I just put “Send in the Clone” in the queue at Literotica. There’s been a two-day lag in posting for quite some time now, so I expect it to go live there on Wednesday. With that in mind, I’ll submit it to Storiesonline on Tuesday night.
If the Lit posting goes up earlier, or gets marked for an earlier posting ( sometimes stories are pre-approved ) I’ll adjust my SOL submission accordingly.
This was written for a contest at Lush, but I think I may stop entering there. Most of the recent entries haven’t even managed to qualify. I tend to get exactly 9 votes, which is one short.
I’ve really seen no benefit of entering the contests there. It doesn’t increase readership the way the Lit contests do. If anything, it seems to keep people from voting because they’re participating in the contest, or a moderator charged with narrowing down the field, etc.
It’s getting to the point where posting there at all isn’t worth the effort. Even a good showing is less than 30 votes now that they’ve disabled anonymous voting, and anonymous comments have never been allowed. So, I’m getting very little feedback there.
The overall readership has plummeted since they got rid of the incest category as well. On the day they abolished the category, they had an Alexa world rank of 5362. Today, that rank has nosedived to to 8121, and is on the verge of dropping below ASSTR again.
If conditions don’t improve, I may not bother with Lush any longer. The submission form is annoying to me because it won’t recognize my italics from Wordperfect, forcing me to go through and manually put them into every story. I do that for Lit as well by adding the tags, but I can do that in the document before submission. I have to do it in the submission window at Lush.
I’m also not getting any referral traffic from Lush. I’ve always had constant referrals from Lit, SOL, and even Lit’s forum, but lately, Lush isn’t even showing up on the radar. Even Facebook and Twitter send more eyes to my site than Lush, and I don’t really post or tweet there that often.
The effort vs. reward is rapidly deteriorating. As it stands right now, if I do decide to drop Lush, I’ll probably leave everything up there and simply stop posting new stories. There have been some troubling things coming from management/moderation in the past, though. If something like that comes up again after I’ve decided to drop them, that could prompt me to wipe out my work there.
If that happens, all the stories will still be available either on my website, or at Lit and SOL.
