Tyranomaster
Guy who writes stuff
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2022
- Messages
- 746
- Points
- 133
Lately, there has been an influx of people asking, "Would you be interested in reading this?" or "How interesting is my story idea?"
Not only is this a plague upon the forums, but it's bad for those who ask the question for multiple reasons, which I will enumerate now:
1. Forums, even reader sections of the forums, are not representative of actual available readers. Regardless of the answer you get, there is a high chance that the result is meaningless.
2. Almost EVERY story idea is meaningless in a vacuum. I've seen great premises be wiped out by awful writing and plot, and I've seen boring premises shine due to the content of the story. In fact, the premise and synopsis is barely useful at all for people to make a direct judgement in the context of them already getting an idea of the genre. LitRPG fans will give LitRPG a shot regardless of the details, same goes for almost every genre. Your question can be rephrased as, "Do you ever read novels with no reader base in x Genre?" To which the response rate will be nearly identical to the question you asked.
3. This is the real kicker, the market is so large that regardless of what your story is about, there are people who will be interested in it, as long as it is well written. The question is malformed, as yes, there will always be people interested in reading your story until they determine if you are skilled at writing. If your REAL question is "Does this premise have what it takes to become relatively popular?" then I refer you back to #2.
4. Lets say, hypothetically, you're asking this because you're a novice and you are either afraid of failure or don't want to waste your time. Well, if your premise IS actually that good, and you haven't started writing it yet, you've literally opened yourself up for better authors to swoop in and write it before you, if it was actually that groundbreaking. You've posted the idea in a public forum. You are, in fact, better off simply taking the time to write it and either sink or swim. In all likelihood, your premise fits within the well defined borders of explored literary territory within a genre.
5. By asking the forums, you're creating a defensive barrier for your ego. If the story does poorly, you can tell yourself that the forums lied to you if they said they would read it, and if they said they won't read it, you'll drop it immediately. The ego really doesn't like to get hurt, so you're pushing responsibility off onto others. Just write the story, you're too afraid of failure, and too afraid of not being successful. By wasting your time agonizing over whether the story will do well or not, you're not progressing forward and improving yourself. In all likelihood, your first stories, regardless of the premise, will suck. They'll flop, and you'll feel bad. You then need to take what you learned from those failures, and make another, better story.
Thank you for listening to my birthday PSA. Please stop asking people if they would read a hypothetical story. Just write it, then ask people to read what you've already written. Success comes from practice.
Not only is this a plague upon the forums, but it's bad for those who ask the question for multiple reasons, which I will enumerate now:
1. Forums, even reader sections of the forums, are not representative of actual available readers. Regardless of the answer you get, there is a high chance that the result is meaningless.
2. Almost EVERY story idea is meaningless in a vacuum. I've seen great premises be wiped out by awful writing and plot, and I've seen boring premises shine due to the content of the story. In fact, the premise and synopsis is barely useful at all for people to make a direct judgement in the context of them already getting an idea of the genre. LitRPG fans will give LitRPG a shot regardless of the details, same goes for almost every genre. Your question can be rephrased as, "Do you ever read novels with no reader base in x Genre?" To which the response rate will be nearly identical to the question you asked.
3. This is the real kicker, the market is so large that regardless of what your story is about, there are people who will be interested in it, as long as it is well written. The question is malformed, as yes, there will always be people interested in reading your story until they determine if you are skilled at writing. If your REAL question is "Does this premise have what it takes to become relatively popular?" then I refer you back to #2.
4. Lets say, hypothetically, you're asking this because you're a novice and you are either afraid of failure or don't want to waste your time. Well, if your premise IS actually that good, and you haven't started writing it yet, you've literally opened yourself up for better authors to swoop in and write it before you, if it was actually that groundbreaking. You've posted the idea in a public forum. You are, in fact, better off simply taking the time to write it and either sink or swim. In all likelihood, your premise fits within the well defined borders of explored literary territory within a genre.
5. By asking the forums, you're creating a defensive barrier for your ego. If the story does poorly, you can tell yourself that the forums lied to you if they said they would read it, and if they said they won't read it, you'll drop it immediately. The ego really doesn't like to get hurt, so you're pushing responsibility off onto others. Just write the story, you're too afraid of failure, and too afraid of not being successful. By wasting your time agonizing over whether the story will do well or not, you're not progressing forward and improving yourself. In all likelihood, your first stories, regardless of the premise, will suck. They'll flop, and you'll feel bad. You then need to take what you learned from those failures, and make another, better story.
Thank you for listening to my birthday PSA. Please stop asking people if they would read a hypothetical story. Just write it, then ask people to read what you've already written. Success comes from practice.
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