How fast did your novel take off?

[Plantorsomething]

I don't really care about the best ways to get a novel going or popular, I'm just curious about how fast some of you guys stuff took off. Not for a comparison, I just wanna know since the forum active is typically good writers.

The first ones I wrote actually were pretty fast. Now that I’ve returned after years, they’re pretty slow goin. But I publish fan fiction mostly now so depends on the fandom too. Though even my originals back then had a lot, but that was because I got on the recommended on novel updates, so I had a big initial audience that I wasn’t skilled enough to satisfy, and I lost that with a big hiatus of not being able to finish any works

 

[TheEldritchGod]

HKN is a story of monumental quality only matched by how big a failure it is.

FTS is schlock with a vague hint that maybe something sexual might happen in the story and it crushed HKN's numbers.

Sex sells.
Sigh.

 

[PancakesWitch]

HKN is a story of monumental quality only matched by how big a failure it is.

FTS is schlock with a vague hint that maybe something sexual might happen in the story and it crushed HKN's numbers.

Sex sells.
Sigh.

maybe it has to do with the title too, keywords are important.
something called "Hara-Kiri Nonfeasance" doesnt tell me anything about your story and it sounds confusing, i can tell why readers wouldnt clcik on that

 

[RepresentingEnvy]

So, first 12-20~ chapters of Nexus Awakened got me on Trending just a week+ (from memory) after it came out back in mid/late 2022 and remained in Trending for some time. Within the month I was at 70-100k views. It pretty much exploded right out of the gates and I could not have been more happier for it.

Whether it was luck still makes me wonder to this day. All I know is that I put everything I had into the story and its structure prior to releasing it after lots of past failures.

Similarly, my side stories despite their low chapter counts had a good number of views in a decently short amount of time thanks to the main story (Nexus Awakened).

It is not luck. You are good.

 

[Enkiari]

Honestly...
I don't think it ever did. Not to say my work is doing badly. On the contrary - it is doing fairly well by all metrics, but the reader count.
My work landed a Trending spot once when I started writing it. It gave me around 80 'Plan To Read' readers. That number hasn't really changed since then.
There are days when I don't gain a single reader. But a lot of people who do pick up the story seem to stick around.
All in all, what is there came slowly but surely with the constant updates.

 

[Corty]

Depends on which story. Let me go through them one by one, as in my signature:

• 1st: The first comments came after chapter 60, but I reached 100k views. Hm. I don't really remember, but it was way above 100 chapters, I think. Anyway, after that, it picked up speed. A lot.
• 2nd: Never. It was an abject failure.
• 3rd: [REDACTED]
• 3rd: It started out with more readers than the 1st because I already had a solid reader base who liked how I wrote, but that is also why its growth was more even, and there was not as big of a spike in gained readers as before. Although I got to trend more with it, all in all, I feel it was more successful than my first book. I even dared to open up a Patreon.
• 4th: It's okay. It has been somewhat picking up speed in the past few days after I passed the 100-chapter mark.
• 5th: My fastest growing one because it has the two most popular tags. I am honestly floored by how quickly it has grown. It is the fastest-growing book I have ever begun writing, reaching over 100k views before even going past 50 chapters. Mental.

Edit:

I started on Webnovel, and there I had very mediocre success, not really growing. I had more than quadrupled those numbers after coming here, so I mostly wasted stagnated for a whole year. But it also helped me out because my 1st book was completed when I found SH. So, I just had to edit/post them.

 

[Insomniologist]

…you’re looking for a good writer?
Who’s story has taken off?
I’ll see myself out then.

 

[P3t1]

Rather quickly I think, I spam posted chapters, three chapters a day at the start and got onto Trending fairly regularly for a month or two.
It's been half a year since I dumped my first chapter on the site and I have around 300k views on it and 1600 readers.
It was far from linear though, I think I had like 30k views for the first 4 months? Not really sure, never paid much attention to it.

Some details to keep in mind tho:
- I cheated with writing a Fanfic and adding some popular tags like GL and such.
- I have no idea why it took off so quickly.
- I also have no idea how these forums work, as evident by me not having those fancy signatures under my post.

For ref, I write Getting Warhammered [WH40k Fanfic]

 

[RiaCorvidiva]

Modest success for Legacy of Dragonfire. 8,600 views / almost 300 readers after 2 weeks isn't bad from what I can tell. We'll see if it gets a little push to really explode here. It has had a similar level of modest success on RR after three months as well.

 

[Sylver]

Hmm, I don't know. I've been busting my butt off trying to raise my views and reader count to have my story take off as well. A lot of users here have reassured me that my story is doing well, I just want it to be higher, kind of like those scales in business meetings where the arror shows that stocks or whatever product they are showing have increased in purchases

I can say that I came from a different website where I wrote for 4 years. On that site, I saw that there weren't many stories that included Monster Girls, so I used that to my advantage and wrote Monster Girl stories. They did okay, nothing special. But 2 years in, I'm pushing for one chapter daily and I see new writers adding new Monster Girl story content to the website, and in a short time they're hitting massive success with millions of views. I was happy for them, but at the same time I felt crushed. Like maybe my story sucks after all if barely anyone comments or reads the new chapters. 2 years and in under 3 weeks these 3 stories blow mine out of the water, yikes!

I quit writing my story for a year after that I went to write a different story that again, did okay. When someone started commenting on my first story and asking if I planned to finish it, that was when I decided to give it a second go just because at least two people were following the story this far. I finished that story in September of last year, and in October is when I moved here.

I'm hoping to start over with a second draft of that story because I have plenty more stories planned that build up to a collective plot, sort of like the Harry Potter books for example. Trouble is, I don't see a point in sharing them if there's not much interest for them for one reason or another. I'm open to the possibility that not many care about my stories which would be sad but true, but I'm hopeful. Fingers crossed but I'm bidding on patience and hard work that maybe I will find a growing audience for my story soon.

So my story hasn't blown up yet, but I'm hoping it will someday soon

 

[someawkwardflame]

I have gotten around 600 readers in 22 days since i posted my first written chapter anywhere, which is far more than I expected and absolutely unbelievable and at least in my head is 'taking off' Kinda scary. I was just hoping a few people would like my lil story and it seems to be more than a few.

 

[wimbledon]

I noticed a big uptick in views once I got into the top 100 rankings for the virtual reality category.

My guess is that people will only scroll through so many pages before giving up on their search, so the time to actually reach that threshold and "take off" will depend on which categories you have selected.

In my case... VR doesn't seem to be that popular of a category, so it only took 1-2 months of semiweekly posting to reach that point. For more popular ones, it'll probably take a lot longer to break through the chaff of dead stories and actually reach the public eye.