Hey, all you need is just that one spicy chapter to add in the smut tag/sexual content warning and bam. If you got 1-2 readers per chapter release before, you suddenly get double or triple that.
Right now I have the 1-2 per chapter release, and I do like it.
Honestly, smut gets readers a lot faster, but you'll get readers with nearly everything that has at least some appealing tags/genres. It'll only take longer. I have no harem/gl/gb/smut or sexual content in the tags and ~660 readers in 75k words. Could have been more if not for muliple times of hiatus (before that I was trending multiple times without doing anything special) or if I could actually write better...
Just looking roughly over it there are around 700 smut stories with a word count of 75k or below. From those, 30 or so are clearly better and a handful is doing just as my story. My story, without any of those tags, and sadly probably more weeks in hiatus than being written. Would I just take those weeks and add the small growth I get with each chapter, the number of smut stories above mine would probably be 15-20. Which is probably true for most genre tags here.
It is true, that there are some stories with these genres that appear in the trending list all the time. Which in turn gives the impression that tags are a must have. But the truth is also, that the majority of stories with these tags don't blow up. 50k smut stories with <100 readers aren't that rare either.
There are a lot of authors writing gl/harem/smut and the like and in those big group of people there are those, who are successful. But constant good work will easily catch up to the "normal" early push a lot of the stories get. And in turn it would also be a bit unfair to say, that some of those really big stories are only there for their tags...
So just keep at it, try to experiment with things (maybe a make-over for your synopsis or first chapter (some readers dislike the boring "he woke up" beginning) or even a "I dropped stories before" author's note) and there might be a time you hit gold with a story...
This current story is an interesting side-project of mine. Most of my readers come from my first two novels, so they're more interested in my world-building.
Good tip about the first chapter though. That thought never crossed my mind. I have no problem retaining the readers that do stay, but new readers is a problem.
Synopsis - you have a decently written synopsis. Unfortunately, all these 3 paragraphs tell me is that your story is "isekai" "male protagonist" and from the sounds of it "author self insert" Neither of which are bad by themselves but they don't really tell me a lot past what the tags already telling me.
Thanks :) Though I'm not sure why people assume self-insert with a situation like that. Sure, the guy is from the city I spent most of my life in. But he's got very little in common with me. I chose that city just for it's familiarity. I'd make a horrible main character haha.
I write 2000 words (minimum) a day. This serves two purposes. First, I have an addiction to writing. If I'm not writing, I don't know what to do with my time. Second, I want my story to appear on the front page of ScribbleHub as often as possible. I've seen stories in a similar vein do well, so I think the main problem is the content of my stories, rather than the rate of production. But I'll put it to my readers, to try to get a sense.
I find that so weird. So it is better to update slowly? Like... What if the author already has the book finished and is just posting it? Hm... this gives me something to think about.~
I'm not sure I agree with this point of view. I feel like I started performing much better when I went to a regular upload schedule, once a day. Plus, it's a nice even number to work with, 5/week.
Indeed it does warrant some thinking about. But if I'm gonna have to reduce the amount of chapters uploaded per week, then I'm going to have to work on more than one story at a time. I can't do just 4k or 6k words a week. I'll go mad :(
