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shivverMy last post (well, not the one about my murderous intentions) was the AO3 stats meme, in which I wondered why in the world "Bloody Doctors!" was such an outlier in terms of number of hits, garnering nearly 1300 hits when most of my short stories are lucky to get 300 hits over ten years. thisbluespirit agreed that popularity is often inexplicable, though there's often bias from how long the fic has been available and from the size of the fandom, but she got me thinking, and then of course, the only way to really think about things is to do a data analysis.
Not a real one, of course. I don't have the expertise to do a real data analysis. But I did take data and I did analyze it. :P
I recorded all of my works in a Google spreadsheet, with their name, type, date posted, number of hits, and number of kudos. Then I created graphs to look at trends, specifically for the short stories, because the other types of works (novels and drabbles) are few enough that I don't need a separate visualization method.
A few things I should mention here.
So, here's the graph of the short stories that aren't part of those chopped series and aren't drabbles. The x-axis shows the titles of the stories, and the y-axis is the number of hits. The image is condensed, so not all of the titles are displayed (though all the data points are).
You can see that in general, my stories don't get more than about 300 hits, and the number of hits gradually decrease with time, asthisbluespirit said, simply because newer works haven't had time for people to find them. However, there are a number of spikes. The first spike is "Bloody Doctors!" The rest of the spikes make sense:
Which leaves "Bloody Doctors!" as inexplicable, especially considering the size of the spike. The only thing I can think that caused this is that it's Broadchurch fans looking for doppleganger crossovers, and the fact that BC had three seasons spread years apart, it gave readers three opportunities to find this piece. There's no way for me to get data on when the fic was hit so I can't disprove this. (Note: This still doesn't make sense. If "Bloody Doctors!" had a normal hit rate but three times, once for each season, it should be about 900 hits, but the spike is nearly 1300 hits. This is just weird.)
Compiling this data also gave me a chance to look at the stat that I'm mostly concerned about, which is the ratio of kudos to hits, in percentage form. To me, this is the most important bit: how many of the people who looked at a fic actually liked it. Hits don't mean anything because that depends on so many outside factors that you can't control, and total number of kudos is useless. So I look at the percent kudos to hits, because it's easy to calculate at a glance, and my target number for a fic is 10%. I'm happy if one in ten readers like what they read.
I'm pleased to say that over the last 11 years of my writing, the kudo/hit ratio has been trending upwards a little, from about 7% in 2014 to about 12% now. I guess I'm improving.
Looking at the novels, it's pretty much as I expected. The DT RPF, The Ten/Donna superhero AU, and the HP crossover dominate the others. The novels written for the DT-as-a-TL AU are slightly below those, and the two entirely independent novels (the hey-what-if-someone-refused-to-become-a-companion piece and Nerys' chance to travel in the TARDIS) are way below. The weird thing is that Blue Rain has one of the worst kudos/hits ratios I have, at 5.3%. Like, it's in the bottom 10 or so of all my works. I'd thought that it was one of the best-plotted and best-written things I've done, so I guess that shows how much I know.
thisbluespirit agreed that popularity is often inexplicable, though there's often bias from how long the fic has been available and from the size of the fandom, but she got me thinking, and then of course, the only way to really think about things is to do a data analysis.Not a real one, of course. I don't have the expertise to do a real data analysis. But I did take data and I did analyze it. :P
I recorded all of my works in a Google spreadsheet, with their name, type, date posted, number of hits, and number of kudos. Then I created graphs to look at trends, specifically for the short stories, because the other types of works (novels and drabbles) are few enough that I don't need a separate visualization method.
A few things I should mention here.
- I used to have a good number of short stories organized as chapters in a single work rather than as a series (they were called A Teacher and a Housemaid, about John Smith in 1913, and Short Fiction, a collection of fics done for ficathons and comms). At some point, I separated them out into individual works in a series, so their posting dates and hit counts are wrong. Thus, I removed them from this analysis.
- Later works that I added to the two series should have correct dates and stats, but I'm not sure what the date cutoff is, so I omitted those as well. I know I have date recorded in my DW blag, so when I find it, I'll reinstate those stories in my analysis.
- I'm not including drabbles here (and by drabbles I mean anything that's either super-tiny or crafted to a specific small word count, not just 100-word drabbles) because, honestly, I just don't care about them. Drabbles are an exercise in a particular type of writing and aren't representative of my normal style.
So, here's the graph of the short stories that aren't part of those chopped series and aren't drabbles. The x-axis shows the titles of the stories, and the y-axis is the number of hits. The image is condensed, so not all of the titles are displayed (though all the data points are).
