Hi, everyone! It was time for our monthly chat again.
In terms of results, this past May was undoubtedly a failed month.
The monthly vote ranking stayed pretty steady, but new bookmarks, subscriptions, and the bestseller ranking all fell badly. Average subscriptions per chapter only rose by a thousand, too, and currently stood at over fourteen thousand.
Still, I didn't think there was any major problem.
I couldn't be a hundred percent sure of the exact reason, but it was most likely because the number of readers keeping up with updates fell, causing the algorithmic recommendations to be cut in half.
We'd started a new volume, after all. The number of readers keeping up fell by over a thousand, from over four thousand in the previous volume to over three thousand. I didn't think much of it. That was perfectly normal. When part of the story ended, some readers were bound to stop keeping up, and they'd come back as I kept writing.
When I was writing Demon Slaying before, the number of readers keeping up fluctuated a lot, too. It often fell by several thousand when a new volume started. I remembered it getting close to twenty thousand at its peak, but most of the time it was only six or seven thousand. Those ups and downs were perfectly normal.
But the way Qidian's recommendation algorithm judged things now seemed to be that, once the number of readers keeping up dropped significantly, it decided your book had gone off the rails, slashed your algorithmic recommendations, and stopped recommending it to new readers.
Otherwise, it was hard to explain why, before April, when I only had a little over three thousand readers keeping up and ranked outside the top fifty in monthly votes, I still got seven or eight hundred