Hi, kinda old fic writer here (started posting 4 years ago). My fics barely get comments or subscriptions and after four years the average kudos counts is 37… That is the main reason I sometimes don’t continue a fic because I feel like it is shit / nobody wants to read it anyway. I try to motivate myself to keep writing, but it is very discouraging. Especially when some of the comments I get are just “you made a mistake in this sentence”. I feel like I am whining when I tell anyone this though

not-poignant:

It’s tough for sure, and sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason why some fics are more popular than others, it often comes down to the oddest things – too many tags or not enough tags, minor formatting or just being in a particular fandom or even just skating under the radar for some reason, it’s definitely not an easy thing to do.

I know for myself, in the end, I wrote stories for me. I still have stories on my computer that I’ve never posted because I wrote them for me. But it gave me a chance to practice writing and to see if I could do what other people were doing (i.e. not writing their stories, but following the formatting / tag systems etc. that other people were using). Even then, the first stories I posted when I sort of ‘returned’ didn’t do very well. It didn’t matter as much at that point though, because I really just…wrote them for my enjoyment.

But that doesn’t stop it hurting when something gets little or no notice.

That being said, something a friend said helped put things in perspective for me recently, which is something along the lines of this (paraphrased for your situation):

You wrote something that made on average, 37 people happy. If you imagine all of those individual people – more than can fit in most people’s houses, more than you’re probably comfortable seeing in a single day – with their individual lives and loves, all of those people got something meaningful out of your fic. That’s not nothing. There are people out there who get an average of 4 kudos per fic who would kill to have your average, for them, that’s nearly ten times as many kudos that they’re fighting for. Likewise, you probably see other averages, and feel the same way.

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