#27 — The art of commenting — a collaborative series with Grandma Smillew, Debdutta Pal, and R C Hammond

Hey, Comments Drive Total Views!

Great news, writers, but with a pretty significant caveat

We recently learned from Grandma Smillew that our View statistics include our comments, also known as responses.

Grandma suggested that an unexplained bump in your stats might be driven by a response that has generated a lot of attention.

If there was ever a reason to invest a little time in your comments, this would be it.

• Forget about showing the story author respect
• Never mind demonstrating that you’re smart, which is what we otherwise assume is the purpose of all comments
• And heaven forbid that you write a comment with the selfish thought of leveraging the principle of reciprocity to encourage someone to read your work

No, my new favorite reason to comment preposterously well is to drive the View and Read stats of my own comments.

There’s just one problem: response math is not on our side.

Think about it. Every comment string eventually comes to an end. That means the last response gets zero response.

Not only that but if you go beyond two comment responses in an exchange, the responses are hidden from easy view. A reader needs to click to see the full chain, and most readers won’t.

And worst of all, not all readers read all comments. The more popular a story, the more readers and comments. But few readers take the time to read every comment, particularly when there are a lot of them.

To see how the math works for you, have a look at your own stats for responses. I’ll wait.

• You’ll see a long string of responses that have 0, 1, or 2 Views and Reads. Hardly the stuff of statistic legends.
• Sure, every now and then there’s an outlier. A comment that got 10 or more sets of eyeballs.

Before you go celebrating your success, keep in mind that your comments on others’ stories help THEM not you. More read time on their story, great. That’s not what you were after.

Now contrast this with what happens on the actual stories you write.

Your stories retain forever the ability to attract a new reader or comment. Just look at how many of your old stories are still generating income.

When it comes to comments on your own stories, everything you can do to keep readers there longer is to your benefit.

The obvious lesson: save your effort for the comment section on your own stories.

Be well.

For more insights on how to use comments to achieve world domination, check out the full series.