Monday!

[alexandraerin]

It's definitely Monday, my lappy tells me. Thanks to lizkayl for the tip on making that visible.

I fixed my problem with Chrome... sort of. Apparently it's a known issue with the base browser that it sometimes starts eating checkboxes, and the easiest way that's been found to unstick it is to go alter the Windows display theme stuff (even just changing it to something and change it back). For some people it happens again and again, for some people it never happens, and for some people it happens once or twice. If it keeps happening, I don't know if I'll keep using Chrome.

I need to make an appointment to go back to the doctor sometime this week, but that's not a huge deal... she just wants to see what my heart rate and blood pressure are like when I'm not actively killing myself with stress.

Comments

Economic Advice

[tgnome57.livejournal.com]

Hi Alexandra,

I wanted to just Email this to you directly, but I'm not sure if I'm just missing the link to do it or what. If you read it and want to remove it from the comment list immediately, then by all means do so.

The short of it is: I think you are spreading yourself too thin IF you are trying to write all these stories as your job. If you are working on them all as your various loves, and doing what you want, when you want, then please ignore what I'm saying and just do what you enjoy. If that is not entirely the case though, I think you would be better off economically to primarily focus on the MU stories. I think when you did your survey of what people liked to read, your results may have been skewed by a vocal minority.

I notice that in your comments section, that the last TOMU story had 18 comments, the last MTOMU had 8, while the last SHNights, 3Seas, VDogs have 1, 1 and 3 respectively. That tells me that you have a lot more folks interested in your MU stories than in your others. If you take that out a couple weeks the numbers become even more obvious: TOMU 73, MOTOM 39, SHN 11, VD 11, 3seas 3. It appears, to me, that it would make more sense to focus on your more popular works, which would in turn keep your larger fan base happy, and likely result in more donations to keep you solvent. I also notice, that if you go back even further in time, to where you were updating TOMU many times a week, the lists of comments were VERY large sometimes in the 100s. Which worries me, because it means that you may be losing readers due to the sporadic nature of the posts. I myself must admit, that I'm far less intent on finding out what Mackenzie's next wacky adventure is going to be, when I have to wait 5 days at a time to read them. I'm losing interest and that makes me sad.

If I'm coming across as a jerk with an agenda, I apologize. I just like your stories, and I'd hate to see go under economically, because you are killing yourself to write five or six stories when you could focus on the two that are likely 80% of your income, and just update the others occasionally, as the mood strikes you.

Sincerely,
TGnome

Re: Economic Advice

[brenda-ea.livejournal.com]

Not true. I really enjoy "3 Seas", just as much as ToMU only different, but I seldom have anything to comment about it. On the other hand, I do not enjoy MoToMU nearly as much as the other stories, but often post comments.

The comments should not be taken as an indicator of popularity.

Re: Economic Advice

[drooling-ferret.livejournal.com]

Seconded. Besides, there are better indicators of which stories get read more - site traffic data should tell the story much more clearly, no?

Also, when you have a lively comments-based community, and it dies (for whatever reason, though in many cases technological failures do them in), sometimes its awful hard to get that back. Plus, you know, sometimes those active communities arise around specific people who will move on and then there's less to say.

[cursejones.livejournal.com]

I have had similiar thoughts to gnome quite a few times and just figured I would second them. But in the end do what you will as long as your happy.

[vox-vocis-causa.livejournal.com]

It is frustrating to not have regular updates, but judging readership by comments is probably not totally reliable because
a. there are probably many people like brenda_ea and
b. there is less to say about the shorter story posts

Donations

[teddywars.livejournal.com]

I know you need to do what makes you happy, but I agree with TGnome. I started donating a fair amount to AE on a monthly basis because I liked TOMU but now, with so few updates, I am probably going to stop doing so. The way I saw it was that I was paying to get stories, kind of like a subscription to a game. I want to play the game so I am willing to pay money to see it survive and continue. Right now, it has been 7 days since I saw a TOMU post and 6 since a MTOMU post. The twitter feed is 6 days old as well. That's like a game being down for a week with no word from the game admins on how the "fix" is going and no refund on my monthly subscription fee because I can't play my game, the entire reason I am paying them in the first place.