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2019

Coal All The Way

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Do you guys only think about stats, kudos, comments, audience potential???

DA

I'm mostly doing exchanges for the gift, but if I wasn't thinking about comments and audience, I wouldn't post fic in a public space.

DC

It doesn't necessarily have to be all about the stats for somebody to want to connect with another fan of their small fandom in namespace. If you can see somebody's been writing fic for a particular fandom for years, they make a way more likely prospect for a new fandom friend who might want to chat about it or keep posting new content you'd be interested in than if all you know is they wrote it once for an exchange.

It's my first yuletide. I wrote for fandoms I would have written for anyway. "More people will read it and comment" was appealing to me, why wouldn't it be? But the boost in stats was only the first day and not really that many comments, as in 1 instead of none, so it won't be anything I think about when deciding if I want to participate again.

Maybe it's only the people in actually not small fandoms who get anything significantly different from usual?

DC Honestly, anyone who's just in fandom for the comments/kudos/etc. probably isn't doing Yuletide. They're writing tropey fic for juggernaut pairings in megafandoms.

I keep track of how my works are doing in Yuletide, but it's not out of any desire to dominate Yuletide or build a brand or whatever. It's something to do while I'm commenting on other people's works. And if people really enjoy a particular thing, I know to write more like that in the future, if it comes up. That's helpful. But I'm still going to be writing the thing for a fandom with a small or tiny or maybe non-existent audience, not for a megafandom juggernaut.

+1

Over half the stories I wrote this year were first-in-fandoms, so I knew going on that a recip comment might be the beginning and end of it. If I cared about getting lots of hits, kudos and comments I'd have written untitled goose game or a children's show, but I have no interest in writing for or reading those.

People who are concerned about that stuff just have to write for one or two of those and wait for the hits to come, pretty much guaranteed.

On the other hand, if the fandoms I like and maybe already write it or plan to start, filling a Yuletide request for them is typically going to mean more attention than it might get in mid-January or June outside an exchange, so I might wait for that. Even those are small fandoms where a little handful of comments is the most it will ever get.

But there's no wrong way to do it. People who are in for the kudos and comments and people who aren't are all just trying to have fun in their own way.

Honestly, anyone who's just in fandom for the comments/kudos/etc. probably isn't doing Yuletide

Are you nuts? Have you read the endless "I got no kudos and comments for this Yuletide fic" here and on FFA?

DA

I think there's a difference between people who are only doing fandom to game for high numbers on their stats page and people who hope for anything >[absolute silence] in response to posting their fanwork.

+1000

I totally scale my expectations for feedback based on fandom size, ship popularity (when applicable), story length, and my self-evaluation of how good the fic I wrote is. But if I get literally no feedback for a story, when I was hoping at the very least for a recip comment/kudos, then that's going to make me feel like crap.

DC

I think it goes one of two ways for Yuletide popularity: fandoms that are small generally but big for Yuletide, like Rivers of London or Gideon the Ninth, or five-minute fandoms where most people can check out the canon, such as it is. In between those you bank on nostalgia (childhood classics like Little Women or Secret Garden) or just luck.

DC

Yeah, basically everything else, you might get a very slight boost from extra eyes, but it's more that a fandom that would normally get 50-100ish hits slowly trickling in over months will instead get that in the first week.

I do notice that they seem to have the longest tails though. Those old fics in juggernaut fandoms I wrote are now buried and rarely found. But all those old Yuletide fics in genuinely tiny fandoms? I usually get a kudos for at least one of them every week. Hell, most of the e-mails from the old account I've abandoned are for Yuletide stuff, not the old SGA, HP, Due South, etc fic on it.

I wrote for two fandoms I write in year-round and got ... about the same response as I get for one and less of a response for the other. (It’s currently on hiatus for the year so people are probably not checking that tag.) I did it mostly to write treats for people in the fandom, one of whom also wrote me the treat of my heart. I’ve never “won” Yuletide but I still get comments and kudos in a lot of my old YT fic because it has a complete beginning, middle, and end, which a lot of YT fic tends not to.

There was a period - pre-AO3 - where the YT archive was basically the only place truly small fandom stuff got traction, cause you couldn't find it otherwise. Post-AO3 that no longer applies the same way, but ten years later the rep lingers somehow.

Ever since Yuletide moved to AO3, yup.

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