"Review Plz? Feedback Behavior in the Tolkien Fanfic Community" by Dawn Felagund

[dawn_felagund]

B2MeM Prompt and Path: Meta on Fandom and Multimedia (orange/nonfiction path)
Format: essay
Genre: nonfiction/meta
Rating: General
Warnings: n/a
Characters: n/a
Pairings: n/a
Summary: A look at Tolkien Fan Fiction Survey data on who leaves feedback and how often, and how many readers wish they did more.

Review Plz? Feedback Behavior in the Tolkien Fanfic Community

A little over a year ago, I ran an online survey about Tolkien fan fiction as part of my ongoing research on the history and culture of the Tolkien fan fiction community. (Read more about the Tolkien Fan Fiction survey here.) I have been slowly posting the results of the survey over the last year or so. For the orange/nonfiction path prompt "Meta on Fandom," I decided to dig into a topic from the survey based on what other B2MeM participants would like to know more about. People who answer my poll wanted to know more about, "How many readers comment or give feedback on stories? Why do they do this?" I will eventually investigate the other topics as well, most likely over the summer while I'm on break from school.

This essay seeks to answer some basic questions on feedback behavior in the Tolkien fanfic community. Who leaves feedback? How often? I will also begin to look at why people leave feedback, specifically at social pressure to do so. This will be the first post in a series looking at feedback behavior; the series will in all likelihood extent beyond B2MeM; follow heretic_lore, my Twitter, or the Tumblr tag #tolkien fan fiction survey for updates related to the survey.

Probably the first question to answer when thinking about commenting is: How often do people comment? I asked the question, "Do you leave comments or other feedback on Tolkien-based fan fiction stories?" Of the 1040 people who answered that question, 75.9% of them said YES.

Now it's important to note the "or other feedback" in the statement. This didn't ask just about comments or reviews; it could have included one-click feedback like kudos or likes as well. If I could go back and do this survey over, I'd likely change this question to distinguish between the two. For now, though, it's what I have to work with.

Who Leaves Feedback?

When we break down this question by the participant's role, the results become more interesting. I looked at the responses of writers versus readers only to this question. Writers were far, far more likely to leave feedback on what they read: 86.5% of writers (n = 635) answered YES compared to 59.3% of readers-only (n = 393). My initial reaction to this information is, "Well, of course, writers would best understand how much feedback matters to other writers." I think that's part of it, but there are probably other factors involved as well.

• Writers are more likely to belong to the sites where they read. Many sites (SWG and MPTT, for example) do not allow comments from anonymous users.


• Writers are more likely to be comfortable enough with English (or the language the story is written in) to be able to write a comment. I can read tolerably in Spanish, for example, but would never dare attempt to comment on something written in Spanish.


• Writers are more likely to simply know what to say in a comment. They know what they like to hear on their own stories. They know what goes into crafting a story and are possibly more accustomed to noticing a characterization detail or a particularly good turn of phrase: the kind of thing you'd mention in a comment.

Interestingly, 13.5% of writers responded that they did not leave feedback on stories that they read. I find this group intensely interesting, and a future post will look specifically at this group of participants.

How Often Do Readers Leave Feedback?

Of course, a participant could have left a single comment or liked one story posted on Tumblr and answered YES to the above. Any author can tell you that three-fourths of their readers do not leave feedback on a specific story; many of my stories, based on click counts, would have hundreds of comments, and it is rare for me to exceed ten comments, and I receive more comments than most authors. (The highest percentage of kudos-per-click on my AO3 stories is about 19%.) So what percentage of stories do readers leave comments on?

I asked participants to "Estimate the percentage of Tolkien-based fan fiction stories that you leave comments or other feedback on." Those who responded with a number greater than zero left comments on a median average of 30% of stories.

Breaking down the data a little further also shows that readers willing to leave feedback tend to leave it relatively infrequently. More than half of participants (54.7%) left feedback on one out of three stories, or less. The graph below shows the number of participants who left different amounts of feedback. The numbers drop steadily until spiking briefly around 50%--likely because someone is more likely to respond with 50% rather than dithering slightly to either side of that number; after the 50% mark, the numbers hang rather steadily. There is a small resurgence among the participants that, in my mind as I worked on these numbers, I termed "unicorns": those who left feedback on almost everything they read.



It's important to note that these numbers are likely slightly inflated. Even in anonymous surveys, like this one, there is a tendency to overstate positive behaviors, like one's habit of leaving feedback on the fiction one reads for free. To support this point in this particular survey, several participants left brief comments on their answers, suggesting that they'd recently increased their feedback due to growing awareness of its value to authors or that they felt they needed to do more; some participants offered excuses (such as English as a second language) or responded to a perceived low number with self-effacing humor (like a :P emoticon). In addition, numbers were potentially inflated because one is more likely to remember the stories one takes time to leave feedback on, especially comments. A ficlet skimmed quickly on Tumblr, for instance, is more likely to be forgotten than the same ficlet on AO3 where the reader leaves a one-sentence comment or even clicks a kudos; especially the comment requires more careful reading.

Looking at actual feedback numbers supports that 30% is likely inflated. I chose ten stories on AO3 from the section "The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-earth -- J.R.R. Tolkien." The stories had been posted just over a week ago and were on the sixth page of results, so they had likely received the first heavy wave of readership. Since most AO3 readers who leave comments, in my experience, also leave a kudos (and since comment counts on AO3 also include author replies and further conversation on a story), then I looked just at kudos. For those ten stories, the kudos-per-click percentage was a median average of 9.2%, spanning a range of 1.7% to 26.2%: nowhere near the self-reported 30% rate from the survey.

Do Readers Want to Leave More Feedback?

As implied above, there is a degree of social pressure to leave feedback on stories. I was curious if readers felt they needed to do this more, or if they were happy with the current amount of feedback they left, so I looked at responses to the statement "I want to leave comments and other feedback more often on the stories I read." Participants had five options to choose from: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, and No Opinion/Not Sure.

Overwhelmingly, participants wanted to leave more feedback: 77.6% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. In other words, three out of four readers think they need to leave more feedback. Fewer than one in ten (8.89%) disagreed or strongly disagreed. Of the latter category, a mere eight participants chose this option.



