Why your story isn't recced...

[amalthia]

Okay so your story is beta read, you're getting a ton of feedback, chances are I may have left feedback but I'm not reccing it, so what's going on?

There is a good chance you're hitting one of my biggest pet peeves. Posting a completed story over a period of days instead of all at once. If I find the story after it's all parts are posted there is a good chance I'll rec and feedback the fic...but lately because I am actively reading and looking for fics I'm running into this more often.

I rarely leave feedback for these stories and I'll probably never recommend the story unless enough years go by and I completely forget the author did that to the story. (but honestly, I'm not likely to forget because it gets to me on so many levels anytime I see the story I get upset all over again)

Now some people may be wondering..."but you recommend WIP..." yeah well I never said I was rational. For some reason WIP don't make me upset the same way. I wrote about this once trying to figure out why WIP work better than completed stories that are chopped into pieces...I think WIP have better story flow than completed stories that break off at an arbitrary word count number.

I guess for me I feel like the author is jerking my chain by not posting the entire story at once. It feels like a cheap ploy to gain more feedback and well this whole deal pisses me off. (I know this probably isn't the reason why some authors decide to post their completed fic over a period of days but I don't understand if the story is complete why not post it all at once and if it's not finished then why is the author saying it's complete?)

Anyway, I've been seeing this around a bit more lately and I'm baffled.

Comments

[hansbekhart.livejournal.com]

I've done that once before, for a couple different reasons - yeah, it is a ploy for more comments, which I think is, in most cases, fair when it's a really long story that might've taken a couple months to write. Also, a lot of stories max out LJ's posting limits - once I had a chapter cut off right in the middle, after I'd already coded the entire goddamn thing, which was a pain in the ass. But the biggest reason that I felt okay doing it was that I was posting one part per day, there were only three parts (so it wasn't like there was a huge wait between parts) and each chapter was very self-contained, with beginning, middle and end, with slight cliffhangers to build suspense. I had to split the last chapter up into two parts because of the posting limits, but I think I did that on the same day, actually. When I started posting the story, I said in the header that there were three complete chapters and one would be posted per day, and I knew that most people would simply wait until the end to read it.

One of my pet peeves is people posting for a week or a couple days after a fic that they posted a fic, so, heh, I'd feel really uncomfortable reminding my flist to go and read it.

I don't have a lot of free time, and I prefer things to be broken up into smaller chapters; if I know that something is 30K or 50K, I might not end up reading it even if it's from an author I really love, just because I don't have that much time.

[amalthia]

I think waiting 3 days for a fic is reasonable. It's bad when you're waiting a month, or 10 days, or 20 days...one time I think the author spread it out over 2 months! and trust me the story wasn't that long...shakes head.

10k a day...that feels more acceptable and 3 days isn't such a long wait I think by the time anyone realizes there's a new story it's already all posted. :)

I also get that after writing such a long story you'd want to keep it active for a little while longer in people's memories. astolat proposed a solution I hadn't thought of before, which is post a small reminder after posting a story in the next 2 or 3 LJ posts so in case anyone missed the story update...for me I have a website so for a long time I just put my newest story at the very top of the page...I don't know I just feel like there are other ways to keep a story alive a little longer in people's memories than spreading it out like butter.

It just kills me when I see some authors with a 30k story and only posting 2k words a day.

and for me this is a pet peeve not something that I feel rational about and I know that but I can't help feeling it. and I'm just one reader and I read fast and I want to read the entire story in one go, especially if it's from a really good author.

[hansbekhart.livejournal.com]

Oh no, man. Ahahaha, see, one of my biggest pet peeves is people pimping themselves on their own journals, even just a small reminder. That just makes me uncomfortable and really unlikely to read the fic, so I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that myself.

But dude, I totally see what you mean. Posting 2K a day just kinda sucks, especially for a longer story. Now THAT I can definitely see just as a ploy for comments. Ahahaha I would feel as though I was behaving very tackily if I spread it out longer then, say, one 10K chapter a day for a week. (Holy crap, this is suddenly making me wonder how I'm going to post BigBang. I wonder if there's gonna be guidelines or something for that.)