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Lol! Me, too. I'm like, "Done editing! What? It's two in the morning on a Wednesday??? Hm... Eh, whatever. *posts*"

No. Your method makes more sense to me in order to maximize views, but like you said it's kinda hard to do that during summer break. If I post on Monday or any weekday, I'm most likely alienating the working crowd. If I post on Saturday, the odds are that people are out partying or doing something else because it's summer. If I post on Sunday, I could be losing out on viewers who are religious (at least in the US). So, there really isn't a specific day to optimize views during the summer because, like you said, there's not really a set schedule with school (middle school, high school, college). But what I've found in the summer is that no matter what day I post, I get the highest number of views on the day that I post. Whereas during school, I get the most views on the weekend even if I post during the week.

I feel the need to amend my statement. "But what I've found in the summer is that no matter what day I post, I get the highest number of views on the day that I post if FFnet's system isn't down." You see, I updated yesterday and didn't receive the usual alert telling me that my story has a new chapter. The alert didn't come until today. Still, it's usually the case during summer break that "if you post it, they will read it."

emotion_brofist
Yes, so you aren't lame in the slightest for trying to find a method to garner more hits on your story. Notice that I say hits and not reviews. I don't know about you, but as long as I'm getting hits on my story I don't mind the lack of reviews. Especially since a lot of readers either don't have an account or are squeamish about leaving reviews for whatever reason.

Oh my gosh... Don't even get me started on the "hostage story" thing. I have taken entire stories off of my favorites/alerts list and removed authors from my favorite authors list because I was so turned off from reading the story or anything written by the author due to the author taking their greediness for reviews so far that they refused to update unless they received X amount of reviews. I mean, are you freaking kidding me? Begging or demanding reviews is the easiest way to get me to not leave a review.

I'm going to leave that subject behind already because I can go on forever about it... I have seen what you mentioned: loads of reviews but they're all negative. But I have also seen loads of good reviews but some are clearly manufactured by the author using obvious mule accounts and/or anonymous reviews. The latter annoys the everloving ******** out of me, mostly because I feel stupid for buying into the ruse until I actually do a bit of digging.

There are a few fandoms that have this type of thing in surplus and what really, really annoys me about it is that it turns me into a complete conspiracy theorist because then I start to doubt every gushingly positive review. And even the anonymous flames become suspicious because I've come across some cases where they're completely fabricated by the author to stir up a bit of drama and get themselves some sympathy reviewers. It's enough to make you neurotic. emotion_facepalm

Yeah, I thought it was insane. My first thought was, "No, c'mon Crow. No one has time for that." But then I started noticing similarities in the "troll's" writing style and the author's and also how the account was obviously a mule (i.e., it didn't take the time to put up an avatar, the favorite author/story lists were empty, the bio was bare, and the account was only active at its creation and posting of the flame).

I thought it was a really far-fetched theory because I personally don't have the time to make multiple emails and accounts since I find that process tedious and I'm a bit like an oldster in that I can't keep up with more than two emails (one for business and one for FFnet, Gaia, Steam, and my other haunts). So I brought up to the author that I thought it was a little weird that the troll only ever attacked that one particular story. The author and I had been speaking with each other fairly regularly since I read their story, but after I made that comment the author completely stopped responding to me.

It's far more common for authors (especially new ones) to anon review their own stories to beef up the review count. I personally don't see what one would gain from doing that since it seems rather sad to praise your own story, but to a lot of writers the number of reviews is all that matters. Like you said, it should be about quality of reviews and not quantity. But not a lot of writers think that way. It seems that the growing misconception is lots of reviews = awesome/popular story

That sounds... rather annoying. I've never really had anyone to "compete" with, per se, but I do understand the problem. For what it's worth, I'm glad that you don't really experience that issue anymore. The lesson about reviews is one that not everyone learns. It took me a little while to learn, but I didn't have the "Oh, you've only got...?" statement thrown at me from friends. In fact, the closest I ever got to that was reviewers saying, "Wow, this story has only...?" which was always a stab of annoyance at my ego back when that sort of thing still mattered to me. Now it's completely different statements that annoy me. neutral