How do you deal with a declining viewcount trend on your story?

[Ral]

And, I fear that readers who left rarely returns. Time to cut your losses and start again.

If the decline have been going on for a long time, then there is practically nothing you can do.

 

[ForestDweller]

If it makes you feel any better, it probably won't, all 3/4 of my novels that have been running for longer than 6 months are on a downward trend in valid reads, favorites, comments, but I have a consistent reader gain.

Number of fucks given: 0.

It's like anyone following a mango that's been running for a long period of time, it eventually drops off their radar.

So to answer your original question-- write something else or get over it. Your next story, don't try to write the next One Piece or Boku no Hero Academia. No one cares that you're going to write the next Homer's Epic. Write a story with a foreseeable ending and hit that within 100 chapters or less, so at some point you peaked in readership and then leave it as a success rather than perceive it as an eventual failure.

Yeah, shouldn't have tried to imitate a big series like Mushoku Tensei in the first place.

 

[Owl]

After writing a story for over one year now - that's normal. Changes all the time. I've had switches from between up to 3k visitors a day to 300. There's lots of reasons for that. Just continue writing and don't think too much about it, might also be readers letting chapters stack up or stuff like holidays/school getting in the way
Of course it makes you worry but... You likely won't find out the reason anyway

 

[ForestDweller]

After writing a story for over one year now - that's normal. Changes all the time. I've had switches from between up to 3k visitors a day to 300. There's lots of reasons for that. Just continue writing and don't think too much about it, might also be readers letting chapters stack up or stuff like holidays/school getting in the way
Of course it makes you worry but... You likely won't find out the reason anyway

How about the average trend though? Over a month for example?

I once got a really high spike out of nowhere. Never been able to replicate that.

 

[Owl]

How about the average trend though? Over a month for example?

I once got a really high spike out of nowhere. Never been able to replicate that.

Same thing. There's no exact trend - if I look over the year, it literally goes up and down all the time, over weeks. It scared me at first when I just had three weeks of downward trends but then it went up again. Also depends a bit on the current story progression and me taking breaks.
Really high spikes are common for me (like, differences of 1-2k reader compared to the days around it)

 

[UYScuti]

Tbh, you’re probably suffering from several things. It’s the holidays, so people are busy. More novels due to competitions like NANO. Your book is 153 chapters long/500k words long. That’s the equivalent of 6 traditional books. Long stories are always going to lose readers towards the end. And your chapters are long. It’s not so much release rate, it’s a matter of how long it takes to read a chapter. At that length for a Webnovel, a lot of people will skim stuff. Once they start skimming, they’ll lose interest.

 

[ForestDweller]

Tbh, you’re probably suffering from several things. It’s the holidays, so people are busy. More novels due to competitions like NANO. Your book is 153 chapters long/500k words long. That’s the equivalent of 6 traditional books. Long stories are always going to lose readers towards the end. And your chapters are long. It’s not so much release rate, it’s a matter of how long it takes to read a chapter. At that length for a Webnovel, a lot of people will skim stuff. Once they start skimming, they’ll lose interest.

I wonder if this is why some writers here split their long novel into separate books as their separate stories.

 

[Aaky]

View count doesn't matter. Has your reader gained slowed, or valid reads declined?

All view count really shows is someone clicking on your page, but not necessarily reading it. So that is borderline useless information.

This is also a joke. Valid readers don't mean shit if you have like 100 chapters. Since 10 readers could marathon your novel and give you 1k valid readers, giving the illusion that there are hundreds of readers.

I would put more faith into individual chapter views and likes.

 

[LostLibrarian]

If you have a massive drop all at once, it might have to do with a "wrong" direction you took that discouraged the readers. But the "normal" declining viewcount where it slowly dribbles out often comes more from fatigue.

I never even got so far with my stories, so I can't speak from my experience as writer, but looking at it from the point of readers also works. You have written half a million words with your story - that's 6 or 7 full-length YA books. So here is the question for you: did you also have 6,7 big arcs and climaxes in your story? Do you have 7 books worth of character development?


The worst thing while reading a long-running story is repetition without change. Especially CN-webnovels suffer from that where it's often the same thing over and over again just with different names for enemies and cities. And if you read the same "funny joke" for the 100th time... yeah, people start to go looking for something new and therefore more exciting.


How I deal with that? I try to plan my novel with an ending in mind. And every volume/arc/whatever both follows the three-act-structure (meaning lows and highs for a change in pacing) and takes a step towards the endgoal. And with that I hope that some of my viewers stick around because they can see the ending in the distance and want to experience it.

So that would be my thing. Do you write towards an endgoal you forshadow? Are your arcs connected and build up towards that endgoal? Are the stakes in your story going up? Do you have slow and peaceful moments in your story to accentuate the big events? Do you pay off developments from 50 chapters ago or are past events "forgotten"?

If your story has some of those problems, I could see myself dropping it somewhere in the middle just out of... "fatigue".

 

[Jamminrabbit]

This is also a joke. Valid readers don't mean shit if you have like 100 chapters. Since 10 readers could marathon your novel and give you 1k valid readers, giving the illusion that there are hundreds of readers.

I would put more faith into individual chapter views and likes.

You're not supposed to treat the valid reads as a day by day statistic, but as a week to months.

 

[ForestDweller]

So here is the question for you: did you also have 6,7 big arcs and climaxes in your story? Do you have 7 books worth of character development?

