I know that because I don't write in the juggernaut slash fandoms, I'm never going to get the epic volumes of praise that some other people do. And mostly I'm okay with that--I know that I write pretty good stories, stories I want to read. And if they're not enormously popular in online fandom, well, that's okay. Most of the time.

I think one of the forces at work in the fandom I'm writing in now is a certain amount of clique-ishness. One of the communities for it on Proboards is hosting an awards thingy now. I see stuff getting nominated that I think is just ok, but is by authors in a clique, when I can name four much better stories that qualify for the same category, not to mention my own stuff. The only fix for that is to nominate the other stories myself. I doubt my nominees will win, but at least I paid those authors the compliment of putting them up for it. (And I'm doing so regardless of how many reviews they get.)

When someone on your DW Network has five times as many hits as your most popular story ever, it's... kind of disheartening.

So little of my stuff is on AO3, or rather, started on AO3, that I haven't even bothered. Plus, plenty of BNF friends = ahahaha, not going to even pretend to compete.

I mean, my most popular Yuletide story (from 2006, the one where NPH and Harold's car get intimate) only has 83 AO3 hits. I think it got at least that many comments on the old site. But then I have a few hundred hits on my utterly random DCU stuff that was never more than niche.

My most popular story in terms of hit count is from the first Yuletide year on AO3. It's got 859 hits.

What does amaze me is that this year's Yuletide, in a fairly tiny fandom, has 642 hits, 54 kudos, 16 comments, and 9 bookmarks. And it's gen. So I apparently hit a Cabin Pressure sweet spot of "aww!" or something.

Shit, I thought I'd personally hit the NPH/Car story more than 83 times.

Does AO3 count each visit, or just each visitor?

What does amaze me is that this year's Yuletide, in a fairly tiny fandom, has 642 hits, 54 kudos, 16 comments, and 9 bookmarks

643.

As much as I love the fandot, I haven't really sought out much fic.

Yay, I have posted my Remix Madness story. First thing I've written in about six months.

Now I feel like I should try to do another one: I have all the rest of the day, after all...

I think childhood books are usually a pretty good bet in Yuletide.

I'd never done Yuletide before. It was a really nice surprise.

I'm still having a hard time branching out from my OTFandom, which is Star Trek, or I'd try Yuletide. But it's meant specifically for very small fandoms.

Hit counts are very seductive, but drive me nuts. They don't seem to indicate much of anything to me other than the popularity of a pairing, where you rate on the BNF scale and sheer luck. My big bang this year is over 800 hits, but pretty much everything else is lucky to hit 400. I don't write a super rare pair, but I think the fandom has been around for such a long time that it's only the diehards that pay any attention to them. Now, if I wrote Kirk/Spock, those stories would have easily double the number of hits, just because of the number of people who ship the "original" slash pairing of Star Trek.

I mean, there are two stories where I collaborated with other people during a challenge in a comm. One story won first prize and the other story won third prize. Yet the hit count on AO3 for the third place story is twice that of the first place story. Go figure! I'm curious to see what happens, though, because when I first posted those stories, the other collaborators weren't on AO3, so I couldn't list them as co-authors. Just today, I was finally able to do that and some of them have higher BNF quotients than I do. So now, people searching for those other authors can find these stories. I look forward to watching the hit count go all funky on me.

Fanfic writers' habit of constantly having characters roll their eyes at each other has annoyed me since way back, but never more than today in the story I read where Nick Fury rolls his eyes at Tony Stark.

Now, see, you are making me want to go through everything I've ever written and search 'em for rolling eyes. I think I have used it at least once, but I swear on your life that it was in character.