Data analysis: comments on cross-posted entries

I still haven't finished any new Doctor Who fic, but of the three I'd already written, one had only been posted to Teaspoon and ff.net, and there were at least a handful of LJ communities to which I could post the other two that I hadn't done before. So that's what I did, and now I have some new comments to analyze.

To No Splendid Phoenix Wings:
rose_cat: Awesome! It's like being in his skin and, well, burning with him ;) I just recently saw CIN for the first time, and your last two paragraphs really capture the pain he clearly feels when Rose rejects him. Very nice work :)
Pinchin_lane: Gorgeous. Very well done. :)
lorelaisquared: Awwww this is lovely and beautiful and achingly sad all at once. Nicely done.
helygen: This is excellent, a very nice look into the process and his thoughts :)
amberite: I really felt that one. Well done.
jennytork: Absolutely brilliant!
quean-of-swords*: Oooh... Nice!
the-10thdoctor: Beautiful. Absolutely perfect.
ssshunt: Oh this is very nice. I really loved it. Very well done.
goodbye2spices: This is wonderful. What an insightful glimpse into the process of regeneration and beautifully written as well. Just lovely :)

To The Lost Boy:
cecilegrey: *squee* Teddy and the Doctor! I love it! Awesome fic.
Gioia: Loved it!!!
ZiggyChaos: Brilliant! More, please?
faeriemaiden**: okay, i just re-read your fic and flailed all over myself. ALKSHDHG TEN. how is your ten so perfect, seriously.

To Too Close to the Moon:
michele72: This is well done despite the built-in impediments (which I see why you just handwaved away). The parallels between Lupin and the Doctor are nicely observed, and you do a very good job with the Doctor's voice.***
dariclone: Aww, very nice. I'm not a huge Reamus/Tonks fan, but I love this a lot. So true to the characters from both series' and I love how the action in the TARDIS takes place.
quean-of-swords: I like this! Nice parallels between Rose and Tonks. Lupin and Ten; two of my favorite characters in one place. Well done. ^^
torn-eledhwen: Excellent - great characterisation and I liked the plot. It's difficult, I think, to cross a fandom like DW where the Doctor's explicitly stated that magic doesn't exist, with HP, but it works here.
ffutures: Nice - I would have liked to see the other story.
jellocomics: I love this fic. It's got just the right amount of detail- things like Rose's accent, references to Harry Potter, and how Tonks and Rose are similar. And the romance was so subtle! :)


Notes:
* Quean-of-swords first found this LJ when I cross-posted "Too Close to the Moon"; she read more of my fic then and friended me, so she got to "No Splendid Phoenix Wings" that way rather than from one of the places I cross-posted it.
** Faeriemaiden is a close friend of mine and has been for about seven years, so she's very familiar with me and my writing.
*** Posted after I wrote this reply to an earlier comment by torn-eledhwen:

Yeeeeah, for this particular story I just decided, what the heck, I'll ignore that inconvenience since I didn't have time to address it. >_< In a fairly epic crossover I haven't written yet, though, Ten sort of keeps an eye on Teddy as he's growing up (which eventually results in them going back in time and Teddy saving his parents, which would be a major problem except it turns out they weren't really supposed to die because...something, somebody else tweaked the timeline so they would, I don't know exactly, haven't figured it all out yet), and at one point Teddy finds the whole Harry Potter series in the Doctor's library. I'm not totally sure how the Doctor will handwave this, but it'll have something to do with the fact that, well, it doesn't matter all that much that you're in a book, Teddy, because nobody's 100% in control of their lives and does it really matter whether you attribute that to fate or God or an author or chance or something? Teddy's like 13 at this point so he pretty much just accepts this explanation with a shrug, because really, what are you going to do? Although he does wonder whether Remus knew about the books, and Ten says no, Remus was already way too into existential angst and this wouldn't have helped. >_< So...yeah.

