Wattpad and publishing

This week I got a lovely review on Wattpad for ‘I’ll be Home for Christmas’.

[Thank god, I mean 10,400 reads and only two reviews… don’t get me started on Wattpad.]

But in any case, this is what they said.

And this confused me.

It’s not my story. It’s fanfiction. This is as published as it will get. The characters belong to Stephenie Meyer while the story - beyond the canon of the books - is mine.

Did they not know they were reading fanfiction? It’s clearly marked as such. The cast is listed as the people who played the characters in the movies, with some extra additions of my own.

Do they not understand that fanfiction cannot be published when the original work is within copyright? Not without pulling the names and changing everything. I write too close to canon to do this. And I feel it’s wrong, in any case. [I’m looking at you 50 shades]

I don’t know what they were thinking and I didn’t ask. I just reminded them it was fanfiction and thanked them for taking the time to review.

I can always write my own original stories. Assuming I can finally get around to getting them published. Still got no idea why that is more of an issue for my original stuff than it is for my fanfic.

Sighs…

Wattpad

I haven’t been in Wattpad for a while so it was a pleasant surprise to log in and see that ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ had passed 6k reads. Nice… and it had amassed 452 gold stars. Woot woot.

Well done, Josh.

The next most popular? It’s my Paul one shot ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’… of course it is.

Links: wattpad

Quiet achiever

I said back in the first week of October that my story ‘I'll be home for Christmas’ has ever so quietly crept up the statistics table.

Its still doing that, but what I hadn't noticed was how well it is doing on Wattpad. It just passed 1,000 reads. For contrast, on Ao3 it is just over 400 hits and on FictionPad it has 105 hits with 23 followers. With 74 chapters, it doesn't take too many reads to push up the stats, if someone finishes the story. So I find it rather intriguing that the math just doesn't add up. Unless people are following it with the intention of maybe reading it one day? With those numbers one or two people have actually read it all the way through. *shrugs* I don’t know.

I kind of skim read it myself this week. A reader was reviewing every chapter (bless them) and I had to read it to remind myself what happened so that I could reply. They said they were a Cullen fan and hadn't read much wolf fic before. For some reason this story gets a few comments like that. They expressed surprise that I only  had 3,700 reviews… no, really, I told them, that’s huge for a wolf fic.

I just did a quick search on FFN - it has fixed up the search tags a bit more - and found that for a Paul/Bella pairing the story with the most reviews has 3292 and is of course, Apologies… written by ME! bwahaha

When I change that to Edward/Bella the story with the largest number of reviews has just under 25,000.

Sigh. Wolf writers always were swimming against the tide.

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Read the story here at fanfiction, here at fictionPad, here on A03 or here on Wattpad.

Hurt passes a milestone

*banner made by goldengirl2707

I get a special sense of wonder from stats. Weird, I know. But with people reviewing less and less, the only sign I have that people are reading my fanfiction is the stats that fanfiction.net provides. A lot of my stats are re-reads and they can’t review a second time.

There is a ‘legacy’ button that gives you a table of all your hits, how many reviews, words, communities etc. for each story posted. At the moment, my legacy table looks like this.

I was refreshing like a newbie to watch Hurt pass the half million mark.

Hurt was my super angsty story (I made myself sob)  of Sam and Bella based on the song by the Nine Inch Nails. The cover by Johnny Cash is in my short list of cover songs better than the original.

Their love is complicated by the fact that Sam is with his imprint, Emily, but she treats him very badly; sure that she will never lose him. And Bella is lost and hunted by vampires and struggling with her own emotions. It always struck me as odd in the books that, way before Bella worked out that Jake was a wolf, her life was pretty heavily impacted by Sam. He found her when she was lost in the forest after chasing Edward and his actions saved her again in the meadow. She dreamed of him. And Bella’s dreams always meant something.

blahblahblahinfinity keeps begging me to write the AU of my own fanfic in which Bella and Paul stay together. She swears she has scars from me breaking them up. Sniffs… I know, honey, I know. I sobbed when I wrote it and I still cry whenever I read that chapter.

Another story ‘I’ll be home forChristmas’ has ever so quietly crept up the statistics table. It now pulls the same number of daily hits as Closer to God. An amazing feat given that it is a crazy premise (I made the older generation phase) and a very unusual pairing. It has also crept up to sixth place in my top ten for legacy hits. I am very proud of Josh and Izzy as well.

And my total hits are over seven million.

Whoa…

Pats self on back.

Fanfic-n-tastic awards

I’ll be home for Christmas won second prize in the best Wolf Pack Story category of the 2014 fanfic-n-tastic awards.

