How was your first experience with publishing here?

I would like to hear from you how was your first experience with sharing your writing. Did anyone react? How did it make you feel?
And also if you have readers, with whom you have at least some communication, how did you find your crowd?

I am new here. I've been writing for many years just for fun, because I enjoy the process.
But I have never tried to show my writing to anyone before. Creative fiction writing that is, as in short stories or novels.
I've participated in some written RPGs back in the day. And I write technical documentation professionally, stuff like user manual and helps for software. Those are read by unfortunate users who got stuck all the time and i get feedback, but usually it's about some instructions being missing or outdated, so rarely favourable and it it is what it is, which is technical, fulfilling a function, delivering information in the clearest way possible, which is a writing skill, but a rather specific one.

Recently I decided to try and show some of my creative writing here. I guess, I was hoping someone might find interesting something that I enjoyed writing.
I chose Scribble Hub because that what search revealed. I haven't been on any similar resources before. So have no idea how things work.
But idk, it feels like people have better things to do than read me scribbles Which is fair, even if a bit disappointing. I totally get it that there might be simply too much stuff to ever get noticed, and that it probably takes a lot of time to get discovered, and besides there's a wild assortment of different interests and preferences. People might honestly have zero interest. But I am just curious how it is for others here.

Consistent updates is how things get noticed, really. There are ways to fine tune that, or to cheese algorithms, or manipulate readers, and some of those are less ethically questionable than others, but all of it starts with consistency.

If your writing is consistently enjoyable to read, and you put it out on a schedule, readers will find you.

As a forex, readers have found the Diary (my daily Isekai Ecchi Romance Insanity) and some have commented. Heck, over on RR one reader has started up a Diary Fanfic (an absolute crack-fic in all the best ways) that just broke a million words recently.

None of that was my first publishing experience, but it has been my most successful, and it has been awesome to hear people enjoying what I've written, engaging with it and with each other.

KennyCelican said:

Consistent updates is how things get noticed, really. There are ways to fine tune that, or to cheese algorithms, or manipulate readers, and some of those are less ethically questionable than others, but all of it starts with consistency.

If your writing is consistently enjoyable to read, and you put it out on a schedule, readers will find you.

As a forex, readers have found the Diary (my daily Isekai Ecchi Romance Insanity) and some have commented. Heck, over on RR one reader has started up a Diary Fanfic (an absolute crack-fic in all the best ways) that just broke a million words recently.

None of that was my first publishing experience, but it has been my most successful, and it has been awesome to hear people enjoying what I've written, engaging with it and with each other.

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Thank you for your answer. This sounds awesome! Like I said, never published anything just for fun before.
Professionally, I'm used to getting feedback as we do pier editing a lot. But that's very different. It's just something I do for money and that's it. My grammar might get criticised or occasionally someone gets a good laugh because of a typo. Like I actually wrote "lick the [...] button" instead of "click" once.

But here it feels SO weird waiting what people might say whenever I publish a new chapter.
I published 8 chapters and got two comments so far And I'm oscillating between "what do I even care" and "oh, wow, someone actually read this!" That's super funny. Thus I got curious how does it feel for others here.

my case would be atypical.
I insist on writing as if creating a paperback I would have read growing up.
that's how I want it to read, that's what I aim for.
it *really* doesn't fly well overall in WebNovel land.

your writing might be more to market tastes.

but welcome.
the natives, emerge to greet you.

I entered expecting maybe a page view or two as a debut (mostly from friends wanting to support) and was pleasantly surprised. I'm just starting out myself and have been more used to Ao3's way of doing things, so it's a bit of a learning curve, but so far so good! I think, just like with any kind of writing, the first couple of things you do aren't going to be 'wildly successful', but it's still good experience. Just like with working out, the first couple of months is building skills and finding out what works.

One thing I have noticed here, is the cover has to be eye-catching as a thumbnail; it and your book title should summarize your book to the best of your ability. I've heard consistent updates also help, so here in a few weeks, hopefully things keep going up :3

Awful, amateurish. I deleted it and began working harder

FreeKey said:

I was hoping someone might find interesting something that I enjoyed writing.

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Eh, not bad.
Although you wont get many reaction from the readers on this site tho. Most of them are shy creatures.

Don't remember which one I posted first or which one second. One of my first two (Strange Awakening) went very well (even spent part of a day on Trending), the other pretty mediocre.

I like the SH experience. Was sticking to Amazon exclusively for a bit, but, go figure it never paid. Then I had revelation years later.
At any moment, I could get hit by truck or mauled by a Russian Centaur. And then, with no marketing, and books pay-walled at the beginning, they may never be known or read.

Pushing them here for free made sense to me for the reason of retention, and thus, putting that optional pay wall (asking for donations if liked story) at the end. That said, I wish I had not started with Wattpad

I'm new here too. This place is pretty good, even though there isn't much interaction in the story (yet), the views are still going up nicely (which is better than nothing).
The Statistics section is really useful I guess.

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OmegaC said:

I'm new here too. This place is pretty good, even though there isn't much interaction in the story (yet), the views are still going up nicely (which is better than nothing).
The Statistics section is really useful I guess.

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Your forum experience was better than the main site.
Admit it.

Madkins said:

Your forum experience was better than the main site.
Admit it.

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Of course lol, I wasn't even hiding it, let alone having to "admit" it.

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I've got back to writing a gender-bender TG/TF story after about a decade off. I was used to publishing on sites like Fictionmania, TGStorytime etc and getting engagement and several comments per chapter. Here it feels a bit like throwing the story into an abyss, but I think my numbers are fairly good given I just got started. I did receive some nice comments on here recently and it made me squee a bit.

I used to be a huge reader of pretty much anything I could get my hands on up until high school. But I only ever bothered to consume rather than write anything. only recently (past few years) have I even considered drafting little ideas that I maybe possibly wanted to turn into something. Gaining readers is a plus, but just the opportunity to put finger to keyboard is all I ask for. I'm in college now (insert meta joke about being busy and pulling my hair out) and with certain developments in life I finally decided to do something about it. You can fill up a doc with a hundred pages of random ideas, but you'll never see those exact ideas out in the open until you send them out there yourself. I settled on scribblehub because its just niche enough to be low-key, yet big enough to have a real community should one choose to engage. Plus. it's a better way to organize my work than some private corner of the internet where it'd never see the light of day. The only way i'd ever xpost is if I polish my story up in 5 years and it does numbers - one can dream.

OmegaC said:

I'm new here too. This place is pretty good, even though there isn't much interaction in the story (yet), the views are still going up nicely (which is better than nothing).
The Statistics section is really useful I guess.

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Sadly, we are in 2026 not anymore 2015.

Now internet is toxic.
ESPECIALLY HORRIBLY toxic after tiktok. (starting from socials like Facebook/Twitter/etc or games like LoL, but zoomers and tiktok quadrupled it)

Try looking at early/old series, and you will see comments everywhere. Even in chapter1.
Edit : Even danbooru was wholesome and lot of comments early on. (2000ish)(MMO era)

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Also, dont give up.
Like i explained 200x, readers (even me) like to read series when they got 50+ chapters.

Because tired of authors dropping it or axing it or MIA.
Not just west, but even eastern readers (chineses) and co, prefer to wait. Because majority readers are now vet readers that have seen hundreds series, and ton of favorite series dropped. So people are tired of disappointment so they wait to make sure they wont suffer the same pain again. (just like an immortal is tired of seeing wife die young, so they now at least prefer a wife with good health that like for 100years).