I looked closer at that group: participants who strongly disagreed that they wanted to leave feedback more often. Of those eight participants, three were part of the unicorn group that left feedback on almost everything they read; it's understandable why they felt they didn't need to do more! One participant left feedback a reported 70% of the time--still a relatively high number--so about half responded with Strongly Disagree because they really can't do much more than they already are. One person did not provide a response for the amount of feedback they left but answered NO to the question "Do you leave comments or other feedback on Tolkien-based fan fiction stories?" Three entered "zero" for the amount of feedback they left; these four responses felt somewhat defiant to me given how contrary to correct fandom etiquette it was. (I would say that this etiquette demands that one either leave feedback or feel badly for not doing so.)

I was also curious about the unicorn group: those who left feedback a reported 90 to 100% of the time. Despite leaving feedback on just about everything they read, 65% still agreed or strongly agreed that they wanted to do more. (Including those who reported that they left feedback 100% of the time: 67% of these participants still wanted to do more, including five who strongly agreed with the statement.)

Of the unicorn group, 21.7% chose No Opinion/Not Sure, a percentage much higher than the 13.5% of all participants who chose this option for this statement. I generally avoid making inferences about the No Opinion/Not Sure participants--there are a lot of reasons why people might choose this option, including that they truly do not understand what the statement is asking--but this discrepancy is too interesting to pass up hypothesizing about a little. I suspect that these respondents know that they are going above and beyond the majority of fandom but still feel uncomfortable stating directly that they don't think they need to do more. Choosing No Opinion/Not Sure is quite possibly the more socially acceptable option: a way to circumspectly admit that one really can't do much more.

The unicorns are an interesting group. Why do so many of them--about two out of three--feel that they need to do more? It is possible that the feedback they are leaving is mostly or entirely kudos or other one-click feedback, and they feel they should be writing more comments. (Readers who leave kudos on everything they read are a well-reported phenomenon on AO3; one participant even commented that they "kudos" everything they read.) It is also possible that social norms in fandom dictate that one should always be striving to improve on how much feedback one leaves on stories, and these readers feel that guilty gnawing even though they already are leaving feedback on almost everything they pick up. Here, I can turn to personal experience: I am in the unicorn group myself, leaving feedback on everything I read (in the form of comments) except when I regularly have to skim stories as part of my mod duties on the sites I run. (Sometimes even then I get sucked into a story and comment.) Despite the number of comments I leave, despite the hours of work I do in the fandom each week, I still feel guilty over not commenting on more of those stories skimmed in the course of daily site business. (I also feel guilty for not reading more, period.)

Conclusion

From this data, it is possible to draw a few conclusions:

• Most readers of Tolkien fan fiction leave feedback, but most readers leave feedback on a relatively low number of the stories they read.


• Self reports of the number of stories a reader feedback on appear to be significantly inflated. This doesn't have to mean that participants wanted to deliberately mislead in their responses--there are a number of reasons why self reports might be inaccurate, discussed above--but it is worth keeping in mind for other items on the survey where self-reported and actual behavior are more difficult to compare.


• Authors are significantly more likely than readers-only to leave feedback on a story.


• The vast majority of readers express that they want to leave feedback more often on stories they read. This includes the so-called "unicorns": readers who leave feedback on almost everything they read. This suggests, to me, that there is enough social pressure to leave feedback that participants may have felt uncomfortable stating that they felt they were doing enough. If you have an alternate explanation, please share in the comments!

If you have a question you'd like to see data on, please do share! Next time, I will likely look at why readers decide to leave feedback on a story, but if there's a topic or question you're interested in seeing analyzed and discussed in greater depth, let me know!

Comments

[sashahoneypalm.livejournal.com]

Another interesting angle to look at would be why people don't leave feedback, especially when they wish they did more.

For example, I often want to comment on something I've read, but can't think of anything more helpful or specific than, "I liked it." Especially if it's an older piece and the author might not be paying attention to it anymore, it doesn't feel worthwhile to merely squee. Particularly if I'd have to sign up to comment. (Perhaps some day I'll join the SWG to make an insightful, witty comment that offers constructive praise and criticism and asks a question that no one else has brought up, but it won't be just to go "OGM I love Return To Me it's seriously one of my top two favorite Silmfics ever squeeee!!!!" Even though that will be my second comment). I wonder how many other people really do care, but just have difficulty expressing themselves.
As an author, do you find any value in generic "I loved it!" comments? Or would you prefer your readers wait until they have something to actually say?

[shirebound]

can't think of anything more helpful or specific than, "I liked it."

As a fanfic author, I value and am delighted with every comment, however brief.

[ladybrooke]

I like the "I loved this!" comments. As a writer, the in-depth comments are nice, don't get me wrong! I enjoy them. But they're also more time consuming to reply to and sometimes it's really nice to have something easy to respond to, instead of spending a lot of time responding to questions and such.

[zdenka]

As an author, do you find any value in generic "I loved it!" comments?

100% yes! (And I know I'm also always happy to get feedback on older pieces as well.)

As a commenter, though, I know how you feel -- I often feel self-conscious leaving only a brief and generic comment, especially when it's for something I really loved, even though I know I'd be happy to get something like that myself as an author.

[dreamflower]

Any comments are valued to me. "I liked it" or "I loved it" is, at least a comment.

I do have to say, though, that I feel more strongly about comments with a bit more substance, simply because that opens the way to a dialogue with the reader.

For example, all I can say to "I liked it" is "Thank you." But to the reader who says "I liked it because you got the character voices right" I can say "Thank you. I'm very glad you think that since it's important to me to know the characters feel true." Then, they might reply to my reply, and next thing I know, I have a new friend.

Also, I am a lot more likely to check out the reviewer's profile page and maybe read/review one of her (or his) stories if I can tell from the review that we appear to have common taste.

But even so, sometimes "I liked it" is all they may need to say, or have time to say. That goes even for me.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I have the same problem.

If I'm entirely honest as a writer, of course I am happy when someone gives me an "I liked it!" kind of comment. I should be more happy, really, because it means they took the time to actually type something, however short. I should be happy about ":)" or "Great job!" too.

