Does anyone have any particular tips or recommended methods or platforms for harvesting story feedback?

As someone said the other day, the variation between numbers of views and comments/ratings, whether on here or, say, Literotica, can be wild.

Possibly as people are reading cock or clit in hand of course, not inclined to leave an in depth literary review once they've had their immediate fun...

But still, I'd be interested in hearing more about what readers do/don't like in my work, which could in turn help them - for example, I'd happily bring back a character or format someone really liked if they requested it or I could see from the stats that one story was particularly popular.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Sadly, I think this kind of thing seems to be lost to time. I've been a writer of various kinds in a lot of different places, and I've seen comments on content disappear in most of them over the years. Many places I've worked used to get dozens, even hundreds of comments in the early 2000's, but now most similar sites don't even have a comments section.

If a WAM fiction subreddit ever got big enough, that'd be your best bet nowadays. I must admit I don't even visit the main subreddt since Keir decided we Brits aren't allowed to make our own decisions about internet usage.

I don't think any platform is particularly better or good for eliciting comments than any other. I suspect the best way to obtain feedback is to directly ask for it on forums like this, however you're more likely to receive comments from fellow writers than the silent majority of readers.


Views don't really say much about a story other than it's been looked it; they don't even prove a story has actually been read and certainly are no indication of quality. It's also worth noting that I've seen a massive increase in views of my content on sites like DeviantArt recently which I suspect is down to bot activity rather than real people reading the stories.

Ratings are slightly better but again are very subjective. A highly rated story may be because its well written or it may be because the subject matter aligns better with the readers particularly taste or kink. Also how do you interpret the score, is a score of 5 stars from 4 readers better or worse than an average score of 4 star from 10 readers?

SEO babyyyyyyyyyy, don't ya just love it? You're right, though, even the view count is useless without context. For example, my most viewed story on Literotica is called Under The Table. It has about 25% more views than any of my other stuff, but has about the same number of comments as less-viewed stories (four, lol). It has more total likes, but still at roughly the same ratio in relation to views.

But... it mentions feet in the description. Now I can't know for sure that's the reason for its success, but the actual content of the story is similar to my other WAM stuff. I don't think this one story is especially better than my other stuff either.

All of that to say, even my "breakout hit" (lol) still got a measly four comments. Only one of them was longer than a single sentence. On the bright side, they are all positive. I wouldn't call them useful, though.

Yeah, this sounds right to me as well. Which... is anyone here ready to ask for feedback on something they're currently writing? Or do people have some specific older work of theirs that they would like us to comment on?

In theory, that's something we can do for each other - at least, as long as people take the initiative to ask and are willing to live with whatever responses they get.

I would love feedback on my current story/series. My previous stuff is mostly just personal experiences or other stuff that doesn't really need feedback since I'm unlikely to go back and edit them, but my Kori and Beth series is ongoing and I'd like to improve it as I go.

https://umd.net/stories/i/kori-and-beth-part-1--third-times-the-ch/

https://umd.net/stories/i/kori-and-beth-part-2--the-shower/

Thank you for stepping up!

If people want to give you feedback, should they post here? On the stories? Would you prefer a private message?

Cheers All. They're helpful, thought-provoking answers.

The thought they trigger is that what I'm personally after from feedback isn't praise or high engagement stats (nice as they are), but an unexpected steer for what next - so like writing to a story prompt, or the excellent idea in another thread of writing by random chance, but customised to my own work.

Thank you, that's genuinely helpful for how to approach such conversations in future, I wouldn't have got to that realisation on my own.

All of which of course is prefixed on the presumptious premise that anyone who reads our work gives a hoot anyway, but hey, let's be optimists

I always appreciate the feedback from people. It genuinely gives encouragement to write another story.

As others have mentioned should we have a specific thread here for comments both positive and negative, even though the majority of contributors will be fellow authors? It might encourage a short paragraph rather than a one line review.
Not sure how the large number of readers would contribute however.

If you purely rated successful stories on numbers that theoretically gives an indication of readers enjoyment. Certainly my figures seem higher when the word "revenge" appears in the title for example!
And 'female' or 'male/female' again give higher numbers on stories overall rather than 'male' which is probably unsurprising!!

Honestly, I'm not sure the number of views has anything at all to do with reader enjoyment. Titles and tags are like search engine optimization: if you use the keywords people are searching for, you'll get more views. A separate metric like "repeat views" that tracks how many times unique visitors accessed your story would be a far better assessment of readers' enjoyment. And as others have mentioned, loves aren't really a great metric either, as they're often given out just for the story matching the viewer's kink rather than for being a great story. For me personally, one comment with non-generic feedback, positive or negative, means more to me than all the views and loves combined.

Ideally, I'd like if we could get readers to give feedback, but being a fetish site, most readers couldn't care less about the technical aspects as long as it's readable. But maybe if we get the ball rolling with comments on each other's stories, readers might contribute too. Most people don't really want to be the first person to comment.


However they want.

I think there's a character limit on story comments? I don't remember, but I know there is a character limit for comments on images. So maybe shorter feedback can be on the story, and anything longer can be either here or in a PM?

If we want this to be a thing, maybe we could create threads for each writer looking for feedback? As long as we're not creating new threads for each individual story, this group shouldn't get too flooded.