How to Get More Views and Reviews on Your Fan Fiction: Introduction

No matter the reason you started writing or how long ago you began, you probably get a little thrill every time someone favourites, follows, and/or reviews one of your stories. Everyone wants to feel appreciated, and fanfiction writers are no different.

The trouble arises when those much anticipated and appreciated views and reviews don’t come. You start asking yourself what you did wrong, what you could do better, and maybe you even lose faith in yourself and your writing.

The goal of this article is to 1) tell you not to lose faith, 2) explain why, and 3) give you some hints that might up the view and review counts on your stories.

Why You Shouldn’t Lose Faith Because of a Lack of Reviews:

On average, stories in the Harry Potter fandom get 6 reviews. That’s across the board—every genre, language, pairing, word count, etc. Six reviews is this fandom’s middle ground. It doesn’t seem like a lot, especially when you see that the most reviewed story of the fandom has 39,000 reviews and counting.

You can double-check this if you want.

• Open fanfiction.net and go to browse.
• Pick a fandom.
• Filter the stories as you please but make sure to sort by reviews.
• Go to the last page to see how many pages there are in total.
• Divide that number by two.
• Click on the URL bar. At the very end of the link, you’ll see p=#.
• Replace the number with the halved result you got and click enter. That’ll take you to the page of stories getting the median number of reviews for your chosen fandom.

Example:

Browse > Books > Harry Potter

Filter:

• Sort: REVIEWS
• Time Range: All
• Genre (A): All
• Genre (B): All
• Rating: K → T
• Language: English
• Length: <5K words
• Status: Complete
• World: All
• All characters (A)
• All characters (B)
• All characters (C)
• All characters (D)

Apply > Last (page) = p#8572

8572/2=4286

Original link: https://www.fanfiction.net/book/Harry-Potter/?&srt=3&lan=1&r=103&len=51&s=2&p=8572

Change it to: https://www.fanfiction.net/book/Harry-Potter/?&srt=3&lan=1&r=103&len=51&s=2&p=4286

Result: 4 reviews

For completed stories, rated K to T, written in English, with a word count that’s inferior to 5,000 words, the median number of reviews is 4.

There’s no way of telling how many views all those stories have, but when I first wrote this article, I had three fics in this range with that number of reviews (I then took my advice, followed the steps I’ll be explaining in the rest of these articles, and my review count went up, so there is some success to be found with this). Let’s look at those three stories.

Story A: 

• published: 23/08/2019
• main characters: Hermione, Harry, Ron, Death
• genre: drama/angst
• rated: T
• word count: 2,469
• views: 632

Story B:

• published: 19/02/2020
• main characters: Sirius, Regulus, Walburga
• genre: family/adventure
• rated: K
• word count: 1,032
• views: 93

Story C: 

• published: 08/05/2020
• main characters: Harry, Draco, Teddy
• genre: family/friendship
• rated: K+
• word count: 1,754
• views: 182

93–632 is a pretty wide range in the number of views, yet each story was reviewed four times. Does that mean that Story B is better than the other two because the review to view ratio is the smallest? Is Story A better because more people read it? Perhaps Story A only has more views because it’s older or because it was posted on the right day of the week at the right time.

I can’t answer those questions (if you can, let me know). The thing to remember is that the worth of your story can’t be judged based on the number of reviews it gets, and you can’t compare that number to the review counts of the most popular stories in the fandoms you write for.

Keep in mind that readers rarely review. That’s just how it is, and nothing will change it. No amount of begging for reviews or increasing the quality of your work will get your stories reviewed by readers who aren’t in the habit of leaving comments (i.e. the majority of readers), so lower your standards.

Now, it is possible to get dozens, hundreds, thousands of reviews. Keeping in mind that there are a lot of variables, most of which can’t be predicted, I’ve found a few things that do help, and I’ll be telling you about them in future articles.