But I'm way more thrilled when somebody says a bit more. "XYZ is my favourite character and I think you got them just right." - "This is such a pivotal scene." - "Loved the humour in the dialogue." - "Quote from the story This really resonated with me!" Best, of course, are comments that go a bit more in-depth, share their own thoughts, possibly even disagree on my interpretation or ask how I arrived at a certain conclusion. As dreamflower02 put it below, these are likely the people whose profiles and own writing I check out, or (on LJ) with whom I begin to engage in more dialogue (and whom I might well add to my flist because I want to read more from them).
Add to that that on AO3, the simple "I liked it!" is basically covered by the "kudos" function. I mean, that's exactly how I interpret the "kudos" function: "I liked this but I can't think of anything more to say so *click*".
That is also why I don't leave as many reviews as I should: I don't feel I get much out of "I liked this", so I don't want to leave just that kind of comment. If I really really liked it (or feel obliged to leave a comment), I'll ponder the issue for a few hours or even days until my brain comes up with something more eloquent. If nothing more eloquent comes up, alas, I'll probably say nothing.

That said, on a story that has no comment whatsoever a couple of days after posting, even an "I liked it" or "I'm glad to see you're continuing this" can be a life-saver (metaphorically speaking). But yeah. Generic comments are nice because they are comments. I'll definitely take "I like it" over 0 comments. But I'll also definitely take two "I liked it because....." over 10 "I liked it" type comments, so in turn, I feel obliged that if I leave a comment, it should be a more elaborate comment.

That said that said, I've also observed that doing the latter is, at least in part, a matter of practice. Leaving just one eloquent comment is haaaard (unless the reasons why I loved something are so obvious that they're virtually leaping from my fingers into the comment field). But during events like B2MeM or Akallabêth in August, or in the old days during the MEFAs, when there's a lot of high-quality writing that I'll want to comment on in a short period of time, it becomes a lot easier. It's like there's a switch in my brain and once I've written the initial four or so comments, suddenly it goes into review mode and picks up on lines or characters or ideas to comment on immediately during reading, and then it becomes a lot easier to leave a review like one of the above examples. So I've come to the conclusion that leaving "good" comments is a skill that can be honed. Sadly, it is also easy to fall out of practice again...

Something like "OGM I love Return To Me it's seriously one of my top two favorite Silmfics ever squeeee!!!!", on the other hand... that doesn't need to be eloquent. That's just pure love and I know that as an author, a comment like that would absolutely make my week, without further elaboration. ;)

In conclusion: Yes, but meh, but sort of?

[independence1776]

Yet another person saying "I liked this!" is great. Seriously: if we don't hear anything, most of us start wondering what the point of posting is. (I personally would prefer an "I liked this" to a kudo; kudos are meaningless to me because there are so many ways to interpret and use them. Also because I can't even say thank you to people leaving them.)

A wholehearted YES please comment on older fics; some of my favorite fics are old fics and it does break my heart a little that I don't get reviews on them anymore.

Also, the "[x] is my favorite fic ever" type? That's a valuable comment in and of itself. It says to me that 1) you adore [x], 2) you probably reread it 3) you like the characterizations, 4) you like the plot, 5) you like my writing enough that you probably went or will go and read other fics of mine even if you never review them. It might be one sentence, but there's still a ton of meaning packed into it.

Pure squee is never unwelcome. I want to know I've affected people like that. Emotional reactions are writers' bread and butter.

In a nutshell: One line reviews are still valuable and still treasured. Squee = love.

[dawn_felagund]

I had two items on the survey that might get at what you're interested in:

• "I sometimes want to leave a comment but am not sure what to say."


• "I sometimes want to leave a comment but think that my comment might not mean much to the writer." (both on the Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, No Opinion/Not Sure scale)

For sure I will include those in the next data post. :)

I personally prefer a simple "I loved it!" comment to nothing. I think I speak for most writers in saying so. I've never known a writer who doesn't like hearing someone liked their work (although reading on this thread, it seems they do exist?). I totally get that not all readers feel prepared to go all deep and analytical about a story; that's a skill, not just something that everyone can do easily or at all.

I'm pretty confident in my abilities as a writer by this point. (I wasn't always.) If a story underperforms as far as the feedback it receives, I'm disappointed but not crushed; I'm to the point where I can pick myself up and dust myself off and try again. But I have known writers who stop writing (or at least posting) their Tolkienfic because the echoing silence that always greets them (while people are clicking on their stories) leads them to believe that they're either no good or that their work doesn't really matter to people. I think it's important to leave comments--even brief ones--on stories one likes because I think more writers are closer to that state of being than to mine.

Squees are always welcome. If you really feel that way about "Return to Me" and weren't just using it as a convenient example at hand ... thank you for letting me know. :) Hearing that something I've written is someone's favorite or changed the way they saw something/someone in the books or made them want to start writing ... those are the kinds of compliments that keep me going, that have made me a writer who can dust myself off when I sometimes fall down. I really can't overstate the positive impact that people sharing those kinds of things has had on my life, in so many ways.

[shirebound]

Writers are more likely to simply know what to say in a comment. They know what they like to hear on their own stories. They know what goes into crafting a story and are possibly more accustomed to noticing a characterization detail or a particularly good turn of phrase: the kind of thing you'd mention in a comment.

That's very perceptive, and I agree.

[dawn_felagund]

In teaching English, I have learned that while analyzing a story has always been pretty natural for me, it is not for most people! This makes me more forgiving of people who are uncomfortable leaving comments (but I still believe strongly that readers should show some form of appreciation to the authors they read often or whose work they have particularly enjoyed).

[ladybrooke]

I'm wondering what percentage of kudos only reviewers would actually take a survey of that length...

