The Journey to Writing a Successful Story: a tip book

Completed Stories

One of the biggest questions that is asked is: Do completed stories go down in reads?

The answer is yes. Yes they do.

This is because it's not getting advertised well enough. When your story isn't completed and you're updating it every week or two, it gets put onto the "new stories" list (if they still have that, ha!) But it's not only where new stories go when someone had just posted chapter one or whatnot, but it's also for stories that get updated. People end up looking through the list and may find the story and may read it. All sort of depends...

But otherwise, once your story is completed, it's done. You're gonna have to advertise it and keep up with the advertising because those reads won't get there by themselves. Now, it can go up if the story is great, meaning it has a nice looking cover and summary, plus a well-written story that has a great plot. It depends on this one because I've seen stories go up easily because of this; the only thing is that you would have to stay in the clubs for people to notice you and once that happens and you make friends, people start seeing that completed work and start loving it.

But if the story needs work or you just need to begin advertising it, the reads are going to stay the same. For me, A Nightmare's Fate is in-between. It does need work, even after the first revision (and other multiple revisions for chapters 0-15) but its main reason is because I don't advertise it as much not to mention, most people don't want to read something that sad and depressing. So it's not going to be a hit. It does have almost 30,000 reads, but it's been in the 20s for over two years now...

Yes, most readers want completed stories because then they have the story at their disposal. They don't have to wait for updates and they know that the author didn't walk away from it. Not to mention, it may also be edited.

But not all stories that are completed get great treatment. If you're not doing anything with it, it's going to get dusty sitting there on your shelf. This also gives you an opportunity to do more things with it - quizzes, ask readers questions, do special things especially on anniversaries. Things like that. I knew of an author that completed her work and because some people weren't too happy with the ending, she did a contest for her readers where they were able to write their own ending as a one-shot.

You could do something like that, or similar. For instance, you could ask readers what they thought of the ending and if they didn't like it as much as they should have, you could do a contest where they throw out ideas and you can create an alternate ending to their liking.