Hello readers!

Today is all about giving honorable mentions to forums, as well as share my 1 month anniversary experience with ya'll :D :D :D

It can also help those who want to start a hobby writing similar genre serial novels, or begin sharing their translations.

Before this, I will like to humbly say I am no expert, and every thing here is in my personal opinion shared from experience.

There are definitely much better blogs, with writers as well as translation veterans, who have much better results and stories to share.

So with that said, let the ride begin! :D

Brief Overview

Forums, as well as some other aspects of the internet, is growing my readers view gradually and some times rapidly.

My blog went from here (well somehow I couldn't get the values from 20th Aug-24th Aug)






This is what happened,

It gained literally from 10-50 page views per day, to 500 page views within the first week. This was the period between 20th August to 27th August. For unique visitors, it went from 5 to 100.

Then from 28th August to 9th Sept, it saw only an increased by 100+. The total tall was about 600+ page views per day. Visitor's amount stayed approximately the same.

It jumped from 9th Sept, and since then never went below 1000 page views per day. Visitors went from 100 to 200. I guess it was the long weekend in the US.

Currently the average 7 days page views is 1700-2000 a day. Visitors have increased to between 400-500 per day.

Yes, I agree the visitor count to page views seems weird. But this is a novel, and it shows to me that readers are reading more than just 1 page or chapter. It also shows that at the very least, my story still has some interesting content to keep readers going for a little more.

The above paragraph may not be true for many other blogs, who gets a closer ratio of visitors to views.

I know I wrote previously on an earlier post (on WordPress) that I had 800-1000 views per day, but it was for a month (total views divided by 30 days) on average. I did not really check on page views, as that was not the point of writing a novel.

Today I was rather amazed to see a huge jump in the numbers for the past week, something must have been working, and it was working pretty well.



FORUMS and how they helped

I want to give honorable mentions to a few forums, who are key to these numbers. In order of date which the first post was made:-

(you can click on the forum names for the direct links)

1. AnimeSuki Forums

The first post was on 22nd August, by a Facebook buddy.

It increased viewership to 100-200 views on average. It may seem small, but in total generated 792 referrals to date.

While original novels do not generate much interest as compared to translated ones, they are still accepted and gain decent numbers.


2. Wuxiaworld Forums (Notable)

I personally posted my first link here on 23rd August. It has so far generated 2,314 referrals.

Here original novels do garner way more interest as compared to AnimeSuki. There is even a chance that original works get published on their main site.

These hardworking and good authors, will even get a share of the income generated by the site.

No, they didn't get a 'notable' because I want to rub them the right way :P Its because they have generated the most link referrals so far.


3. Royal Road Forums (Special thanks to superposhposh from Light Translations)

One of the biggest fan fiction/original sites on the planet earth.

Although I only posted this on the 15th of Sept, it is one of the reasons the numbers jumped recently.

Most guys here are experienced readers, and they can read your whole novel in one go.

Referrals to date are low compared to the above 2, only because of how recently I posted there. All 12 chapters of them :D

The formatting to include chapters is really weird, and I have to edit proper spacing between sentences. This is very time consuming, and it needs to be done each time I post a new chapter there.


4. Reddit (needs no introduction - Highly recommended to start from here!)

What can I say, it encompasses every single thing on the planet earth. Although I feel in terms of fan fiction/originals, it still loses out to Royal Road.

BUT hold on, my first post on 20th Sept made that jump you see on the 21st of Sept (refer to image above). It went from 1500+ views to 3600+ in one day.

I did not post anything for the following day, and it still gained 3000+ page views.

Total link referrals in just these very short 3 days is 400+.

So I say once again, its a highly recommended place to post your novels/translations.


5. Misc. Forums that may help translations and other genre. (no links)

SPCNET.TV - Strong community of the Wuxia based genre here. They love their kung fu :D

Baka Tsuki - It would have been a good forum, if their registration isn't screwed up.




Feedback and comments (from a writer's/my point of view)

This is a very sensitive topic to some, and it could even lead to troll/flame wars on the forums/comment boxes. I sometimes engross myself in them, it can be fun to read :D hahhahaha :P

Do remember, that vast majority of the readers in these forums are not writers. But they will give all sorts of negative remarks, and even try to influence you to write the story their way.

That aside, there are also many creative and constructive comments, as well as kudos from readers.

