Comment Judgment

So, I'm here to have another little rant. This one is about, you guessed it, comments.

I've written (or started writing, rather) a new story or two recently. I admittedly didn't have sky-high hopes for either of them, but I've seen dozens of similar stories on Mibba, and they'd gotten fairly good responses: over 20 comments, usually, and a large handful of subscribers. I read through the stories myself, and I like them. Good substance, fairly well written, the whole bit.

And I put loads of effort into my stories. Just like everybody else on the site. So I figured, hey, I might get a decent response, too. A nice little following of kindly supporters who will urge me on in my endeavors.

But no.

I get the regular amount of readers, maybe a subscriber or two per story, and two whole comments among both new stories. I don't always necessarily take the advice of readers, but the fact that they're reading and taking the three seconds out of their lives to comment is always a nice thing to have. I don't get that, though, and I started to wonder for a while if I wasn't up to par.

I made up a mental checklist. Focusing on my favorite story of the two newer ones, I made sure I had an original story plot (I do), solid characters (they're very unique, if I say so myself), and, above all, I checked to see if it was well written. I checked over and over for grammatical errors, loss of punctuation, or misuse of words. I corrected the few mistakes I found. Not to say my writing was perfect, just that I didn't find any obvious flaw to the English language in my chapters. I think up fairly creative titles for the chapters, too, with headings and everything in the description. And I still get the feeble reply. I can see that at least 40 people have read my story, but I have one subscriber and two comments. I wonder, 'What's going on?' I even went so far as to make sure I had comments enabled, which I did.

So what was wrong?

And then I started to sift through the other stories like mine (suffice it to say they all had a fan-fiction-y feel to them, like mine) and I found there were a fair few that were extremely well written, had a believable plot, and were simply great stories, that had the same response as mine. A comment or two, maybe a star, and I was surprised. What was going on here?

So I looked at the other stories with the same base, the ones with 5 to 10 stars and hundreds of comments and subscribers. I read through them - quite a few of them, actually. And I discovered that, though they all had interesting main characters, who were all original, the story lines seemed dangerously alike. I started seeing resemblances everywhere, including in catchy titles or slogans used in the descriptions. And these were all the stories with massively positive responses and huge followings.

There was nothing wrong with my stories, then. I just happen to be one of the unlucky authors - that is to say, my stories aren't widely read. I don't have that same plot in mind, because I always want it to be different. I noticed in other stories, to do with everything form the Jonas Brothers to Zacky Vengeance to Original Fictions, ran the same course and died at the same place. I'm not saying all stories out there are the same, but that a few seem to be subtly similar, even if the authors didn't realize it.

What I think, now, is that people latch onto one favorite genre or idea, and weed out the stories that follow those guidelines. They don't bother with other stories. I myself am one of these people, so I'm going to try and open my mind a bit more - check out more obscure and lesser known stories. But I think people should also know that some authors on Mibba are suffering due to lack of responses, and simply discontinuing stories out of discouragement. I see it happen frequently.

Please, people - give some of those one-star stories a chance. Maybe the reason they only have one star is because nobody give them a chance at first glance!

Now to clear some things up - I am NOT trying to bully people into reading my stories in particular. Just to realize that some of those stories with only one (or maybe no) stars or so rated because nobody takes the time to read them. Give new plot lines a chance. I personally have a great many favorite stories here, and I look forward to discovering more.

Nothing here was meant to be insulting. Merely a suggestion to everybody out there.