Points to consider for analysis:
-differences in comments between crossovers and oneshot--crossovers require a level of familiarity with two fandoms and canons rather than just one, and they tend to be longer and more complicated due to the difficulty of reconciling two canons that may or may not be compatible with each other. A reader's enjoyment of a crossover therefore depends on whether they're part of the fandoms in question, how far they're willing to suspend their disbelief, and how good the author is at reconciling those fandoms. Some readers just don't like crossovers on principle (although this can also be nice, because I've had a few commenters specifically say they dislike crossovers but enjoyed mine) or might take issue with how the fandoms are crossed. All of this results in a smaller readership pool for my crossovers to begin with.
-short vs. long stories, especially since there seems to be some direct correlation there--really long fics presented in one go (evidence A: my Sarah Jane Adventures crossover, which has been posted--unedited, essentially as one chunk rather than a multi-chapter fic--in more than one place) get no comments. Long fics broken into chapters and posted serially tend to get a lot, at least based on others' observations--I have none of these yet so I can't judge that personally. Fics that are too short don't get much, but there seems to be a sweet spot that garners the most (and least critical?) comments. "No Splendid Phoenix Wings" appears to hit that spot, especially with this set of cross-posts--but then, of the three fics, it was the one I posted to the most communities at one time, and "The Lost Boy" also appeared to hit this sweet spot based on the comments it received when it was first posted.
-how many new places I cross-posted, and which comments came from where--that's a little trickier, because all my cross-postings just directed people back to the original posting in my personal journal, meaning I don't have a way of easily seeing on which community each commenter found my fic. I can tell which communities each reader is a member of from their Livejournal profiles, however, which lets me make a reasonable guess, and the question is relevant for a number of reasons. Some communities are more active than others, meaning more people are likely to come across my fic, but it's also more likely to be buried more quickly below more recent posts; some are more specific than others, meaning those who come across my fic are more likely to be familiar enough with the fandom to read it (Doctor Who-specific communities rather than general-fic, or crossover-specific communities, or even a couple communities devoted to Doctor Who crossovers), but the more specific the community, the smaller it's generally likely to be. The crossovers can be posted to slightly more places--communities dedicated to Doctor Who and those dedicated to Harry Potter, rather than just one or the other--but they do have the limitations mentioned above.
-oddly, "The Lost Boy" originally got the most attention--including my first fic award--and continues to (it's still getting faved and reviewed on fanfiction.net, for instance), but in this particular go-round, it got the least number of comments. This may be due to the fact that, of the three, it had been cross-posted to the greatest number of communities previously and was therefore posted to the fewest additional communities this time. I've found a few other places to post it, though, so that may change.

All these variables mean a lot more data just from these comments than I realized I had in the first place, so I'm actually putting together a table to see if I can draw any correlations--it's not very scientific, but it might be interesting to see whether the number and kind of comments left on these three fics fall into classes by length, type, etc. I'm also including the gender of the commenter, something that can typically be determined from user profiles if it's not explicitly stated, to see if there are similarities by gender, although that may be a bit pointless since the majority of online fandom--particularly the parts of fandom that write fanfic--seems to be female anyway.

Chosen research site

After looking around at the sites I was considering, I've picked Gallifrey Base--ff.net is called the Pit of Voles for a reason, and though I (and many very good writers) do use it as a fic repository, I suspect the quality of discussion in its forums would be...well, fairly low. The LJ community would likely have a better level of discussion, as well as a wide range of fannish behavior/activities to observe and participate in, but because it's a blog community rather than a traditional forum, its organization is likely to be more hit-or-miss--with a community that big, keeping up with tagging posts and adding them to memories (the only real ways of organizing posts in Livejournal) would be difficult, so participating or getting a feel for the site as a whole would be harder.

Gallifrey Base, though, is an enormous forum for the Doctor Who fandom with dozens of subforums on virtually every conceivable topic of discussion. Members can post different kinds of fanwork (fanart, mixes, fic, roleplaying games, vids), discuss the old and new shows and all their accompanying spinoff media, speculate on future developments, and so on. I expect to see other common hallmarks of fandom there as well, such as image macros, fandom-specific language and slang, and shipping discussions if not outright ship wars (I imagine the moderators do a fairly good job of keeping that down, but it's possible to discuss shipping in a civil manner, as well as to discuss fanwank going on in other corners of the fandom without actively participating in it). The forum has thousands of members and almost all of its subforums appear to update daily, indicating a very active community. I'm not sure what the general demographic of the users is, although with so many users, it probably covers a fairly wide range.

Having recently joined this particular forum does put me in a slightly odd position--I've been in the Doctor Who fandom for at least two years now, and a member of fandom in general for at least five years. I'm familiar with fandom conventions and with many of the conventions specific to the Doctor Who fandom, although less so than with others because the show itself stretches over such a long period of time (including Old Who and New Who, it's one of the longest-running shows in history, going almost unbroken from the 1960s to today) and gets even more complicated when you factor in all the spinoff media--novels, comics, specials, audios, semi-affiliated alternate-universe worlds, additional spinoff shows and their spinoff media, and so on. I'm not familiar with the entire range of the fandom, so while I'm not an outsider in that sense, I'm not an insider in the same way someone who has watched the entire run of the series from the beginning would be. In addition, I joined Gallifrey Base very recently, after I came across it in a Google search when I was trying to determine my options for this project, and to one extent or another, all forums and other corners of fandom have their own specific conventions and quirks with which I'll be unfamiliar. In some ways, I'll have the simultaneous experience of being an insider and a newbie (though not, I hope, a n00b).

As for my own participation, I'll begin simply by browsing the forum and lurking a bit to see what sorts of discussions are going on and what the particular rules are, after which I'll participate in the discussions as they interest me (and with a new season of The Sarah Jane Adventures airing next month, Doctor Who specials with the last of David Tennant's run coming up soon, and the Eleventh Doctor starting up next year, I imagine there'll be a lot to talk about). I've also written a few Doctor Who fanfics and crossovers, so I'll post some existing fic for feedback and work on creating new fanfic, as well as giving feedback for fanworks that others have posted.