You need to just filter out the unnecessary, and apply those necessary.

There are some chapters in my novel, that has been edited based on positive feedback from readers.

Some comments I have received so far:-

- If you do not do this and that, well I am not going to read your book anymore.
- Its so slow in the beginning, not worth my time.
- Well bye bye, dropping your book, cause you do not write in a style I like.
- Why did you have to do this?
- Not enough character growth.
- I have read the first few chapters, and can say your novel is sh*t.
- You should write like so and so, then you will get better.
- I have read everything (vol 1 and up to the latest chapter), you suck.
- Your synopsis is an abomination.
- MC too naive.
- I want romance (my view - of course :P )
- etc etc etc

You see where all these are heading?

Yup, basically most want a story to their taste. They somehow cannot accept that the novel is different and goes slow from the onset.

I am now in chapter 107 and a little more, for my notes and drafts, and only released a total of 40 chapters (Vol 1+ Vol 2 Chapter 7).

If I were to cater to their tastes, the story will become extremely repetitive in no time.

There are many LN and WN who become like this, and are soon dropped, as their content loses viewership and even the translators themselves get bored out of their minds.

While the customer (readers) is supposedly always right, you will kill yourself trying to entertain every comment/feedback, and apply them when writing your story.

An advice many well known authors, writers and even translator will give, is to focus on your work. Filter out the chaffs (thrash comment/feedback) and only apply those which really can help (proper discernment required).

There is no one, including myself, who can exactly tell you how to exercise proper judgement on these matter. Only time and experience will enable you to do so.





Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and earning from your novel/translation

Are you trying to earn from your blog/translation? It is not a crime and don't let anyone tell you it is.

When I started, I didn't even think about it, till my friend said "Hey you have XXXXX number of views, why not just get [fill in the blanks*] and have it displayed on your blog?"

*e.g. Adsense, WordAds, Medianet, etc.

It makes sense, but does it?

If you can make money to cover the cost of hosting the site, sure.

Will it generate enough income to survive just by blogging/writing/translating? It depends.

If what you are writing is good (no I am not saying mine is :P )  or what you are translating is good, you will. But those that achieve this, are a very tiny percentage, in comparison to the vast amount of people who are doing it.

On the other hand, it also depends on how well you 'market' it. You can write/translate the best story/stories in the entire universe, but without linking it to anywhere else, it is as good as invisible.

Plus, you need to know how to tag your blog/site. I somehow did it accidentally, and I am still not sure how it happened. Perhaps searching the web on this topic will give you a better explanation.

For example, Myth: Legend is ranked 2 on Google for 'Myth Xianxia' searches.



I will not be able to SEO the tag 'Myth', as there is just too many well established sites, who have it a way longer duration.

On the other hand 'xianxia' doesn't return any search results as well, as it is similar to 'Myth'. There are just too many older well established sites who already have it SEO-ed.

But if you are looking for a xianxia novel, containing the word myth, then it definitely shows up.

There have been 129 searches so far that led to my blog.



Ok so what does all these means?

The first thing that comes to mind, is viewership, 129 referrals from search engines may not seem like much.

However lets say 50% of them were looking for it on purpose, while the others on accident. This gives about 65 actual readers.

There is a 50% chance they may not like what they read, and only about 32 remains.

32 readers is negligible to the bigger blogs out there, but it still goes a long way. Why?

32 readers will read 40 of my current chapters, this will translate to 1280 views alone! Sure some of you will be like, 129 searches and only 32 reader? So what?

Yes, to you it may be a 'so what?', but according to articles on SEO, the more referrals by link from search engines to your website, improves your search rankings! Amazing right?!

The 129 searched have made my blog ranked no. 2. Its only 129 of them, and imagine how much more benefit if the numbers were to be increased.

If its a way larger number, other tags in your blog may even be ranked higher.

So lets say my blog has over tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of searches, I need not rely on 'myth xianxia' alone to generate search results. Any tag I put on my blog, will turn out results on the first page of the search engines.

Of course, with that said, it may never happen, or take a lifetime. But who knows one of you out there will be good enough to achieve this! :D

Then with reference to the above segment <Forums and how they helped>, it adds to a pretty neat amount of viewers. This is what I mean by 'market' it.

Then how does this relate to earning?

