!’ and to push away worries when loyal readers took a week off from encouraging me. As writers we have to resist giving into the urge to whine, poke and prod people for more detailed and regular feedback because we know it basically makes us look like asses.

However, we also want to polish our craft and produce work that engages as many people as possible. It’s hard to do that without the guidance of readers. It’s even harder when advice from experts is contradicted by the Dan Browns and Stepenie Meyers of the world.

And this was my frustration. I couldn’t seem to get my existing readers and my webfiction colleagues to agree on what a good well written story was. Common sense seemed to suggest that when you have one group of readers who want more of X and one group who want more of Y you error on the side of the larger group … but which was the larger group? And how do you battle for position in any arena of publishing when commercially successful works appear to defy best practices pushed by gatekeeping editors?

Regular readers of Ergofiction might remember how these thoughts progressed … My study of reader and writer feedback behavior was posted here in July. That confirmed what I already instinctively knew as a reader myself: commenting is not the best feedback system for fiction.

Today I’m here to give you a preview of a possible alternative.

Welcome to fluffy-seme reboot

fluffy-seme is now running on a completely new analytics based platform. Instead of struggling to write out something interesting in a comment, and then praying that the writer doesn’t overreact, readers on fluffy-seme choose one of five ratings: Positive, Neutral, Negative, Skipped, Skimmed. The ratings interface is AJAX-based, meaning that readers never have to navigate away from the story to tell you what they think. It’s just one click and keep reading.

But you’re thinking to yourself: so what? There’s probably a WordPress plugin that will do something like this already. That’s when the real programming work began, so let’s look at something that WordPress can’t do:

fluffy-seme analyzes and charts ratings data for you. Because chapters are broken out by scene and each scene is rated separately, writers can examine audience reaction to every facet of their story, follow engagement trends across chapters, and study whether their hooks are keeping people coming back or driving them away.

Hmmmm... this scene at the beginning of chapter three might need some work...

In a month or so we should also have Google analytics integration so that writers can compare rating data to real traffic numbers. Of course the story navigation bar has a feedback form for those readers who really do want to tell you how awesome you are in words :)

And since we were designing a platform especially for fiction publishing, might as well make it easy to manage multiple stories at once:

It’s so annoying to have dig through a whole 2,000+ word chapter just to find a little typo… So story edits can be easily made to individual scenes:

When updating, writers can either post their whole chapter and have the system divide it into scenes for them (this is really neat actually ^O^) or add individual scenes manually to existing chapters.

We’re currently in private alpha and there’s still so much work to do before we’re ready to open the platform up to the world. Right now we’re looking for opinions to help keep development on the right track, so if you’re excited by what you’ve seen here come test drive the model story display (now playing my new erotic spy thriller The Freelancers ^.^), answer five questions about your User Interface Experience, or tell us about your concerns on the projects Get Satisfcation group.