Anyways, kudos are what I can mainly comment on (at least in the Tolkien fandom(s) versus others, which is not part of this, but since you mentioned your highest percentage of kudos per clicks, it made me think):

Even between the Silmarillion side of Ao3, The Hobbit and LotR sides, the Harry Potter side, and the Labyrinth side, I note a difference in terms of how willing reviewers are to leave kudos per clicks (at least on my stories)

Breaking it down to a chart for ease:
Side : Percentage Range
Harry Potter : 2.6 - 4.6%
Labyrinth : 3.4%
LotR : 0.3 - 8.4%
Hobbit : 2.4 - 6.4%
Silm : 0.3 - 22% (since I have the most in this fandom, I'll go ahead and say that for 133 stories in this fandom, the most common range on my stories is in the 4.0 to 8.5ish% range, going by a quick calculation just scrolling down the list).

Now, granted, I am one writer. But I think I'm a fairly average one in all fandoms, so I do think it might be something in the Silm fandom, because I've noticed it in the kudos to clicks ratio just scrolling down lists in different fandoms. More guilt? Fewer stories, so people spend more time actually reading the story once they open it, and then read all the way through and click the button plus a culture of reviewing?

The other thing? In my experience, most kudos come from readers in the first few days. The first couple of days, my kudos to views percentage is often around 20%, but as time goes by, it usually drops down into a more average 5 to 8% range.

(Also, weirdly, I'm more likely to comment in a foreign language if I've read the fic. I think it's because then I have something to blame if I sound stupid in the comment - it's not my first language! Whereas in English, that's not really a possibility.)

[dawn_felagund]

I'm wondering what percentage of kudos only reviewers would actually take a survey of that length...

Well, the survey asked for readers of Tolkien fanfic, not only people who left feedback. There were people who took it, who read and leave no feedback. I don't know that the amount of feedback one does/doesn't leave would influence participation because the call for participants in no way even alluded to it and most items had nothing to do with it.

I do think that the importance of Tolkien fanfic to a person would influence participation. Casual readers of Tolkien fanfic would be less likely to participate, I think, so I don't think I'm seeing many people represented for whom Tolkien is just a sliver of their participation across dozens of fandoms.

How much of an outlier was 22%? Do you have other stories in that higher range? (Say, more than 15%?) My highest kudos-to-clicks percentage was an outlier ... also, ironically, it was on the story I kept self-deprecatingly calling "the skanky fanfic"! >.<

Being monofandom, I can't comment enough on the cultures of other fandoms to speculate why Silm fandom might be higher. Tolkien fandom but especially Silm fandom is relatively tight-knit (though I don't know that other small fandoms also aren't); it's not the easiest canon, so not many people tackle it, and those willing to do so pay a steep enough "entry fee" in doing so that perhaps they are more committed to the community itself, which might well translate into more prosocial behaviors, like encouraging writers one enjoys?

[zdenka]

Thank you for this essay -- it's very interesting!

[dawn_felagund]

You're welcome! Thanks for reading it. :)

[kayleelupin.livejournal.com]

This is a very interesting essay! It's inspired me to see how people react to my fics in particular just now. *goes to AO3, where most of my fics are posted*

Looking back over my stats on AO3 - if you'd asked me until just now, I would have told you *of course* I received the most "hits" on my co-authored stories. But as a matter of fact, in my top five, only one of them was co-authored - and three of them aren't even Tolkien.

Of my top five 'kudos'ed ones, again only one was co-authored (and not even a Tolkien one!) and again, three (though not the same three) are outside Tolkien fandom.

The top five comment threads, however, are four Tolkien, one not, and only one co-authored. (There is some overlap between all these, btw)

My top two of the top five bookmarked aren't Tolkien, either.

My top fic for subscriptions is "Isildurchil Dithen" by a huge margin (10, as opposed to 4, 2 or 1)

And my longest fic is also Isildurchil Dithen - I wonder if there's any correlation.

Thinking over what I've learned from that, it seems that while I see myself primarily as a Tolkienfic author, it's not all I'm capable of, and some people at least seem to agree that my non-Tolkienfic is just as valuable or even moreso than my non-Tolkien writings. Granted, this is looking on AO3, and anywhere else I post is *just* my Tolkienfic. So I have to wonder if maybe the reason for fewer reviews (usually) on my Tolkienfic is because people have seen them elsewhere first. But what praise and commentary I get on my Tolkienfic is enough to push some of them into the top five, too.

For comparison, when I look at the fics I've posted at SWG, I've posted about 15 stories (I say "about", because a couple of them actually have separate stories, posted in the manner I'd post "collections" on AO3). I've been "favorite author"'ed by one person (thanks just_jenni :) ). The Stats on SWG only show how many reviews I've *written*, not *received*, but going through and counting,

"A Foretelling of Blood - 2"
"Fallen Twilight - 2"
"Frozen Heart - 2"
"Taboos Were Made To Be Broken - 1" (specifically on a chapter of the Beren/Luthien story called "For Little Price" on AO3)
"Tales of the Nine - 2"
All the rest were 0. Now, most of my other stories were written for B2MEM, and received several reviews on LJ, which may have something to do with it. But that's not true of *all* of them. So I'm still a bit perplexed.

(And I'm not trying to whine and beg for more reviews! Just trying to reason out why these, particularly, were reviewed and the others not.)

I guess checking my AO3 stats also drove home that I *can* write good, even excellent fic perhaps, on my own without needing it to be co-authored, though my SWG stats don't seem to reflect that as much - most of those I wrote singly. I haven't really had cause to think about such things before reading this essay. Thanks for the thought-provoking read!

[dawn_felagund]

You're welcome!

Responses to a story or one's work in general is highly variable between archives, in my experience. I receive almost no feedback on MPTT, for example. I continue to post there mostly because I work there and want to continue to support, through my participation, a genfic site that does not have homophobic rules. I have come to the conclusion, based on the lack of response there, that my work just isn't most readers' cuppa on that site. Which is fine! (But then, when I post for the Yule challenge each year, I receive a number of positive comments on LJ. So it really is hard to predict.)

I get a higher-than-average number of comments on the SWG. But I know people there and, having founded the site, it is at least somewhat shaped around my priorities and attracts likeminded people, presumably. (Although my research also shows that members more than admins guide the culture of a site. MPTT's members are more conservative than SoA's, despite MPTT having far more progressive rules.) I don't pretend that my comment counts there reflect the quality of my work anymore than my lack of comments on MPTT does.

