When do you just accept a story is trash and give up on it?

[lilithfairenwrites]

A lot of the time while perusing sites like Tapas, I find plenty of stories with terrible grammar. Terrible writing. Terrible characterization. Plenty of subs.

Then I look to my own stories, ones I've spent years on refining and revising, and they have...nothing. No one posting comments. No one liking the chapters. Heck, barely anyone reading past the first chapter—42 reads for the first episode immediately drops to 8 for the second.

So maybe the problem isn't readers. Maybe the problem is I'm just a trash writer trying to push a trash story everywhere I can, unaware that anything I think is good is totally unlikeable by normal people.

So when do you realize a story is worthless garbage that isn't going to go anywhere? What do you do when something you've become so passionate about, something that's become a part of your heart, is just a festering tumour that should just be cut out so you can get to writing something anyone will give a crap about?

[CarltonIsaac]

You need to identify the tropes/quirks that sell in today's frightening market that ignores good grammar and writing for sensationalism and feels, and then force yourself to produce the same to make it work.

[MattRAuthor]

I know it's hard to ignore the numbers sometimes, but that's not what makes your story. Your book isn't trash, it's something you've put a lot of time and effort and love into. I wouldn't throw it away.
Impostor syndrome isn't fun, but there are things you can do about it. Chat with a writer friend if you have one, throw some ideas around with them. If the numbers are really getting you down, you can link your story in some of the self promo threads on here, it's a really good place to get readers.
Sometimes, the numbers being low isn't a result of you or readers, it's just bad luck. It can be hard to get noticed, especially when you put so much effort in, but like I said, link your stuff in threads on here, ask for feedback. If there is something off about your story, people will point it out for you. It takes a lot of time to get noticed sometimes.
Keep doing what you love and eventually you will find your audience, I promise

[KJBatson]

It helps if you ask friends what tropes they like in media. by adding those you can draw people in and suck them into staying with your talent

[CarltonIsaac]

Keep doing what you love and eventually you will find your audience, I promise

Ah, wishful thinking may have its good points, however adapting to the environment is a surer means of survival, as nature decrees.

[Crusoe]

Why give up on something you care about? If you're not writing to make ends meat, you have 0 obligation to write anything a big audience may enjoy more. Just focus on the few active subs you may have and write for yourself and for them.

[MattRAuthor]

But writing something that caters to someone else and not what you actually enjoy writing will eventually make you hate it. It's better to enjoy your hobby instead of forcing yourself to do something you hate

[CosmicLeon]

well, if people can't find your work, then they can't read it. Idk how much promoting you do for your comic, but that can be a part of it. comics/stories that typically do better are the ones who's artist/writers are more active on the forums, and other sites. getting the word out there. you might have an amazing work, but if no one can find it then its like that artifact in the museum's basement.
as far as people liking your story, I would say, if you like it, then someone else does as well.

[CarltonIsaac]

But writing something that caters to someone else and not what you actually enjoy writing will eventually make you hate it. It's better to enjoy your hobby instead of forcing yourself to do something you hate

The OPs concern is why their efforts were not cutting it in the market they are reaching for, so telling them to keep doing what doesn't work isn't sound advice. No one pays for goods or services they don't require.

[joannekwan]

It would help to identify who exactly you want to read your book. Unfortunately nothing can cater to everyone. This is a conundrum that marketers have faced for years: identifying your target audience and most importantly figuring out how to reach them.

Try posting to different sites, since different sites are populated by different audiences. Here on Tapas, a huge percentage of people seek romance of varying orientations. But on RoyalRoad, the predominant genre people favor is isekai/litrpg and romances pull weak numbers there.

And of course, the task no one can really escape: promotion. Get on social media, use relevant tags, and promote your work!

Also, ask yourself why you're writing in the first place. If your sole priority is to make money or get famous, then perhaps you should do some market research to find things you can implement to attract more readers. However, if it's a story that you love and it's an expression of your truest self and you don't want to bend to market demands, perhaps just writing it and completing it can be enough. People who make niche things have to understand it's a harder hill to climb and that creating the thing for the love of it is usually the first answer to "why?".

