Reading, Reviewing, and Lurking

I was thinking about this the other day and thought that this blog might be a good place to talk about it, since it's directly fanfic-related.  More than once, especially in the Darkwing Duck fandom, I've been surprised to find that my fics are being read and enjoyed by as many people as they are.  I had a bit of that in the Voltron fandom, too, actually.

In the latter, I would hardly get any reviews. I know that was in part because of the subject matter (I wrote for a less popular pairing and even more unpopular fringe bad guy characters, and didn't write the pairing that appealed to 90% of the fandom) and in part because I would wait until a fic was complete and then post all of it at once.  Apparently people don't want to gamble on a 30,000 word fic that's brand new and read it all at once.  And here I'd adopted that policy for that fandom because I remember getting heat for not completing WIPs back in the Thundercats fandom!  You can't please everyone is the lesson there, I guess.

Anyway, when I got into the Darkwing Duck fandom, I went back with posting WIPs.  Not only did I get way more reviews and readers, I also had the benefit of not having to wait so long for feedback.  Feedback along the way really does help motivate me.

So since Darkwing Duck is the fandom where I've gotten the most reviews and active amount of feedback (aside from way back in the early days of the Thundercats fandom, but I don't count that because all of fandom culture was so different back then, with no fanfiction.net and all fics on fan sites and mailing lists) I'm not complaining about a lack of reviews.  The feedback I'm getting here is the most I've gotten in any fandom, and for that I'm quite grateful!

That said, I still never thought all that many people read my fanfic and every time someone who's never left me a single review makes a reference to me as a good writer or something from my stories that they liked, either on a message board post, comment on DA, or PM or something, and it floors me, because they never left me a single review.

I'm one of those people that never assumes that a given fandom population has read my stuff.  Perhaps it comes from writing fringe or less popular characters in other fandoms for so long. (In Thundercats as well as Voltron, my favorite subjects to write about were not the most popular characters.)  Do most authors tend to assume that people have read their stuff and just not commented?  Me, I tend to think if they didn't comment they either A) Didn't read it or B) Had nothing particularly nice to say about it so they didn't bother to review.  And let's face it, my ego would rather believe it's A anyway. ;)

I suppose that's because when I read stories, I try to leave a review if I liked it in any way.  Reviews are like little gold nuggets to authors.  I've yet to meet any that don't like getting them, aside from those whackadoo entitled folks you see posting on places like fanficrants where they bitch about how the reviews of "I liked it" or with netspeak are insulting to them and they'd rather not have them. Or reviews that are just spam or something, of course.

However, I generally don't leave bad reviews.  I've left a couple of critical ones in my time, but they were when something was just so terrible that I had to speak up.  On the rare occasion that I do leave something negative, I try to be polite and constructive about it.  More often than not, though, I'd rather not bother, because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or get a knee-jerk "you suck" flame response back.

So with this in mind, it always comes as a surprise to me when someone mentions how much they liked my story/stories if they've never left me a review.  Do any of you get feelings like this?  Or if you are one of those people who tends not to review stories, even ones you enjoy, what are your reasons for it?  I'm curious.