[dreamflower]

I used to be a unicorn. When I read nearly exclusively in Tolkien only archives, I did comment on everything I read; one year, I even commented on every single nominated story in the MEFAs (a difficult task I never attempted to repeat!)

When I broadened my reading to multi-fandom archives, I still commented on the Tolkien stories I read, but only rarely on stories in other fandoms.

Now, however, I seem to have less time. I often tell myself that I'm going to come back later, but rarely remember. Occasionally, I've composed a comment in my head and thought I'd made it, only to find later that it's not where I thought I'd put it.

Another factor is that much of my reading is now done on my iPod, which is rather awkward to use in commenting--so again, I'll tell myself I'll comment when I can sit down at my desktop, but seldom remember when the time comes.

So, though I still comment on most of the Tolkien stories I read, I'm not nearly a unicorn anymore, and probably am not even at 50% anymore.

I wonder how much the commenting/not commenting thing is affected by what device a person is reading the story on? Did your survey cover that?

[dawn_felagund]

I did not! If I ever end up with a university affiliation again (i.e., access to an institutional review board :) I will do another survey, and that would be a good question.

I have heard MANY people remark that reading on devices is the reason they don't comment. I can see your point with your iPod ... but I have to admit that I don't buy it a lot of the time when someone uses their phone constantly to text and post to social media but then magically can't type well enough on it to leave a comment on a story!

[hhimring]

Very interesting.

Self-reporting may well be inflated for the reasons you say.
But some of the click ratio on which you base your calculation for the inflation could be re-reads or people briefly checking out a fic and then coming back to finish reading or read more thoroughly later.

(And also, of course, more negatively, people opening up stories to have a look and then deciding this is not the story they wanted to read just now after all)

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

This!
Also, multi-chapter stories may require several sittings, yet in the end a reader leaves a comment only on the final chapter.
I, both as a reader and as a writer, would consider this a fully fair comment/review (getting comments on every chapter is awesome but far more likely on a WiP than on a finished story, I suspect). However, in the statistics, it means that the story may have been clicked, say, 10 times (by me alone) but only 1 comment was left.

Or people read the story on a different platform (like LJ or Tumblr) and comment there, and while they may re-read it on AO3 or SWG, they won't leave the comment again. (I am not likely to copy my comments from this comm into the comment field on SWG, for instance, though perhaps I should? I know some people did it for their MEFA reviews but I haven't. Yet, the story got read AND commented on, just not in the same place.)
For instance, I know I've commented on a couple of chapters of AMC, but only on LJ, never (?) on SWG (although I've re-read AMC there a couple of times), so in the statistics, that'll register as lots of reads (probably one read per three or four chapters) and not a single comment.

So while the different places in which people post fic - private sites, social media, event communities, forums and archives - are awesome and all need to exist, they also make it impossible to easily interpret the click data.

In conclusion, I'm perfectly happy to believe that the self-reporting is inflated (personally, I try to err on the side of caution, but I guess others may roll differently). But I don't think it's possible to conclude that quite so easily from the click:comment ratio. So 9,2 % is quite likely just as far from the truth as 30 % is.

[elwenlj.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. It was really interesting. I have noticed that reviews are fewer on my fic. nowadays than they were at the height of the hype over the movies. Whether that's a change in the readers or reflects the quality of my work I'm not sure. :D

Although I love to read well written fanfic. I do tend to hold back on making any detailed comments because of my own inferiority complex. I don't want to look stupid if I completely missed the point of the tale. So a simple, "I loved this," is often all I write, unless I have some kind of relationship with the author. I suspect that a lot of readers feel as I do.

That said, as a writer myself, I love any kind of feedback so I try to leave some sort of comment on any fanfic. I read, as a way to encourage the author to continue to entertain me with their wonderful work.

[dawn_felagund]

I'm using my unicorn icon for you. ;)

I actually love when readers offer an interpretation that's different from mine. I'm very much of the school (which I use as a teacher as well) that a story can have multiple interpretations and that the author's is not inherently the most valid. Readers have turned me on to interpretations of my characters and stories that I would never have imagined but that often, in turn, deepen my later writing.

[cairistiona7.livejournal.com]

Very interesting!

I've found with my own fics in both LOTR and the Captain America fandoms that the best I can hope for is around 10% hit-to-review/kudo rate.

As handy as it is, I do think there's some flaws in the kudos system at AO3, mostly in that you can only leave 1 kudo per entire work instead of 1 per chapter. It skews the feedback results on long-form works. My one-shots get a higher kudo/hit ratio than my long ones, where the readers probably left a kudo after the first chapter and then had no other recourse other than commenting, and if they're more introverted/shy/too busy etc, they likely won't leave comments, so I'm left to just watch the hit count and subscribe numbers to see if a story is still garnering attention from new readers, retaining current readers or losing readers. (Also, bless those readers who leave a comment saying, "Consider this another kudo.")

I love the short "this is great" comments as much as the long, involved ones, just in different ways. As a writer, I can tell myself all day that "I'm doing this for me", but in the end, I may be *writing* for me, but I'm going through the tedium of *posting* for readers, so not getting much response is disheartening. Long comments are great for opening up conversations and that's how I've made friends in fandom, but short comments from readers who don't seem interested in long chats or involved friendships are just as valuable. Both tell me that what I'm doing is worth sharing.

[dawn_felagund]

As a writer, I can tell myself all day that "I'm doing this for me", but in the end, I may be *writing* for me, but I'm going through the tedium of *posting* for readers, so not getting much response is disheartening.

YES. I could not have said it better myself.

I don't buy the argument that I should not care about feedback because I should be "writing for me." I do. But the then hour or more that I spend formatting the story and posting it on various sites is not for me, and if people aren't interested in what I have to say, then I'll just skip that particular act of tedium and move on to the next writing project.

I agree about the types of comments. I don't value one more than another. I appreciate anyone who wants to pause in their busy day to let me know that they like my work, whether it is a deep analysis of a story, a brief "I loved this!", an email/PM/ask ... I really can't understate how much the combined effect of a positive response to my work over the last decade has boosted my confidence as a writer. I honestly don't get people who have time to read a 50-chapter story but not to say, "Hey, thanks for writing this; I really enjoyed it."

