dragonlady7

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i got like six new followers today and like a dozen over the previous week and i was like oh hm bots? but I just went to look and see if I had to block anybody and… you’re… all… apparently, people?? uh hi but whence and also, like, wherefore, this is kind of an odd choice y’all.

I’m not the kind of person who usually notices my follower count but it was a lot of new follower notifications. Hi! Welcome, I don’t mean my suspicion to be off-putting.

Oh, relatedly– people have done some fun end-of-year memes about their fic, and it got me to go look at my stats. I was sort of cringingly wondering if my coping mechanism this year being a whole shitload of Witcher fanfic would mean I’d have this insane wordcount, but it turns out as of now, 2020 is in fourth place in terms of wordcount posted to AO3, after 2016, 2014, and 2015, in that order.

But then I looked at some of the other statistics. Hits, comment threads, kudos.

I’m not a mathematician so the extent of my analysis is that ostensibly all the numbers should go up or down together, right? Listen I have dyscalculia bad enough that I’m not even sure when a number is larger than another number so when I say I have not analyzed these, I am not kidding. But. I have a thesis, here. And some of it is likely due to the pandemic, people are reading more fanfic but are also engaging with it more, is my thesis? IDK.

Here are the raw numbers and my conclusions, but tl;dr all y’all Witcher pandemic buddies have been wonderful generous readers and I love you all, and if I get my ass in gear I can probably make my 2020 totals move up this leaderboard, it’s kind of a close race in wordcount anyway.

In 2016 I published 411,584 words of fanfic to AO3. That’s a lot; it includes all of Home Out In The Wind https://archiveofourown.org/series/468505, and all my Star Wars stuff, back when TFA had just come out and we were all afire with possibility. (Oh yeah and Found Cat https://archiveofourown.org/works/8310697, that one was cute.) Yeah, the first ten months of that year were pretty great. But there’s SG:A and MCU stuff too that year, I was busy. I got 79,581 hits that year, on all my works. Total kudos 5,955. Total comment threads on all works 1,416.

Next up, statistically, is 2014. That’s the year I whiplashed from SG:A to MCU. Why? Winter Soldier was a good movie and it suckered me in. I know. I read Hawkeye too. It was a weird time. I published 381,701 words to AO3 that year. I got the most hits I’ve ever had in a single year, I think because one of my SG:A stories got recced in a non-Tumblr rec community I don’t know anything about; it remains my highest-hits work ever. So, 158,501 hits. But, I think the readers on that comm weren’t big AO3 people; most didn’t comment and not many left kudos. (Maybe because the series is unfinished? People got mad and dipped? IDK. I’m not linking to it, for that reason.) So total kudos 8,160, and total comment threads 994.

Third, statistically, is 2015. I hit my stride in MCU and put out a bunch of stuff that, for me, was pretty popular. I published 372,819 words of fic that year on AO3, and I had 108,608 hits on it. Readers left 6,695 kudos, and started 979 comment threads.

This shows kind of a funny trend in hits and kudos and things, doesn’t it, if you put those years in chronological order? You’d think like, I was growing an audience or something, but. None of those things trend any direction, really. I think there are too many variables to really know what’s going on. Maybe that’s the weirdest thing about Internet “fame”– I have no context, I don’t know what’s a lot, I can’t tell what’s a normal amount of engagement.

(I do know that these are insane wordcounts, by most standards, and if you are a fellow-writer reading this, please do not let this make you feel bad or something, writing fanfic is what I do instead of having any kind of life or like, a TV or other hobbies, so. My low published stats for 2017 and 2018 and 2019 are indicative of my actually having done some things not on the computer in those years, though in some cases the things not on the computer weren’t actually good things either.)

So, now, 2020. Here on the 20th of December, my stats stand at: 364,063 words published. All of these are Witcher stories https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639717. Total hits: 106,026. These stats are in line with previous years. But here’s where 2020 stands out: Kudos are 13,060, and comment threads: 2,640.

Y’all, that’s what’s getting me through. Thanks for taking this ride with me.

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