That's a valid point. I only have three arcs in my story right now. And I don't think my character development amounts to seven books worth as well.

The worst thing while reading a long-running story is repetition without change.

It does change though. Not like those CN webnovels.

Do you write towards an endgoal you forshadow? Are your arcs connected and build up towards that endgoal? Are the stakes in your story going up? Do you have slow and peaceful moments in your story to accentuate the big events? Do you pay off developments from 50 chapters ago or are past events "forgotten"?

Yeah, I have an endgoal. The MC wants a family and he's going to get it.

The first arc is a prologue and the other two is dedicated each to a harem member. Not sure if that counts as building to that endgoal.

Stakes are always going up. MC is becoming more and more famous in the world as he faces off against stronger enemies.

There's definitely a lot of slow and peaceful moments in the story. Too much perhaps.

Oh yeah, the MC still carries the burden from his failure 100 chapters ago, for example.

If your story has some of those problems, I could see myself dropping it somewhere in the middle just out of... "fatigue".

For me, I'm the type who prefers not following a series in real time, unless the current development really fascinates me. The site not giving notifications every time a series updates doesn't help either.

I usually don't have a concrete reason to dropping a series though. It just depends on my current mood, which always changes.

 

[thedude3445]

Maybe stupid advice, but this is mostly psychological I imagine; I've felt this same thing many times about the slow decline of a series in views (which happens naturally with every single serialized work, so don't worry about that honestly). Therefore, the way to trick yourself into feeling better about it: Crosspost on another site! Let those chapters be scheduled at 3-4x a week and let them go out over the course of a year and watch as you get new readers and fans. I've done this a few times and it's always fun.

Sites I recommend: Neovel & Tapas. Both have post scheduling and decent readerships; the latter is my favorite, though it comes with some catches: chapters can only be 15,000 characters (about 2,000 words) and so you will have to split up almost every chapter; and you DEFINITELY do not want to post more than once a day due to its algorithms. But that just means you've already got an entire year's worth of chapters for Tapas, and you'll probably have plenty of readers on there as well by this time next year.

The worst idea of them all is to drop the story. DO NOT drop it, but if you are feeling the pressure on SH, lowering your wordcount per chapter is probably a great idea. Readers may be "angry" but it's your story, so you should do what makes you feel comfortable with it.

 

[ForestDweller]

Crosspost on another site! Let those chapters be scheduled at 3-4x a week and let them go out over the course of a year and watch as you get new readers and fans. I've done this a few times and it's always fun.

I'm already doing that actually. At Webnovel, AO3, and QuestionableQuesting. Webnovel has the best stats but the comments/reviews are pretty bad compared to Scribblehub. AO3 barely has any comments and views to the point that I often don't bother updating on it.

But I'll try Tapas.

The worst idea of them all is to drop the story.

I'm the kind of writer who doesn't want to write unless I can do it well.

 

[SilvCrimBlac]

What is this shit? Dude has on eof the highest view counts I've ever seen on this site. Plenty of favorites. Sure as hell more than most. He even ranks highly in numerous tags.....and he's bitching about a few lost reader?

Fucking whiny ass entitlement. Get the hell over it

Like watching Bill Gates or Mark Bezos complain about losing a couple thousand when it fell out of their wallet. The absurdity of some of the more popular authors here is fucking amazing to me. While most can't even imagine getting a quarter of what they have, they whine about losing a few here and there.

This is why I rarely come to the forums. All I do is see more stupid shit like this.

 

[ForestDweller]

What is this shit? Dude has on eof the highest view counts I've ever seen on this site. Plenty of favorites. Sure as hell more than most. He even ranks highly in numerous tags.....and he's bitching about a few lost reader?

Fucking whiny ass entitlement. Get the hell over it

Like watching Bill Gates or Mark Bezos complain about losing a couple thousand when it fell out of their wallet. The absurdity of some of the more popular authors here is fucking amazing to me. While most can't even imagine getting a quarter of what they have, they whine about losing a few here and there.

This is why I rarely come to the forums. All I do is see more stupid shit like this.

It's not that high if you realize I need 500k words to get to that level.

 

[SilvCrimBlac]

It's not that high if you realize I need 500k words to get to that level.

All I see is a whiner. Who gives a shit how many words when most still won't reach your level. All I see is entitlement. Your not getting enough pats on the head and someone isn't saying "good boy" enough?

 

[ForestDweller]

Who gives a shit how many words when most still won't reach your level.

They just need to write more then.

 

[SilvCrimBlac]

They just need to write more then.

There's your answer too. Keep writing. Move on.

 

[ForestDweller]

There's your answer too. Keep writing. Move on.

Not when there's a story with more views yet a fourth of the wordcount.

 

[Kaguro]

Are you sure your view-count is actually declining? I would ask this because your daily views look relatively stable and your chapter views don't look too much different than what you should expect. All authors have a small continuous dip in views and engagement the longer your story gets, here's my individual chapter views and the date they were published and you can see that reader engagement is strongly logarithmic. The longer your story gets the flatter and more stable your recent chapter viewership. This happens regardless of how popular your story is.

Most of my daily readers are on older chapters, some chapters are more popular than others, maybe because of the names I don't really know, but none of them break this trend. Each release you make will push more people to read older chapters, but your newest chapters will generally have fewer views by a small margin each time. New readers need to catch up, and not all of them make it to the end.