Why AO3 Hit Counts Matter to Me

weconqueratdawn:

anarchycox:

I hope I can say this right, as it is something that I’ve been mulling for a few days.

@pemberley-press casually mentioned ‘according to ao3 I’ve read A Suitable Alpha X number of times.” And it was a fair bit. And I have stories I know I’ve reread dozens of times.

You can only kudos once, but each time someone reopens a story for a second, for a tenth, for a thirtieth time, that hit count goes up.

Yes people should kudos, I love kudos. And yes people should comment, I love comments.

But I am tired of telling people to comment because either they are already the sort to consistently comment or they aren’t, and if they don’t give a fuck no matter how many times we ask it won’t change their mind, or if they just forget or are nervous about leaving a comment those posts will just make the guilt feel worse. 

But every bad day that someone has, and they open one of my stories to feel better that hit count goes up. Stories written years ago, that number steadily climbs and that is amazing.

Sure I’d love readers to say they are new or are there yet again, but they won’t or can’t and you know what that is okay.

Because I know they are reading.

I have a story for a ridiculously small ship and it is a dark and intense story and it has a disproportionate high hit count. That means that some people are coming back to it again and again. And that is a great feeling for me. I know that that story matters to people.

More and more the hits matters as much to me as kudos and comments and seeing bookmarks, because it tells its own story, doesn’t it? 

It tells me people like what I’m doing. It isn’t as explicit as the other options but still it matters.

Thank you for all your rereads.

This is a really interesting perspective – I’m used to hearing writers talk about watching hits go up and kudos stay roughly the same in a depressed way, but it’s quite amazing to me that people are still reading/re-reading fics which I posted a couple of years ago. And it will just get more gratifying the longer that goes on. The total number of hits on my fics is something which never fails to cheer me up 🙂