When did your story start to pick up an audience?

[HisDivineShadow]

For Strange Awakening, it happened around chapter 11 for some odd reason.
For my two stories on PocketFM, it happened when my mom made a Facebook post about them.
That's pretty much it...

Your mom is very supportive of you in this. That’s nice.

 

[Kara_dija]

It seems that number varies by person, but it does generally float between 70 and 100 chapters.

Wow, my novel is only 25-27 chapters, am I doomed to have no viewers?

 

[Eldoria]

Wow, my novel is only 25-27 chapters, am I doomed to have no viewers?

You must understand that having a novel with great content (even a masterpiece) doesn't equate to having a market segment. Readers are simply looking for stories that suit their tastes. SH itself already has specific reader segments (if you research popular novels, you'll find the answer to the dominant reader segments on SH).

So if your novel doesn't suit your readers' tastes, then abandoned by the majority of readers are inevitable. You may have to create your own market share—yes, that's difficult but not impossible. Another option is to move to another platforms that have reader segments that align with your novel's theme.

 

[AstreiaNyx]

My first story, now deleted, took about 3 days to gain 300 readers. But I uploaded all 30 chaps at once and it had a cheat-code combo of GL + smut.

 

[Tyranomaster]

Ultimately, it's infinitely analyzable. The generalization I gave at the start was exactly that, a generalization. That is where I draw the line at you should consider dropping your own story at. We can make the analysis more deep by comparing all the different tags, or chapter length, or even cover art quality. There are a lot of factors that actually determine the exactness of what to expect.

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

I’ve seen a few posts now from people wondering how long it takes before your story starts to gain traction, so I thought I’d ask: if you have a reader base, no matter how small, how long did it take you to develop it?

Seriously, if the site's readers don't like your work, the tags, and/or the premise, it won't garner readers.

 

[TheBestofSome]

Pretty much right from the word go. It probably helped that it's fantasy, isekai, smut, all the popular tags. I uploaded ...I want to say ten chapters immediately, kept a consistent schedule for something like half a year of first two and then three chapters a week, and had a serviceable cover image. Admittedly, my synopsis was kind of rough (I'm still not sure how to write a good synopsis, but it's at least better than it was). And importantly, I already had a readerbase on CHYOA, at least a few of which popped over here and gave me an immediate boost, if a small one.

I'm not super popular, but I have a loyal readerbase, and at least a few of them will comment pretty much every chapter. I haven't specifically checked, but I estimate that I normally get about five hundred pageviews within a couple days of uploading a new chapter, and that's with a sporadic upload schedule. My latest chapters have pageviews ranging from seven hundred and fifty to around a thousand, and my earlier chapters are up to two or three thousand. Favorites are much lower, with most of my later chapters having between twenty and thirty, and the earlier ones having just under a hundred.

Note that when I say pageviews, I mean views on one chapter in specific, not on the story as a whole. That stat doesn't mean much of anything.

 

[Kara_dija]

Another option is to move to another platforms that have reader segments that align with your novel's theme.

Someone else told me the same thing. I'm working on the shortcomings of my novel, and also searching for other platforms. (⁠◕⁠ᴗ⁠◕⁠✿⁠)