This was posted someplace else, but it'll work here...
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The quality of the downloads is what's important, which sounds like a total copout coming from someone who gets less downloads than any other author in this forum, but I have to believe that.
Posting at a place like SOL, for some of us, is a lot like selling our soul to Santa Clause. What I mean is, there are a number of forums where I post bestiality stories and in proportion to the number of users, my download numbers are significant. Like 95% of all active members in most cases and feedback is also much more pronounced. Much more positive and supportive.
Same thing with other specialized forums, like TG and Snuff...But of course we expect that from those places because we are catering to a specific fetish and targeting a specific group of readers who are actively looking for those kinds of stories.
SOL, on the other hand, is just a large community of authors and readers coming together under the umbrella of "Online Erotica" whatever that is. Well, it's everything, and so the disadvantage is that writing a bestiality story will be ignored by the majority of users. A TG story even more so. The target audience is a minority and proportionally smaller than the whole. Makes sense, right? Everyone knows this.
In that way, from that singular point of view, it's not the best situation to post anything out of the mainstream to a site like SOL. The return is minimal when compared to what other, more popular authors enjoy and while we understand and try to ignore that fact, human's by nature are competative. Our social development is based on comparative teaching and so too our self-image is based on subjective opinion of others. Being compared unfavorably for any reason is not a path to happiness.
So why do it? That's the selling part, in that I'm trading my comfort for the opportunity to reach a wider, more diverse readership. For a brief time I played with middle of the road porn, mainstream themes, and I spent a year writing trash like "Dick" and "Babysitter's First Time" and basically a lot of stories that were very popular, but I rate just below the back of my Fruit Loops box. A lot of people think that was my peak, and perhaps so.
I had to do it though as I came to understand that I couldn't walk in throwing out snuff, bestiality, and hardcore lesbian stories and gain immediate acceptance. I had to build an audience first. 2006-2007 was my throw-away year for that purpose. Now that I have a fanbase on SOL and some minor name recognition outside those forums where I'm worshipped as a goddess, I can move away from writing mainstream tripe and work on other things that are important to me. For the time being my interest is in transgender. I don't know why and doubtless it will wear off eventually, after I've exhausted my explorations, and then I'll do something else.
I'm never completely happy at SOL and I never will be. I resent a lot of what I see there, a lot of what I experience at the hands of voters and anonymous emailers. But the quality of my audience, I think, makes up for its lack of membership. The new readers who come in expecting to find my stories shocking and repulsive, and then email me with valuable comments and criticism, even praise for seducing them into trying something different...That's why I'm there and why I'm writing unpopular fiction. It's why I sold my soul to Santa and I keep asking him for an AK-47 in my stocking, but...
//rant
//rache
On the question of download numbers...
