Post-Mortem: Tarbell Course in Magic, vol 1: The History of Magic

This is an older fic that got a pretty typical treatment, as far as all my big fics go.  I finished it, let it sit for a good, long while, and then went back and re-edited it.  I do this for all my big fics.  Sometimes, the edits are so small I don't even mention them.  Sometimes enough changes that chapters get cut up or added, and I put a note in the summary stating that it's been edited.

And then there's Tarbell, which underwent so many changes its rating changed.  It went from Teen to Explicit.  So it never got re-uploaded until recently, when I decided to actually expand the fic into a series.  A lot of people expected that to happen because they missed the author's note at the end stating that there was never a sequel in the plans.  The name is a joke, which I knew people would miss.  That's why I explained it in the author's notes.  I know jokes aren't funny if you have to explain them.  But I also know now people don't read notes and will miss very important things.

But I was reading back over the new version, trying to decide what to do with it, when I suddenly saw what a full eight-part series could actually be about.  So I put a poll up, asking readers what I should do with it, and overwhelmingly people said I should upload it as a separate fic.  So that's what I did.  And I thought, this could be interesting because the first version bombed pretty hard.  At the time, I'd attributed that to it being uploaded for a big bang, and all 26 chapters going up at once.  So I figured, I'd run a little experiment and upload a new chapter daily.  Daily uploads worked really well for Trickster God, so why not?

Yeah, uh.  I don't think uploading it all at once was the main reason this fic failed.  I think I'm just so far out of step with this fandom it's disgusting.  I think I have the sort of tastes that can produce an 80,000 word fic that nobody wants to read.  I don't normally keep an eye on stats, but for this one, I have been looking at numbers just to see.  And what I've been seeing is utter, complete, deafening disinterest.

I'm not saying the fic sucks, nor do I think I regret writing a sequel, which will be going up later this summer.  But I suddenly don't really see the point in finishing this series.  If I do, it'll likely be drawerfic, written for myself and then published all at once after the fact.  But if nobody cares, I'm not going to keep bothering people with subscriber alerts.