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Something I found interesting when I started to write a few Tolkien-fandom stories is how different the feedback was from the historical fiction & Rosemary Sutcliff fandom that I had previously written in.

Sutcliff fandom is tiny compared with Tolkien, and some of my works relate to minor characters in very obscure out of print books. Yet the feedback levels are much more similar than you'd think. In the tiny historical fandoms, I get not much feedback up front, but there is more 'driveby' feedback than in Tolkien fandom: I will not hear anything on my historical stories in months, then someone will find one and go through my other works leaving comments. In Tolkien fandom, there is a strangely-large wave of kudos in the first couple of days (not anything like so many comments as in Sutcliff fandom though) and then it stops dead. Strange contrast.

[dawn_felagund]

That's an interesting comparison. Pretty much the only time I wish I was inclined to be multifandom is so I can compare fandoms and cultures! :D

For my Silmfic, I find I have a wave of interest (kudos and comments) in the first three days or so. Kudos sometimes continue a little after. Then both die down but I do periodically get a kudos or a comment seemingly out of the blue--though comments less so on AO3 than the SWG.

(I also still have people following stories that I finished more than a decade ago on ff.net. This was explained to me as a way for them to show their interest in my working without commenting to do so?)

Tumblr is the most extreme of all. I might get one hundred notes in a day and zero the next. But then an old post will be periodically resurrected and accrue another hundred notes before going cold again.

[liadt]

As for non respondents I've heard that some people on tumblr discourage commenting on fic so that may be another type of social pressure. It is true that there is a difference between the likelihood of feedback on different sites though.

Also as a writer "I liked it" is more than welcome! I don't feel it's made me a better comment writer - it's harder than writing fic!

[dawn_felagund]

Do you know why they discourage commenting on stories? That seems a mystifying, almost cruel, thing to do. People have left the Tolkien fandom over a lack of feedback on their stories.

I can get someone not personally caring about feedback ... well, I really can't, but different strokes for different folks, so I won't judge someone for not liking or caring about comments on their work. :) So shut off comment notifications and don't read the comments. But to discourage it on the works of other authors? Wow.

[samtyr.livejournal.com]

I know that I used to be a lot better about leaving feedback. I'd try and leave 'detailed' fb, such as "I really liked this because... etc. etc." and felt like I was contributing and part of the dialog.

But then, in one of my older fandoms (where most of the stories/posts were here, on lj rather than a site), about four different authors left in the span of approximately six months. All of them said basically the same thing: I'm leaving. So long, it's been great but I'm done and my work will be gone in another week or so.

Now, I could have understood if one author did that, or maybe two. But after the first one, it seemed like it was every few weeks where someone else did the same thing. (I really hope they weren't sock puppets but weirder things have happened right?) and I just felt devastated. To me (and because yes, it was my 'fandom' life, and my life is all about me), it seemed there was one common thread -- it was, somehow, my fault. Now granted, I was hardly the only reader/follower but still. (And none of them claimed to leave because of school, serious illness, new job, marriage, etc. -- all of which would make sense.) Clearly, I was being too demanding or putting too much stress on them or something of the sort -- in other words, my fault. And me, being clueless as usual, had not realized it until it was too late.

That was when I started pulling back and not leaving much feedback. In Tolkien fandom, I like to think I've done a bit better but it's very hard. Even now, I have the feeling that merely writing this will somehow cause a jinx. I guess I'd rather leave little fb rather than see people I really like leave. (Yes, I would feel that I had somehow driven them off.)

As for AO3: I like being able to leave kudos. I only wish I could leave it more than once (which is why some of my comments on longer fics read: kudos again.) And I love being able to download fics in pdf or whatever format. But it doesn't have the same sense of community there as other fan sites do, which is too bad.

Ok, that's all for now. (And I apologise for being such a drama queen.)

[dawn_felagund]

I have to admit that I'm curious: Why would you assume that leaving feedback on their stories would have somehow been demanding or stress-inducing? Did they say that: that there was too much pressure from readers to update, too much criticism (direct or implied), etc? (If this is too personal, pretend I didn't ask, of course. :)

Is it possible there was some drama going on behind the scenes? I've seen several fans leave at once because of a spat where I often didn't know what exactly was going on.

I've never, in twelve years in fandom, seen someone leave because of too much feedback. Because of bullying or flames? Yes, but that's a different animal. I have seen people leave--or stop posting on a site, or posting as widely--because they don't get much or any feedback. They see clicks but the response to their story is echoing silence. I can understand why these people feel frustrated or sad by this. It in turn makes me sad because it seems such a little thing to say to someone, "Hey, I really liked this," or something along those lines.

Heck, I've done it myself: I stopped posting to Tolkien Fan Fiction because I received one lonely comment there. Granted--it was a pretty awesome comment! It was how I met pandemonium_213! But it became clear to me very quickly that my work wasn't to the liking of most of the readers there, so I stopped wasting my time. Even today, I post last to MPTT, even though I'm a mod on that site and support their existence, because I get little to no feedback. It takes a lot of effort to prepare a story for posting, as I'm sure you know, and if I'm not going to be rewarded for making the effort, I'll do something else with my time.

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I personally noticed a lack of feedback on my work in recent years--lack of readers, in fact. That is not necessarily the fault of the people who are not reading and reviewing. Perhaps, I bucked the trends and newer directions and paid. I really disliked The Hobbit movies, for example. No inspiration there. Sometimes that can happen. One is just out of fashion or out of step. I have started writing more again recently and been getting some feedback. I'm grateful for that.

I have always noticed in general that writers leave more feedback than readers-only. Maybe the readers-only feel like a wall exists they cannot cross or that is scary to cross. Fanfic writers know there is none. Maybe fandom readers feel like an audience while fandom writers feel like a community?

I do, however, get a LOT more non-writer comments and reactions (kudos) on AO3 than anywhere I have ever posted. If I get a comment from a stranger I usually check to see what they write--if they like my writing, I probably might like theirs and, on AO3, they very often not writing.