[Jenny-Toons]

And of course, the task no one can really escape: promotion. Get on social media, use relevant tags, and promote your work!

This was actually going to be my question for this thread:

How exactly have you been promoting your work and building a reputation as a creator? You've talked about refining your craft, but what have you done to get people to look at that quality?

Have you posted WIPs for people to see? Have you helped other creators and talked outside of your own work? Have you given suggestions on what you during the creative process?

These are just some things I've seen people do, including myself, and it seems to help them build up rep and gain trust from readers.

And before anyone tells me "well, just work in a popular genre, and you'll be set" -- No. Working in an overly saturated genre isn't a golden ticket. It might help along the way, but there's always someone doing the genre better than you. In fact -- if it's saturated, there might as well be 100 more people doing it better than you. So the question is always "why should I -- the reader -- pick your work and not someone else?"

Course, I'm not saying you aren't working hard or aren't trying to get eyes to your work. But I am curious as to how you're doing that and for how long you've been doing it. Even more curious as to if you've been doing the same promotional methods for a long period of time or have been switching different methods say, every other week.

Pretty sure your work isn't trash. A lot of good work didn't get the readership it deserved right away. Hell, some never do. And that comes down to promoting and giving people reasons to invest in the storyline.

[gmaximin]

I think the original post had a legitimate question everyone seem to have avoided: “when to give up”. To me giving up is not always such a disgrace, it can be very formative to acknowledge failure.
Me, I’d say that when your objective is out of reach... it’s time to step back (at least temporarily).

I do throw away a lot of projects, ideas, episodes, because I’m not good enough, or I don’t have the resources to make it acceptable to myself. Funny thing is that after some time (decades in some cases), ideas morphed and find their way back. Or just fall into oblivion...

I’m not saying you should give up, I’m saying it’s healthy to question your objective, see resources you have, what’s missing, and decide from there your next step: keep the way it is, keep but realign your resources and your objective, or kill the beast for now.

I’m probably not a good example, but I’m doing this all the time.

[essem]

I find plenty of stories with terrible grammar. Terrible writing. Terrible characterization. Plenty of subs.

In many walks of life, not simply in the arts, arguably it's unhelpful to confuse popularity with quality

[essem]

In answer to your question - are you clear why you started writing it? And is there justification for continuing? If the answer to either question is no, then kill your darling ...

[jcmraz]

This depends on your goals. If you're trying to refine your work then try something new when you finish or when you hit a story wall. Or when decide that you dislike the basic structure and plot of the story you're writing.

If your primary goal is to get engagement and clicks then you have to watch market trends and write based on that.

Now this is very important. A story not performing well due to market trends does NOT mean that it is garbage. It may mean that its readership is more niche or less popular on the whole. If you're passionate about a story then write it. Period. It will go slower but you'll be happier writing it. If you want more to write something that more people engage with then watch those market trends and tropes and try to find your place in that. Find something that you like writing that fits within those tropes and genres. If you can't then you have to make a choice about whether you want to enjoy writing or reach people.

[KJWhitten]

Excuse me what? Your first chapter alone is well written. What do you mean your trash? You're just writing a niche story for a niche audience. That's not a bad thing in my opinion, take it from me who is writing a niche story as well.

I would say giving up on a story happens when you constantly struggle to write a story or when you lose the passion to finish writing it. If you can't figure out what happens next, how to express your ideas in a way that makes sense then maybe its time to stop. While saying that, it takes a lot of trial and error to write better and better stories. What you may consider a failure is actually the next stepping stone to another story as each one is a learning experience that you can take with you.

A friend of mine told me that there is always one person out there no matter what that will absolutely love your story no matter what it is. I think it goes with the saying: "one man's trash is another mans treasure." Sure, some people hate the anime SAO or Fairy Tail but there are plenty who like it regardless of those who label it as trash.

[darthmongoose]

I read what you have written all the way through. I wasn't expecting something so well-written to have such a low sub-count.

