As I said on my authors blog, and I’ll link you so I don’t have to repeat myself.
I took down the chapter uploaded of ‘this we know’ on wattpad. I realise that it’s tedious to hear me whine on about unfavorable algorithms, but in this case i think it’s a mix of many things.
One being that I hate PR, I don’t want to do it, and I don’t want others to do it for me either. I would seriously be mortified if someone was hyping my shit, and I couldn’t live up to that. This where I don’t thrive, but crumble under that sorts of pressure.
another being that I am not social AT ALL online, I hate forums, I hate groups, I hate chats, and I fucking hate book clubs.
So I know that on Wattpad, the way to getting yourself readers is to participate (which is ridiculously difficult now that they removed both the forums and pm options) – but the thing is that I am a ghost reader, I don’t leave replies because I often simply don’t know what to say. Also I hate making aware of myself, knowing that if I said something cool or terrible, people would click the link in my name and go look at my profile – and I really don’t want them to.
Funny how I am so protective of my work, and me – and with the same breath bitches and moans about no reads, or views.
But this is fucking wattpad, not the Amazon game for big girls. It’s like a more chaotic version of Ao3 for fucks sake. It wasn’t always like that, but it is what it has been reduced to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wattpad/
don’t believe me? check the reddit. It’s like page after page of humble bragging, and besserwissers. And it does my fucking head in.
This post is super interesting, and it also shows a growing disdain for the platform by their users. Mostly because the algorithm is such utter shit, that in order to get readers, you have to do a fuckton of lobbying to get noticed. And just who the hell does that for Wattpad? And if they do, they shouldn’t.
Look I am all fine with not getting any reads on the shit I have there, but ‘this we see’ is like a baby to me, it’s a very old project that has transformed a lot over the years I spent making it. And it bothers me to see it gather dust like this, and sure it could be a question about me sucking ass as an author, but I don’t think so. It is because I am nobody.
And you know how I feel about e-fame/BNF culture.
It shouldn’t be about who you are, and that was what was awesome about Wattpad, and Original fiction [dot net] back in the days. It was all about creativity and world building, bouncing ideas off each other and growing. Where as now, it’s all about how many people you buttered up with comments, and shamelessly spamming for R4R or C4C in any and all groups, platforms and forums available to you.
And it pisses me off.
I mean the community is completely fucking tone deaf, and you will see that in a minute, if you click that link to their reddit. It’s like a mix of people humble bragging, and people bitching about getting no readers blaming everything and everyone but themselves.
Like this
Underperforming? excuse me?
I mean at least it’s not a mafia werewolf bad-boy story. But still it’s shit like that, that feeds off shit like the one below, like – you are totally new, and you’re already begging for double digits?
And this, this is what is wrong with fucking Wattpad.
Look, I get it. You know how much I bitched about how the feeling of posting something you’re proud of, is completely ignored. And how that deflates you, and demoralises you completely.
So I fucking get it.
What I don’t get is why they don’t try harder, try something different. Make a new plan, perhaps look at their stuff with critical glasses. No, they whine on Reddit about ‘the algorithm is evol because i get no interaction, and fuck ghost readers – I want comments’.
It’s entitled, stupid and childish. You simply cannot expect people to fawn over your stupid story, I mean I have been writing for uhm, always. But for serious since around 1993. And dude I get no comments, I had to fucking guilt trip people who got my book for free, to please leave a comment on goodreads or amazon, since they got the book for free. I mean love it or hate it, it’s still interaction which works in my favor, cause algorithms.
And no one wakes up one morning and just sits down to write something like Lord of the Rings, or fucking The Stand. It is a craft, it takes time and skill. Time no reader really have.
For christmas this year, I got a book from my daughter, it’s a original manuscript, handwritten of HP Lovecraft of ‘at the mountains of Madness‘
But you know what is also in this manuscript? All of dear Howard’s correspondence with publishers, magazines and other authors.
There are page, after page, after page – of rejections, forced edits and angry editors asking him to stop sending his shit. This is not ‘rawrBL101’, this is goddamn HP Lovecraft.
He got so many rejections, half the goddamn story is edited on the back of said rejection letters. And can we just agree, that even if he is not the best author in the world, he is absolutely one of the most prolific. And what he wrote was too outlandish for the magazines and publishers at the time.
So rejections, or no readers, doesn’t have to be about your skills, it can be that you’re the wrong place, at the wrong time. But it can also be because you simply didn’t write something good, I mean Mountains of Madness is to no extend the first work Lovecraft did, but it is one of the few novella length works he created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft_bibliography
If you click this link, you can see how everything he did up until he wrote ‘the dream quest of unknown Kadath‘ in 1927, is short stories, flash fiction and letter excerpts. Of all his works, he only did make one novel, namely ‘The case of Charles Dexter Ward’.
At the mountains of madness; the dunwich horror; the shadow over innsmouth; the whisperer in darkness; and the shadow out of time. They are all listed as novellas, which means they are somewhere between a novel and a short story in case you didn’t know that.
So really it can mean a lot of things, and not getting noticed, getting rejected, not getting an answer back from publishers (be it paper or podcast), and not getting any traction on your stuff – that is the name of the game. Even for Stephen King, or yeah, HP Lovecraft.
So in regards to ‘this we see’, I think that story is perhaps just mine. Perhaps it belongs in my fictive drawer? I mean yeah it sorta feels like quitting, but on the other hand, I simply don’t think there is a reader for it besides me. I think that story is so much my brain-baby that only I find it even remotely interesting. And yeah it sounds fucking arrogant to say ‘I write for me’, and then shop it around. But at the end of the day, that is what I do – I write for me. And that is why I took this story down from everywhere, I felt like I did me, and the story a huge disservice by leaving it on Wattpad like that.
I admit I had expected it to get at least some hits, due to it’s tags… and well it is very ‘on theme’ for wattpad dark romance fantasy. But it is what it is, you can’t win every time, or any time… or whatever.
So yeah Varg and Eske has gone to a nice farm out in the country. hahaha Nah it doesn’t mean I stop writing it, it just mean I keep it to myself. As I said, I love that story, I love those characters, just as I love Nocturnes and those characters – but the odds for Nocturnes suffering the same fate as This we see, is very, very high. Never say never, I mean I might decide to throw either or both at the world, once i finished the stories for Maybe we were the monsters.
But as it stands now, I don’t know if I’ll even actually get around to those. Well one of them need minor edits. The Blackthorn one, so it actually might be the next in the series I publish.
The plot might be stupid convoluted, and I gotta look at that, and make some changes in the dynamics and stuff, just like I did with Heartshaped Tattoos. But is heaps less complicated than Sons of Caina. So perhaps that is what I’ll do.
Eventually.
Some day.
Perhaps.
DREAMS OF A LOST MOONCHILD 
Leave a comment