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

[redbyrd-sgfic.livejournal.com]

Since I came to this from janedavitt's post, I'll comment here-

There's one reason for disliking multipart posts that no one has mentioned, and that's if you have a slow connection. On dialup, even going from one linked post to another can be quite annoying. And going in day after day to find the next bit of a story on LJ.. argh!

I don't get especially wound up over posting formats, and now that I have broadband, I do sometimes read multi-post stories. But I'm another fast reader- I don't read WIP and I don't read stories until all the parts are up. And even then, I probably won't read the story if I have to search for the links to earlier parts. In part that's because my ability to read is erratic - depending on travel, work, school, and other RL commitments, so I can't count on being able to read every day- and if I get too far behind, I'll probably just pick up reading LJ at the current date, and write off the intervening amount of time as spilt milk.

I think a terminal post once everything is up with links to all the chapters is very considerate, as it makes it easy for the reader to find everything, or pick up after a break to continue reading. And offering the alternative of getting parts vs. reading the story all in one go is downright spiffy, and most likely to please everyone. Though I certainly won't blame anyone who doesn't.

I haven't yet bothered to break up any of my longer fics for posting- though I probably should for at least the longest one (49,000 words- eek!). But then I'm going very, very low-end on formatting- plain vanilla html with absolutely nothing fancy. Even though I'm no longer waiting on dialup, I know that some readers are, and a nice simple posting format makes it easy to download for reading offline or do a quick word processor conversion for PDA reading. *g* which are things I do myself, so I try to cater those tastes in others!

Ultimately, I think we all try to post in accord with our own preferences!

[amalthia]

I really love low end formatting because it does make converting to RTF for ebook readers SO MUCH easier.

as a writer I like making my stories easily aviable to all readers.