I don't think the lack of subscribers is due to quality in this case. I'd put it down to a mixture of the following factors:

• GL is not a hugely popular genre compared to BL or Het romance, and sadly tends to be lacking in both readership and quality titles. Even if it was the most popular GL on the site, it'd still lag in subs behind BL and Romance titles. It's best not to compare your subs to stuff outside your genre. Take it from somebody drawing an action comic about mostly queer women
• The cover isn't particularly eyecatching. It's dominated by text in an overly-elaborate font that's hard to read on the smaller writing, and doesn't clearly illustrate what the story is about. If you could commission an artist to draw a cute cover, maybe a cute illo of Faye and Monara, I think that'd be money well spent.
• "Lady in a romance with a humanoid butterfly" is... very niche. Even when it's well-written. Even as a pretty hardcore Rosemary shipper myself (Kanaya and Rose from Homestuck) who doesn't mind fics that explore the dynamic of that alien-human relationship and how they understand each other's physiology and culture, found that Monara having like... four arms and antennae and being covered in fur and stuff was a little too alien for me to not be like... "okay I can't relate to finding this physically attractive". I think if Monara was a little bit more human-like, the romance would be easier to get into.
• I'm about an hour's worth of reading into your book and nothing has really happened yet? I guess maybe this is just how slow-burn romances are, and maybe I'm not a good person to criticise a slow burn romance because I don't particularly like the genre, but I'd be more into it if I felt like there was some kind of stakes or and/or a conflict set up. The most interesting things have been the mentions of the characters former lives as Magical Girls, and Caitlyn's PTSD that causes her to be unfortunately outsider-phobic. Again, maybe it's a personal thing, but I feel like the story would be improved if there was a bit more tension and excitement.

[scribesunlimited]

When we turned the first page of "50 Shades of Grey".

No, kidding aside, If you've run out of ideas for it, or you're seeing something similar to what you've created already out there, or the characters just no longer mesh. When you don't care about the characters, the story is dead 100%.
That's why we view characters as so important. Refer to our character sheet post to help make memorable, believable, and fascinating characters people will fall in love with.

Allow us to share one of our favorite tools for writing about and describing characters. Your goal obviously is to visualize near-perfectly how your characters will look - but there's a lot more to do. So here’s a very useful character sheet that should enable you to really know your people inside and out. Name: Obvious. What's in a name? And you'd be surprised how hard it is to come up with. the name means something to you. Giving your character a name gives it life, and you can then create f…

Insignificant Otters | Tapas

Island Girls | Tapas

[HGohwell]

You've also not been posting that long and post very regularly. It can take months, even years to get up to a decent number of reads and views. Yes, you can't just use wishful thinking forever, but novels are even harder than comics and honestly, your first episode was less than a month ago. Maybe you're expecting returns too quickly. There's no overnight around here and if there is, you should buy a lottery ticket too. A month might as well be overnight around here.

But the answer to the actual question of when, is when you're ready. You can keep producing out of love and know that in time people may find your audience, but also if you feel like it's not going to get anywhere, don't keep going. Creating is a personal thing. Some people will just keep going and some people will stop quickly, some people in the middle.

And yeah, you're writing a niche story for a small audience. I think I bought this up last time you asked about why you didn't have as many views and subs as you wanted. Magical girls appeal to magical girl fans, magical girl novels are a hard sell and more mature magical girls that break a lot of magical girl conventions is an even harder sell. You can't have everything.

[dewarcomics]

Comparing yourself to others can be a double edge sword. It can motivate you but it can also demoralize you.

Creating a comic is hard work. Making sure it's good makes it even harder. You got to make sure that the story you're making is something you are truly passionate about. Something that by impulse you have to make, no matter if people read it or not. If you really think deep down you got an awesome story just continue to work on it. The reality is that readers will eventually find good stories.

You also got recognize that good ideas never truly go away. maybe you got a good concept but you still got to work on how to deliver that in a digestible way that people will find palatable.

There is a trap of having a really good concept but no story.

Bottom line my opinion is to not worry about all the numbers. It's easy to psych yourself out. because what's the alternative? Making something by the numbers of what's popular, but you yourself don't enjoy? Even then there isn't the guarantee that it will get immediate recognition. So do what YOU truly feel like creating. Stay true to yourself.

Good luck and keep creating what you enjoy~
- Yan