squigglydigglydoo:

lnicol1990:

marveloznerd:

steverogersnotebook:

alphaflyer:

thebibliosphere:

niuniente:

l0chn3ss:

ilarual:

makapedia:

kind of tempted to leave a review every time i go through someone’s ff.net/ao3 and reread everything but i also dont want to freak people out with the wave of emails

Please for the love of god do this. In the last… oh, I don’t know, seven-ish years since I first discovered fandom, the culture has made a huge shift. It used to be that, whether you yourself wrote any fic or not, you reviewed every goddamn chapter of every goddamn fic that you read. Usually in detail. And plenty of people (myself included, at times) would leave a review on every chapter even if there were already twenty or thirty chapters in the fic before I ever stumbled upon it.

But we’ve moved away from that. Now, plenty of authors (particularly those who aren’t Big Name Fans) practically have to beg for reviews to get even a small amount of acknowledgement, and that’s not fair. The SE fandom is better about it than plenty of others I’ve been in, but we’re not immune either.

So if you wanna go all out and leave ALL OF THE REVIEWS… I say do it.

D O IT

I’LL JOIN YOU

I remember the time with a custom to REVIEW EVERY SINGLE CHAPTER YOU READ AND GIVE FEEDBACK TO AUTHOR IN DETAIL. In less than 10 years it has changed to “I consume but don’t interact” (why? what has given peeps the belief that authors don’t want to have comments and feedback from you? That leaving your comment is “bothering” them and they think you are stupid? WHERE DOES THIS SILLY IDEA COME FROM?)

Let’s bring it back, the habit to comment plenty!

You can always tell when, shall we say, someone Slightly older discovers your fic, because not only do you get hits, you actually get kudos and what can only be described as a Review at the end of each chapter. Usually followed by a question because they Want to engage. They Want you to know they enjoyed your thing and want to read more from you.

I can’t tell you how discouraging it is for some of my work to have literal actual thousands of hits and 10 kudos and 0 comments. And then people who have never left a single note of their presence come into my messages months later like “hey you’re my fave writer why did you stop :(”

Because. It. Feels. Like. No. One. Gives. A. Shit.

Nothing makes an author’s day faster than seeing that someone is reading a whack of their stories in a row, or re-reading one, because coming back for more is the best compliment we can possibly get.  But we only know that is happening if you leave kudos or comments!  So, go for it.  Feedback is love!

I recently had somebody go through, binge-reading all of one of my fics, and leaving comments on each chapter, and I looked forward to tracking their progress.

^^^ nothing makes my day like a comment, even if it’s only a couple of words. Seriously. And there is absolutely no greater compliment than reading a fic more than once because we know there’s so much other stuff out there.

You really don’t know how important this is until it’s not there.

Seeing people write reviews for every chapter means something. Seeing people engage with what you’ve written means something. Reading people’s thoughts on what has happened and their eager questions for what happens next…

It all means something. And seeing that engagement can be all the encouragement a person needs to continue their work. No one likes to feel like they’re throwing their hard work (yes, even that vampire, coffee house AU slash-fic) into some uncaring abyss.

This also counts for musicians and artists too, I’m sure.

This goes for EVERY KIND OF ART. I go through the tags of my recent art on the daily. On YouTube, I still read the comments, though I know I’m not supposed to.

Creators LOVE it when you interact with their work. PLEASE – if you love it, don’t be afraid to say so.