Have I ever mentioned I'm a math nerd? [Update Blog Kinda]

Every so often I like to make graphs out of my Ao3 stats because sometimes the results surprise me. So here are a bunch of them using my stats as of November 10th 2019! I'll throw some random notes/analyses about them in here too. 

──────

Here's a nice simple one to start with:

So across 79 of my fics, I've averaged around 700 Kudos, and around 6000 hits - not bad! However, this is actually super skewed because it includes all Fandoms, and people really only started reading my fics for the BNHA stuff. So let's try these totals again with BNHA fics only...

Over 800 Kudos per fic, and over 7000 hits - If only every fic genuinely got those numbers! So what's the most "average" fic that I have?

Sadly there isn't one that conforms to both hits and Kudos - I was really hoping there would miraculously be one that was near-perfect just because it would be funny, but sadly there is not. 

Interestingly, these are both fics which are fairly high in the highest-kudos/highest-hits count, because of a few much higher-rated fics which bring the averages up.

Green-Eyed Monster = 22/79 ; A Mile In Your Shoes = 18/64
Love Drunk = 26/79 ; Tall Order = 18/64

So that goes to show how much of a discrepancy there is in the top and bottom stats!

Now on to the fun bit: Graphs! These are all BNHA only unless specified otherwise.

As you can see, these graphs were ordered by Kudos, and yet the spikes of the hits go up and down all over the place. Of course these are all different lengths of fics and published at different times, so let's take a look at the next one...

This one is a little biased in that I only have 2 fics of 40+ chapters, and I have none between 15 and 40 chapters. The huge spike in theory should come from people returning for new chapters, but Ao3 doesn't actually register hits this way: Clicking from an email to a new chapter doesn't register as a new hit. However, they are also two of my oldest fics, so I suspect there are a lot of re-reads in here.

The next one may face a similar bias, but in a different direction...

This one was weirdly interesting to me, because I always thought the E-Rated fics got the most love. I only have 2 G-Rated fics, so the fact that it's fairly average on Kudos is interesting. Even weirder is the M-Rated, of which I have 6 (still not many compared to 27 E and 29 T but more than 2) which have apparently averaged super high. Second Chance plays a huge role in this at 3k Kudos, plus Deku-SHaped Hole and Tall Order in the 800s, but Love Drunk is in the 600s and Listen Up A**hole is in the 500s. One of the others is my lowest-kudos'd BNHA fic at under 200 though so for it to still be the highest category is pretty interesting! Maybe I need to write more M-rated fics?

Here's the extended version of Hits vs Kudos for every fic by their rating:

Now here's my favourite set, and this one includes non-BNHA fandoms:

Despite being on a very different scale, these have a super similar shape which is really neat? I'm blaming 2018 >2019 on the fact that A) the year isn't over yet and B) I've published about double the fics this year, so there were probably few bad ones dragging the numbers down.

And finally, here are the big ones - the titles won't be readable on most of these, but this is every fic I've ever published on Ao3. I like to call this set "stop telling me I don't understand what it's like for a fic to not get much attention"

I was super lucky that my first BNHA fic got a lot of attention on Ao3 - mostly because it was 45 chapters and I was posting daily, so it was constantly at the top of the recent works list - and because of that I got a pretty good headstart on attention for future BNHA fics. In fact, honestly, it was the only reason I wrote so many of them. 

My first fic was in 2016 and it was only mid-2018 that I posted that fic that got attention, so I certainly know what it's like to post fics that get under 100 kudos. Even now, the majority of my fics get 300 or fewer, so it's incredibly frustrating when people tell me I don't "understand" what it's like to not have an audience - you'd be surprised how often people say it to me, and that was kind of how I started making these graphs - to prove a point. 

I have three fics out of seventy-nine which skew my results in different ways - two 40+ chapter fics with a lot of views, and a random oneshot of 5k words that somehow got over 4k kudos. You can see these fics in the spikes in the last set of graphs, and you can see pretty clearly that without those three it would be a much more sensible and much lower line. 

So for anyone who made it this far (welcome, fellow math/statistics nerds), if you take one thing away from it, let it be this: Write more fics. If you find yourself thinking "oh man I thought/hoped this would get more attention" - write more. When you stumble on that one fic that people fall in love with, it will lead them back to your old work too, and you will find yourself with an ever-growing community of readers. As long as you keep writing for them.

This applies to other content creators, too - artists, musicians, whatever. Just keep producing things that you enjoy, and other people wll enjoy them too. You just need to give them a chance to see it.