Congratulations to all the winners! Check the winners’ list here.

Thank you to everyone who voted for me!

twifanfiction recs for the month of December

‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ has been nominated in the twifanfiction recs for the month of December. There are seriously 46 stories and 45 of them are Bella/vampire. Bwahaha. Oh, my god… I love it! They have listed him as an original character - maybe they don’t know he’s a wolf and is Sam’s dad? I am squeeing.

http://twifanfictionrecs.com/top-10-poll-whos-who/

Home for Christmas is finished

I wrote a blog post back in June 2013 about how I was going to finish working on this story. And that I would try hard NOT to write 200k words. [*banner by goldengirl]

Yeah, right…

Oopsies.

It ended up 187,764 words which isn’t 200k – just.

And it has (at the time of writing) 3,425 reviews which is HUGE for such a rare pairing. I just cannot believe it. It has overtaken Apologies and is now my second biggest story in reviews but not for views. It is way behind on views.

To explain: fanfic counts each page visit as a ‘view’ and it counts each person as a ‘visitor’ within a 24 hour period. So if they click again the next day that would be two visits from them in the month. So, on a normal day, I get 6-7k hits and about a thousand visitors. That means each person reads 7 or 8 pages. Which is good. It means that they stay or that they read a whole story while another visitor is reading the latest chapter only.

So if each person reviewed every page that they read, my ratio would be 100%. It isn’t. It’s closer to less than 1%. For Apologies for instance, it is 0.2%, but for Josh it is almost 2%. Big difference.

Josh seemed to get readers who loved it enough to review; more so than other stories. The ratio of views to reviews is much higher. Not sure why that is. Maybe it attracted the more loyal readers of mine? The ones who were willing to experiment with such a rare pairing.

Previously when I have finished a story there is a massive spike in hits as people who waited to read the completed story, read it and others may go back and reread their favourite parts. That didn’t happen with Josh either. Well a little bit, but after one story I hit 28k hits in one day. That might have been Apologies, I forget.

And the reviews are very different. They keep telling me that it is the best fanfic they have ever read. I often get ‘great story’ comments I don’t get ‘best story’.

I am not sure why that is, maybe I made them cry? I killed characters that they cared about, and that leaves an emotional shadow. A resonance that sticks with them.

I’ll be home for Christmas

I was listening to Neil Gaiman talk the other day - I could listen to that man talk for hours… ahem, but I digress. He was laughing that the first time he sent in a manuscript to a publisher he had a belief that the next morning there would be a long black limousine parked outside his house, and that they would offer him champagne and a beautiful contract and everything would be fine.

I finished an original project and sent it in to a publisher. And, like Neil I was waiting for the limousine. Well, for something to happen. I have pushed my wordy baby out of the nest and it is scary and terrifying. What if they hate it? What if they love it? What if they never even reply? All the options are frightening.

I have retreated to the safety of fanfic. I can hear the thunder of my best friend’s feet as she runs over here to smack me upside the head. She grouses at me that I need to drop fanfic but she doesn't understand. I love it. It’s safe and comforting. So I am rolling in my favourite scent spot like a shape changing wolf *Giggle* and finishing a story that I did a pile of work on - ‘I'll be home for Christmas’. It got pushed out of the way by my last fanfic brainwave. My muse is aggressive.

Yes, it is an extension of another one shot. I know right? When have I done that before? Lmao. In any case it was the kind of one shot that got reviews like these:

·       From ShadowPast620: "It was Sam Uley. Karma was really kicking her butt today." OMG.  It's The Sixth Sense and I just realized Bruce Willis is dead.  Totally, utterly, freakin' gobsmacked.  (falls to her knees and kow tows)  I'm not worthy.  Fucking brilliant.  Thank you.

·       From niamhg: have you ever seen a small terrier dog with a rat - grabs hold of it and shakes and shakes and doesn't let go.....well I imagine us readers being the dog and let's guess who the poor rat is (maybe the person who wrote this os hehe) and we won't let go until we get more!!! This was just too good to stop there !!! sorry but you dug this hole yourself -laughs!!!!

People asked - a LOT- when it was going to be extended. I had sketched out some ideas and written nearly 35k words on it before it got pushed away, so it was time to finish it. I will try really hard not to write 200k words - AGAIN. Because I do have a huge pile of other things to write. But oddly, I find when I write fanfic that I write a whole lot of other things as well. It’s like the floodgates open.

The one shot is still posted on fanfic here and the story extension is on JBNP here. I don’t like to post things on fanfic until they are complete, and JBNP is a little more flexible for me. The banner was made by goldengirl2707 completely unexpectedly and it is perfect.