Sometimes I get so neurotic about lack of feedback, that I feel like the readers who cannot be moved to even click the kudo button are not just passive but passive aggressive. It's not like my story did not move them, but that they hated it and hate me. Don't they know how little it takes to make a writer happy?

On writers not commenting--I have personally known literally a couple in our fandom, who do not thank reviewers and never comment. They often are the ones who cry the loudest if they feel they don't received enough comments or the comments are not thoughtful or encouraging enough!

I feel guilty because the length and depth of many of my comments do not match the story. I maybe able to comment in depth on one and then read another and barely have time or energy to make a minimum acknowledgement. I can go from chatty to terse based not upon which story is most deserving, but what's happening around me in my house at the moment! Also, I may find a story very beautifully done, to have all the elements that make it a compelling read, but focused on a genre or style which just not what I feel comfortable talking about ATM. There are parts of canon that don't move me also.

Sometimes I just cannot comment without a disclaimer, so I say nothing.

Maybe most people never write a published author a note. Maybe big readers never thought of writing a note to an author and are carrying that over into fanfic.

[dawn_felagund]

Maybe the readers-only feel like a wall exists they cannot cross or that is scary to cross. Fanfic writers know there is none. Maybe fandom readers feel like an audience while fandom writers feel like a community?

I think you're right. It may be that readers-only think of authors as they think of published authors: as somehow inaccessible, held at arm's length from the "consumers" of their work. Of course, it's not that way ... and we also don't get royalties or advances or movie deals. :)

I do, however, get a LOT more non-writer comments and reactions (kudos) on AO3 than anywhere I have ever posted.

That's interesting. I've never checked mine.

Sometimes I get so neurotic about lack of feedback, that I feel like the readers who cannot be moved to even click the kudo button are not just passive but passive aggressive.

You know I have pretty passionate views on this. I originally had an impassioned conclusion to this post but slept on it and deleted it the next day; I'm trying to be more neutral on my data posts. (It feels wrong to use the data people so generously gave their time to provide to complain about the results!) But I don't think it's a lot to ask of a reader who consistently reads and enjoys an author's work or is particularly moved by a specific work to acknowledge that author in some way. Personally, I think it should be a comment unless there is a good reason for it to be a kudos only. Despite my hardass stance on this, I am sensitive to people who are clinically anxious, ESL, etc. But at the end of the day, that's not most people.

Kudos bother me in part because of the doubts they create. (In addition to the sense that I have that people who would have left a comment now feel a kudos is "good enough." If you liked my work, tell me you liked my work. If you think it was okay and not worth the thirty seconds to tap out five words on your phone ... fine, leave a kudos. But I'm not going to pretend that I take that as a huge compliment to my abilities as a writer. It tells me I did a passable job with the story, no more. I still spent hours/days/weeks on that story; if you liked it, I think it's worth thirty seconds of your time! It amazes me when I accidentally happen on posts where people are squeeing over my stories and yet have never bothered to tell me. I always feel I deserve to know first! :) People who had lots of clicks but few comments had all kinds of rationalizations for why: readers were shy or not comfortable with English or not registered with the site. When my "best" story (in terms of kudos) was award kudos 19% of the time, I wonder what's up with the other 81%. Was the story that bad?

Gods, the others must be atrocious.

As it is, I don't think this way and have confidence enough in my writing, but this isn't the case for everyone, and I've seen my share of people stop sharing Tolkienfic because their work was being read but otherwise ignored.

[engarian.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting breakdown. I admit that I usually do comment on most of what I read, but I also admit that events will lead to more. By that, I mean that I will leave feedback/reviews for almost everything I read/look at during events such as B2MeM or MEFA, but not 100% of the time for casual reading. If I am a participant in a group or event, I'll comment because I think it's a necessary part of give/take in events. It's nice to get comments, therefore I give them. Of course, there needs to also be a distinction between comments and critique. I comment, I do not critique someone's work, nor do I ask for that level of review for mine. In the MEFA, of course, there were levels of commentary that you could leave based on word count and I always made an attempt to review at the highest level when possible.

I'd be interested in another poll one of these days, breaking this aspect down farther with some of the questions you raised examined in greater detail. This was fascinating.

- Erulisse (one L)

[dawn_felagund]

I don't leave concrit in public either. I think readers have the right to, but unsolicited, I also have the right to ignore everything they say. :) (Whereas, in a beta relationship or when I ask for critical feedback, I feel it's only right to give strong consideration to the feedback offered; if I'm not making a good number of changes using that feedback, I probably shouldn't ask for that person's help again, as we're clearly not a good match.) I get concrit sometimes from readers on ff.net on stories that have been finished for the better part of a decade. I wonder sometimes if these readers think I will dust off a ten-year-old story and make those changes.

I have a lot more data on habits related to leaving feedback (including whether people think it's acceptable to leave public concrit; I'll make sure I address this one in my next post). I would like to run another survey in, say, 2020 (five years after this one), not only to see how the fandom has/has not changed but to address issues/questions that came to my attention once I began actually working with the data. Of course, I will have to have some kind of association with a university to make that happen. Since the research involves human subjects, it has to be approved by an Institutional Review Board, or else I can't use it in my scholarly work (which makes it interesting but, at that point, not worth the considerable effort that goes into preparing, running, and analyzing it).

[foxrafer.livejournal.com]

I don't have anything meaningful to add except to say "Yay I'm a unicorn!" : ) This was really interesting, though. I wonder if this survey had been done before Tumblr took over so much of fandom if the results would have been different.

[dawn_felagund]

I think it would have been; the survey was most widely promoted on Tumblr (due to the ease of reblogging) and not at all on older platforms (like ff.net). I also wish I had pre-Hobbit film/Tumblr data! :) The fandom I knew ten years ago was very different from what it is now, and I would love to be able to better quantify that comparison.

[(Anonymous)]

Your "how often" chart looks like people are answering with the inverse, as if their answers were chosen from "all the time", "1 out of 2", "1 out of 4", "1 out of 10", etc. That might be interesting to test.

