How many people read this stuff, anyway?

[emmagrant01]

I've often wondered how many people read my fic. I assume there's a proportional relationship between the general readership and the number of comments left for fics posted on LJ, but what's the proportion? Without a way of measuring the number of "hits" on an LJ post, it's hard to tell.

In addition to LJ and my web page, I also post selected fics on Skyehawke, which does measure hits, so I thought I'd look there for a point of reference. Now, I don't get a lot of reviews on Skyehawke, and I thought perhaps it was just me. I calculated the proportion of reviews left to the number of hits (on fics that were actually reviewed; I didn't count the ones that weren't reviewed by anyone), and found that the review rate was a fairly dismal 0.5%! Yes, less than 1% of people who read my fics on Skyehawke leave a review! I'm sure a certain percentage start to read and then get bored, but I'd like to think that a fairly large number of those who read actually finish.

I wondered if it was just me, so I looked at the Skyehawke pages of a few other HP writers (selected at random from the author directory from the names I was familiar with). Here's what I found:
geoviki, whose fic A Thousand Beautiful Things seems to be one of the most widely read on Skyehawke, has a review rate of 0.4%.
dorrie6 has a review rate of 0.8%.
abbycadabra has a review rate of 0.5%.
amanuensis1 has a review rate of 0.6%.
ivyblossom has a review rate of 0.6%.

At this point, I had to stop looking up authors, because I'm doing this on my lunch break and it's taking up lots of time. But all of those numbers are pretty consistent, at around 0.6%. I was also surprised at the sheer number of fics on these authors' pages with no reviews left, yet with lots of hits. (I didn't count those in the review rate, btw.) Many of these authors post on LJ, on their own pages, and in multiple archives, so maybe their reader base tends to review elsewhere. At any rate, I feel a little better, as I seem to be close to the (non-statistically sound) average.

But my question is this: Is this review rate of 0.6% fairly representative of Skyehawke, and is it representative of review rates in general? So if there are 30 comments left on an LJ story, would it make sense for me to use that rate -- or, to make the arithmetic easier, round it to 1% -- to get an estimate of 3000 as the number of people who actually read my fic? That seems really high, but it's possible that readers really are that uninclined to review.

Thoughts? Other review rates to add to the list?

Disclaimer: I know that what I've done here is very, very far from being statistically sound, and I have no interest in designing an experiment that would be. Sorry! :-P

Damn slow LJ!!!

Comments

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

You know, I didn't comment a lot when I first became involved in the HP fandom. My other fandom was small and fairly tightly knit, and I felt like I was commenting to friends. HP seemed so big and impersonal, and there are so many archives everywhere! It wasn't until I started getting to know people on LJ that I began commenting at the same rate in this fandom. I tend to leave a comment on almost everything I read on LJ, even if it's just a "I read this and it was great". I leave longer comments when I have time. Off of LJ, I only do it if it's easy, like on Skyehawke.

I don't take lack of feedback personally, but I have to say I love getting it and always wish people would tell me what they thought! It's hard not to interpret lack of feedback as "no one is reading this".