Once, @yansusustories and @tigerine actually talked about this issue somewhere on the forum. About how it's a feedback loop where both sides lose something in the end.
Personally, I felt like I walked head-on into a hornet's nest with that take
I guess I do have to admit to being a bit radical in some things ...
With all this said -- I wonder if there can be something like a more or less official BL-group here on SH to give a bit more visibility chance to new and upcoming authors for those who might be interested that can double like some sort of a BL-Trending Tab? Obviously not for every 1 chapter of a new book that appears but for those who are clearly writing a lot but cannot break out of the low rankings (for whichever reasons)...
Is this a bad idea?
I mean I already said it when we personally talked about this before but I guess I should just reiterate it here: I'd be all up for that. Though after thinking about it for a bit, I think what we'd actually need to do would be to get the BL readers from NU over to SH
Does any of that answer the question, are the BL and GL novels that are not in the Romance genre?
Is that a possibility in the wide wide world of the infinite Imaginarium? What kind of story is it?
Oh, another one is opening
that can of worms.
My take: Nope. It's Boys'
Love (or Girls') for a reason so it is some type of romance. There are, however, stories out there with homosexual protagonists that don't focus on romance so they could be literally anything just with a gay or lesbian MC. I would never categorize that as BL or GL though.
You'll get a different response from Queenfisher though
Nani??? Am I on the list for authors with low visibility here??
I actually think this depends on how we want to define 'low visibility'
I mean I know you because I always see you around here on the forums, sometimes on the main page, and definitely much more often over on Tapas. But we're probably not the ones who can accurately judge this. Personally, I feel like it's often hard to say and might even depend more on a certain story than on the author. And sometimes the stats are also misleading.
Like, I have 6 stories in the Top #50, 3 of which are in the Top #20 even. If somebody told me that about themselves, I'd think they were doing really great. I still wouldn't say my visibility on the main page is actually high though. That is because of those three stories at the top, one barely gets 10 views on the latest chapters, another one (which is actually my main series where we just hit 600 chapters) doesn't even average 5 views on the latest chapters, and only the last one which has been finished for ages (like, finished in January over here) gets up to double digits. And even those views vary greatly, like, some of the chapters of the extras have 30 views, some 90 (and even in that order, like, how the fuck are readers reading nowadays?
), so I am not even sure if those are actual views or just people checking whether they like the ending.
The story with the double digits in views is, btw, the only one that has comments on those chapters as well. The others? 0 comments. For one of them (the 10er), the last comment was about 10 chapters ago and before that, there wasn't a single one for 59 chapters. The other story (the 5er) ... I scrolled through and if I didn't miss one, I got the last comment on chapter 221 (to reiterate: I just posted chapter 600 yesterday). So I went almost 400 chapters without comments. I can't even say I'm surprised because if I look at the statistics page with the 'recent readers', then there are only 3 of them that actually read something instead of just bookmarking it at chapter 1. And btw, that story officially has 579 readers and 121.5k views according to the main page.
So, my stats actually look really great when just looking at them from afar but as soon as I look more closely, it gets depressing really fast. I probably don't even have 10 readers on SH. Visibility, my ass. I don't know about you guys but I don't even know how that looks
Sorry, rant over
Maybe what is better is to have some kind of cheerleading writers' network. In the writing spaces where I've been, people sometimes request "cheerleaders", who either (1) literally just give encouragement to keep writing or (2) read [the start of] works-in-progress and again, give encouragement to keep writing. They aren't betas nor full-on readers, but this initial support is really nice.
Although I do have to say I personally find it really demotivating if people start out reading but then not continue. It's almost even worse than no one reading from the beginning because then I can't hoodwink myself into saying 'ah, well, nobody found it yet, they'll come later'. If people read initially but then stop, I'll have to consider the possibility of just being a shitty author that makes all the readers drop her books like cold potatoes
(Not hot ones because then they'd have dropped it right when picking it up. I can only assume it's getting boring for them.)
So, and I should probably get off the internet now and work because this is really getting depressing.
