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.
