“You’re...sensational.” bella

wait, do people find this offensive? What?

13%, 21%, a whooping 30%, 15%, 21% again. and those are the stories that do well.

it’s almost like tumblr has a reblog button you could USE

LIKE IT? REBLOG IT!

look, i don’t give a fuck about money. i’m writing fic for fun. if you wanna throw a billion dollars at me, sure, you do you.

but literally all i want, all we all want, is for our stuff to be acknowledged. spread. REBLOGGED. 

because obviously you read it and liked it, right?

so now all you have to do is hit that little button. it looks a little like this

and then that’s that. 

or, on ao3, you write “i really liked this! thank you for sharing!”. and that’s that.

it takes absolutely ZERO EFFORT, and it makes you happy (because you liked what you just read) and it makes us happy (because our work can get potentially more readers), and everyone is happy.

and instead, there’s likes all around. 

and likes are a little like seeing someone having their arms full with things and they drop their keys and you walk past and say “hey dude, i hope that works out for you!”

writers spend hours, even days and weeks or months on fics, pouring ourselves into it, forgoing sleep and food sometimes just to finish something because we hope you’ll like it.

and we get a litte ❤️ for our troubles and that’s it.

and especially when you get statistics like above - 42 likes and 9 reblogs - it feels like a kick to the face. 

if every writer only wrote for themselves (”as you’re supposed to do uwu”), there wouldn’t be a single fic out there, because we’d keep all the fics. but we write for our audience too, hoping we’ll hear back, hoping people will spread our fics, “hey, look at this cool thing i read!”.

and that doesn’t happen.

so you start thinking “hey, maybe i shouldn’t publish this. it’s bad anyways, right? and it doesn’t make a difference if i do. it’s not like anyone cares.”

how many thousands and thousands of words for your favorite ship do you think are out there, saved on hard drives by authors who’ve given up wishing to publish their things, because “nobody cares.”

reblogging and commenting seems to be at an all time low at the moment. and you know what happens when you, the supplier, feel like there’s no demand out there? 

you stop supplying.

because nobody cares enough to want to share it.

“thoughts and prayers with your fic! it was so good!” that’s what the like button means, to make an extreme comparison here.

and honestly, i don’t understand why.