Meaning of a "Small author"?

So I saw alot of threads like support “Small authors”, “R4R for small authors”.
But what do u mean of a small author?
Like under 1000 reads?

1 Like

I think it means the popularity of their story is low. You sort of have an idea.

1 Like

Moved to Episode Fan Community since this is not about story creation. Make sure to check out our Forum Tutorial for more info about where to correctly create topics, and feel to ask me if there are any questions. :wink:

I’m a small author. I write stories and I’m only less than five feet tall.

Puns aside, it definitely varies depending on who you ask. I personally don’t think you can go for total number of reads because some authors are more prolific than others (is someone with 10 stories and 10,000 reads across all of them really any “bigger” of an author than someone with 1 story that has 5,000 reads?) I personally don’t categorize authors as small or popular, just because I honestly don’t know how to define them.

9 Likes

Agreed. I don’t really think of myself as a small author anymore, but I’m also nowhere near being a big author either, and most people won’t know who I am :joy:
There’s a lot of people on the app who have over 100,000 reads on their stories, but don’t trend particularly high and I’ve never heard of them for example. I don’t know if it’s fair to say they don’t also deserve support, or the exposure that being on a shelf brings, for example.

4 Likes

There was a similar topic not too long ago and this is what I posted there:

Essentially, I think it’s really hard to define what’s a “small author” as there are so many variables to take into consideration such as how many stories they have, how long the stories have been on the app gaining reads, how many episodes the stories have etc. Can you realistically compare someone who has 1k reads after one week to someone who has 1k reads after a month (for example)?

4 Likes

Yeah, I have over 100,000 reads, but I’m not that popular (I was rank 3 in Fantasy for about 4 days and then slipped way back above rank 100). I wouldn’t call myself a small author, but I’m definitely not big. Not many people have actually heard of my stories, let alone me.

The problem with giving a number for reads is that it really depends on how many chapters a person has. If someone has a 50 chapter story with 100 loyal readers, they’d have 5000 reads - which would seem quite big… but then some people have 200,000+ reads on a 3 chapter story!

Then there’s the fact that it’s actually the story that’s (relatively) big and not me, the author. While my main story has over 100,000 reads, one of my other stories has 200 reads. It’s all relative, haha!

3 Likes