[dawn_felagund]

Hi, Anonymous, I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by "answering with the inverse"? I do agree that responses tend to clump around percentages that correspond with simple fractions. The response field on the survey allowed for a free response (and some people were very specific! E.g., 12% or 58%. :) I think it's likely that people probably tend to think in those simpler numbers, i.e., "I review about half of what I read," so an answer of 50% rather than 60%. Or, "I leave kudos on about 3 out of 4 stories I read," so 75% (where there are also more responses).

[starbrow.livejournal.com]

I'm not really in the unicorn category -- if I finish reading a story and found any value in it, I will kudos it, but my rate of commenting is more along the lines of maybe 40-50% of the stories I read. I am more likely to comment on friends' stories, femslash, or my favourite ships, though I do feel quite guilty about this, and would really like to comment more. I read extremely fast, and it takes much longer (and much more brainwork) for me to compose a comment most of the time than it does to read the actual story!

I sometimes set myself challenges in terms of comments -- last year for Innumerable Stars (http://innumerable-stars.dreamwidth.org) I challenged myself and the rest of the participants to comment on every story in the exchange, and two others joined me in completing the challenge. This month I'm challenging myself to comment on every B2MEM post, and I'm way behind!

I feel a strong social pressure to leave 'good' comments with lots of content and squee, and have at times (especially for exchange fics, where someone has written a story all for meeeeee) spent as much or more time composing a comment as I've spent writing a fic. It can take up to a good hour to write an excellent comment, the kind that gets you mentioned on FFA as a really good commenter. :D

But sometimes I'm just not up to that -- my B2MEM comments have been a lot briefer on the whole, but that certainly doesn't mean I liked the stories on the whole any less! It helps that I'm quite easy to please, and deliberately going out there and looking for the positive value in the story, so unless the story has something in it I find really negative (like character bashing), I can always find something to like about it.

My comment strategy is basically: a) always positive, critique is for betaing, b) always encouraging and upbeat, c) based on my emotional response to the story itself, d) if a longer comment, quote, response, quote, response, quote, response, authors love that! e) sometimes a keyboard smash is more eloquent than a dozen lines of commentary. :D

Now, what I am terrible at is responding to comments. *hides face* So bad at it. I love getting the comments, but all my wit deserts me when I try to reply.

[dawn_felagund]

Part of my being a unicorn is helped by two things: 1) I don't read much, not because I don't want/like to read Silmfic but because I rarely have time after my admin duties and 2) I have A LOT of experience responding to fiction. I once estimated, based on work in and out of fandom, that I've done around 2,000 "beta" reads of stories since I was in university. And now I teach English so I'm used to having to crank out replies to twenty essays in a night or to hone in on what a writer's strengths are, or her weaknesses. (Even though I don't leave public concrit.)

I can also almost always find something to like about a story--I'm not a picky reader!--and focus on that positive. I'm happy to give concrit but would rather a read contact me privately and for that exchange to happen not on a public archive.

I'm also really bad at replying to comments! I can usually keep up in the first days after a story/essay is posted, but feedback that trickles in after always seems to catch me at a moment when I feel like I don't have the few minutes needed to spare. Which you know personally, since I still owe you replies to your comments on the Tolkien Fanfic Survey posts I made last summer ... *hides* I really do need to work on this.

[fernstrike]

Really interesting, Dawn! I don't really have much more to add that hasn't already been said, except perhaps only my personal thoughts.

I always feel really bad about not leaving comments, but for me, it's because I have so little time to read fics, and when I do read them, I savour them, and when I savour them, I want to leave a comment telling the author exactly how good their story was. Something enriching and lovely, articulating the emotional response, putting quotes if something really jumped out to me. I want to make sure I understand their story, and if my understanding of it was perhaps variant, to explain why. Perhaps that's my own fault, setting such a high bar, but it's because the authors deserve it! I too believe that commenting is separate from critique, and because of that, I want to make sure I draw out all the positives and the things that made me squee or point at the screen with my mouth gaping or throw my hands up and cheer.

Which is perhaps counter-intuitive, because as an author I much prefer, out of any response, those short "I loved it!" or "Well done!" comments from readers than those nebulous kudos. I appreciate the concept of kudos, because I understand lacking time to write a fulfilling comment but wanting to show appreciation for a work you enjoyed. Yet at the same time, I can't help but be disappointed by it, because as a writer I know how much just a couple of words mean in encouragement. This reader/writer/commenter/kudos-giver dynamic is a double edged sword and it's so tricky to balance on that edge!

Also, like others have said, there's only so far you can go with the psychology of "I'm writing for me". It may be so - it usually is, and deeply so - but with the effort required to prepare a story for posting, the lack of a noticeable response makes one question the relevance of that effort anymore. Any time I've taken a hiatus from writing fic, it's usually been because of a lackluster or lukewarm response to the fics. I know that it took forever to get back into the fic writing because of a lack of comments or a lack of positive comments (I got guilted once for not updating a fic and it drove me away from the fandom for nearly a year).

[dawn_felagund]

I understand the pressure of wanting to be an awesome commenter! I'm pretty good at writing comments thanks to LOTS of practice: years in writers' workshops, courses in university, a couple fiction editor posts, and of course, beta-reads in fandom. (I once estimated and figured that I've critiqued around 2,000 stories!) And now I teach English, so my job, in a lot of ways, is pulling out a writer's strengths and saying what works in a story. (Also weaknesses, in my work, but I don't feel like that belongs in a public comment.) Despite this, I sometimes wish I could say more or articulate better, particularly when reading authors who always have insightful comments on my own stories. (And who I now know, thanks to this thread, really do spend a lot of thinking about those comments.)

I will admit that the commenting issue is one I tend to be passionate about (which is probably really evident in these comments. >.>) I know the positive difference comments made for me as a young writer when I first started writing fanfic. I had stopped writing for more than a year, and the positive encouragement I received here helped slowly heal and rebuild my confidence. It's also, as an admin, seeing people stop writing (or posting) because of a lack of comments when they see their work is being read. I am sometimes hyper-conscious, now that there are no more Tolkien books to make into films, that our fandom communities will now be sustained by becoming places people want to be, despite more energetic, new fandoms. Knowing that a story will generate nice remarks from a proportion of people who read it and that friendships will sometimes grow out of author-reviewer interactions seems one way to make staying here worth people's while.