When i was 12 I wrote a fairly popular (30k+ reads)fic. It was terribly written and honestly not worth reading yet it has outdone literally every other fic I’ve written. Countless hours of improvement and writing and I peaked at 12. Smh
No matter how much engagement I get I will never beat the fic I wrote on wattpad when I was 12
Complaint/Pet PeeveAnything you wrote when you were 12 has had however many years to accumulate stats. Anything you write now has only had since the second you posted it- they're not truly comparable.
THIS.
For awhile I was a little bummed that a fic I considered to be technically better was being outperformed by a different fic I had already written. Then, over time, I watched the numbers creep up. It just takes time to accumulate those kind of hit numbers.
Remember that engagement on AO3 is different from engagement on Wattpad. By that I mean it’s calculated differently. On AO3 you can only give a single kudos to an entire work, and leave comments by chapter. Wattpad allows for those star/heart/like/(I forget the shape) things to be given on each chapter, and comments can be made every line/paragraph break.
Don’t let it pull you down, a part of it is just that things are different now. That’s not a bad thing, but it is something to keep in mind.
If you measure success by engagement you will never get to enjoy writing about something that lacks mass appeal.
Unless you literally stopped writing afterwards, there's no way to know whether that's something you can ever beat or not.
STOPPP I had the same exact experience. My first ever fic was when I was 14 on Wattpad and it had half a million reads and thousands of comments before I deleted it 💀 I think being exposed to that much attention on my first attempt genuinely gave me psychic damage because now All Posting Online is Tainted
Popularity is not always an indicator of talent, and a lot of it is luck. Wattpad audience skews younger so of course their tastes will be different. If you only aim to be popular again, you won’t appreciate the work you’ve done to improve and you’ll start to lose your drive to write and burn out.
why do you measure success in views? like why is that a bar in how you view your works?
No offense, but do you live on this subreddit? I think you've commented on about every post here, lmao.
My first pieces in Wattpad have 328k reads, 7.5k votes and 1.5k comments. Granted it's a oneshot collection book (as Wattpad makes it incredibly difficult to make individual oneshots) but most of the pieces there are from 2018. I was 23 and pretty good at English, but my writing was really cheesy 😅 I myself cringe hard when I reread them, but people seem to enjoy it.
Where my second most popular oneshot collection book has 193k reads, 4.3k votes and 323 comments. It has far FAR better writing than that 328k reads book but I guess people like it cheesy.
In Wattpad, it's pure luck whether people find your pieces as you can't really find fics by searching if the character or the fandom isn't SUUUUUPER popular + your fic has to get a lot of reads to be featured on the search page, but getting them is pure luck. For example, searching for Rupert Travis (Detroit: Become Human) x reader mostly brings up BTS x readers and One Direction x readers, and some anime show x readers. Plus, there's a lot of people who no longer read real fanfics because ChatGPT writes you any prompt you want it to write, and it does so within seconds. You no longer need to request for fics and wait for an indefinite time for your fic to come out. Which sucks of course...
I feel the same way about a melodramatic fic I wrote when I was about 13. At the time, the fandom had the most number of fics on ff.net. I posted all my work on a forum and I had hundreds of people waiting for updates.
What a time. Seriously
SAME
140K READS HERE.
yes, same. That 1M reads work is staring at me like 'Can’t you produce anything with more engagement than your first piece of fiction?'
Views don’t necessarily indicate how good a story is.
My most viewed fanfic (on ff.net) has 55k+ views with 10 chapters and 18k words written, and “only” 71 followers, a story written 6 years ago. On the contrary my most recent story has 2k views, 3 chapters and 11k words written with 122 subscriptions.
So remember, quality>quantity
Popularity isn't how you measure your peak
It's the exact same with me lol. It's like the second it starts mattering to you you stop getting it.
You were also on the website with twelve year olds. Do you trust a twelve year old’s taste in what is well written?
Embrace the learning you’ve done and the audience you’re reaching now.