You can see that in general, my stories don't get more than about 300 hits, and the number of hits gradually decrease with time, as
thisbluespirit said, simply because newer works haven't had time for people to find them. However, there are a number of spikes. The first spike is "Bloody Doctors!" The rest of the spikes make sense:- The two largest non-"Bloody Doctors!" spike are two short stories that accompany The Actor, which is by far my most popular work.
- Many are stories in my "David Tennant is a Time Lord" AU, which for some reason has a small but dedicated following.
- Many others are stories in my Blue Rain AU, which has an understandable small but dedicated following (thanks, bas_math_girl!)
- Two are Jack with Donna and Jack with Thirteen (before he actually appeared in the show); the second was definitely filling in for something people wanted to see.
- One smaller spike was Thirteen visiting Wilf during the first few nights of the covid lockdown, which was both topical and providing a meeting that people wanted to see.
Which leaves "Bloody Doctors!" as inexplicable, especially considering the size of the spike. The only thing I can think that caused this is that it's Broadchurch fans looking for doppleganger crossovers, and the fact that BC had three seasons spread years apart, it gave readers three opportunities to find this piece. There's no way for me to get data on when the fic was hit so I can't disprove this. (Note: This still doesn't make sense. If "Bloody Doctors!" had a normal hit rate but three times, once for each season, it should be about 900 hits, but the spike is nearly 1300 hits. This is just weird.)
Compiling this data also gave me a chance to look at the stat that I'm mostly concerned about, which is the ratio of kudos to hits, in percentage form. To me, this is the most important bit: how many of the people who looked at a fic actually liked it. Hits don't mean anything because that depends on so many outside factors that you can't control, and total number of kudos is useless. So I look at the percent kudos to hits, because it's easy to calculate at a glance, and my target number for a fic is 10%. I'm happy if one in ten readers like what they read.
I'm pleased to say that over the last 11 years of my writing, the kudo/hit ratio has been trending upwards a little, from about 7% in 2014 to about 12% now. I guess I'm improving.
Looking at the novels, it's pretty much as I expected. The DT RPF, The Ten/Donna superhero AU, and the HP crossover dominate the others. The novels written for the DT-as-a-TL AU are slightly below those, and the two entirely independent novels (the hey-what-if-someone-refused-to-become-a-companion piece and Nerys' chance to travel in the TARDIS) are way below. The weird thing is that Blue Rain has one of the worst kudos/hits ratios I have, at 5.3%. Like, it's in the bottom 10 or so of all my works. I'd thought that it was one of the best-plotted and best-written things I've done, so I guess that shows how much I know.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-28 08:52 pm (UTC)Yeah, that one is a bit weird, and it's not the bot-hit count thing that skewed at least 2 of mine hits-wise back in the day, because you've got reasonably high kudos etc as well which suggests that it's real. I'd say, then, it's got to be a rec by someone with a bit of influence in their own circle - I've had the odd fic suddenly had a flurry of hits/kudos or comments out of nowhere over the years, but it's virtually impossible to find the source since fandom left LJ. Most likely someone somewhere in a Discord or similarly closed place recced it.
The weird thing is that Blue Rain has one of the worst kudos/hits ratios I have, at 5.3%. Like, it's in the bottom 10 or so of all my works. I'd thought that it was one of the best-plotted and best-written things I've done, so I guess that shows how much I know.
But that showed up on the other as being higher in comments and while I think hits/kudos is a reasonable judge of popularity, comments are qualitative, the biggest indicator we have that the people who did actually stop long enough to read it really liked it, so I'd say you probably are a decent judge of that. Popularity and quality are not the same thing, even when it just comes to random fic!
It's cool to see that I inspired you to some stats, though. Very interesting!
no subject
Date: 2025-03-01 09:06 pm (UTC)> (For Blue Rain) ...hits/kudos is a reasonable judge of popularity, comments are qualitative, the biggest indicator we have that the people who did actually stop long enough to read it really liked it...
Yes, that is definitely true. I think it's important consider both together, which is kind of why I'm surprised that the hits/kudos is so low.
However, I did think of something that was sparked by what you were saying. I've been told by multiple people that they've read Blue Rain multiple times, and that it's comfort/popcorn fic for them. Each return would be a separate hit, so that could account for inflated hit count and therefore deflated hits/kudos. (Still, it's like 1700 extra hits, if I'm thinking 10% hits/kudos, which seems difficult to justify from repeated reads, but at least it does account for some of it.)