Well, once the numbers improves, you get visible ad revenues. If your viewers like what they see, they have no problems coming back or clicking on affiliated links (5 seconds wait, e.g. Adfly).

Ad revenue generators like Google Adsense for one, require certain criteria to be fulfilled. This includes content quality, and number of site hits.

It doesn't translate to mean the more content the merrier, but in actuality it means how much hits you get per content.

I am shifting over to here (blogger.com) to get this exact criteria fulfilled. I will be going a little more on this later.

In the meantime, some good blogs, gets a few hundred thousand to millions of hits per content/review/posts/page/etc. These is similar to what they mean, although perhaps not on such an enormous scale.

Before I get derailed, the point is, earnings are basically from sources similar to them.

Here is an info graph and earnings from Adfly for all seven chapters of Volume 2 of my novel. I started linking them shortly after the 18th of Sept.



In an earlier blog post (on WordPress), I mentioned how only an estimated 40% of hits on adfly get through, based on web browser ad-block.

Additionally, I realize just yesterday, that various Internet Service Providers (ISP) in some countries, auto blocks adfly from even showing ads. It is not browser base, and these reduces the hits by another 10% odd.

This goes to say that for every 100 actual clicks, only an estimated 30 clicks gain ad impressions.

But that's my diffculty, it will not be for you :D

So lets see, I have 500+ hits in 8 days (from 18th) making US$1.17. If you include those ad-blocked and ISP-blocked, it translates to 1600-1700+ actual hits.

So you can roughly make US$0.70 from 1000 hits on adfly, if you are like me, with an international audience.

Of course you can make way more in countries like the US and UK with the same number of hits. It is due to the higher payout rate for views there, as well as the 10% who will not get ISP-blocked like mine.

Since I only have 7 chapters linked, it will still be earning way less, as most of my total site views are inclusive of Volume 1 which are not linked.

I am not going to link them anytime soon, since its really a matter of principal.

On the other hand, having Google Adsense, solves most of this problem. Yes their payout may be low for my site, but it can be higher for yours. Unfortunately, I do not have experience with it.

As mentioned a little earlier, I need to qualify and be actually using it, before I can say for sure how effective it is.

But why does it actually solves the problem with Adfly?

Well, from what I can tell by searching the web, is that it is accessible worldwide. So the problem with Adfly, will mostly be irrelevant if I had Adsense on my blog.

Of course ad-block may still work on it, but I notice many Adsense ads still get through when I visit sites with it.

To cap it off, I will this part here, till I get more experience with Ad revenue.



Donations and asking for support

No new reader wants to read a novel that starts with, "Hey, you want to read? Wait 5 seconds before you can start" or "Donate for new chapter" or similar lines . They don't even know the story at all.

Its a different situation if they have read enough of your content, and already know when to exercise proper judgment if they want to support it.

This same method applies for most blogs/translations/etc, you do not want to scare your potential readers away right from the start.

I personally know a blog or two, that has comments on how the translator is pseudo demanding donations to sponsor a chapter. The commentator(s) made a very good point, the translation have not even reached 14 chapters.

But its all a matter of perception and the individuals prerogative.

Sometimes there is a very fine line between demanding donations and needing donations. You have to let your audience know why, and its better to be forthcoming, than to let it slip out some time in the future.

It becomes very apparent, when you start asking for support/donations frequently, and then drop your translation/story/novel when nothing happens.

But at the end of the day, donations are never easy to get for small sites, e.g. mine. Yes, there are donations once in a while, which is extremely appreciated. However it can never be better than finding other means of revenue, till you get 'famous' or so to speak.



In conclusion

Forums does help for beginner writers/translators, never neglect that.

And on the other hand if your aim is to gain monetarily, consider ad revenue first. Donations will come in time, and do some proper research.

Lastly, do not be a jerk/jerkess :P and demand donations right from the start for no reason or rhyme. Rome was not built in a single day.


Afterwords

This is all written as is, no intention to harm or cause shame to anyone or anything related to them.

Once again, it is written as a personal experience and shared without bias or prejudice. These views are learnt from many sources out there, and if any seem familiar to you, due credit is given to them.

I will not claim originality for this article, but I do give proper credits to the screenshots which belonged to the relevant party/parties mentioned.

At the end of it all, it is in my own personal opinion.




Cheerios and Regards
WT