OK, on to #2: what about having too many fics by the same pool of authors?
So this is a really good question, but I'm really interested to know how you count 444 unique authors! Because when I just went now and did a count, I only came up with 208! (I let my database program do the counting for me, so if I set up the parameters wrong, I could get a miscount, but I'm just wondering how you did it :)
Indeed, your numbers are much more generous than mine. If mine is right, then my data is even less representative than you gave me credit for!
As for the full set of 1490 fics I used for this post, Somehow my program is telling me that I have even fewer unique authors, at only 191. Wow. Some explanation is in order: even though I've got nearly 1300 fics from capitu in my database, I only used a subset of these for this analysis: the ones where she clearly indicated top/bottom (or where I had read it myself and knew what was what). So if she didn't include the info, I didn't include the fic. What this really means is that I didn't include a bunch of PG and PG-13 rated fics that don't have any topping action going on anyway. So I could have claimed a much larger sample to draw from (indeed my full unedited database has nearly 3000 HD fics) but it wouldn't have meant anything because there would have just been lots more no-sex fics that wouldn't have changed the overall percentages of top/bottom results anyway. I limited myself to 1490 because those were fics that at least had the potential for sex :)
So that's a lot of words to say that I really don't know how to answer your question :) Certainly the smaller the pool of authors, the greater the effect of any one author's preferences will be. I guess the question is how many authors are enough? And I really don't know :)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2015-03-19 05:43 am (UTC)So this is a really good question, but I'm really interested to know how you count 444 unique authors! Because when I just went now and did a count, I only came up with 208! (I let my database program do the counting for me, so if I set up the parameters wrong, I could get a miscount, but I'm just wondering how you did it :)
Indeed, your numbers are much more generous than mine. If mine is right, then my data is even less representative than you gave me credit for!
As for the full set of 1490 fics I used for this post, Somehow my program is telling me that I have even fewer unique authors, at only 191. Wow. Some explanation is in order: even though I've got nearly 1300 fics from capitu in my database, I only used a subset of these for this analysis: the ones where she clearly indicated top/bottom (or where I had read it myself and knew what was what). So if she didn't include the info, I didn't include the fic. What this really means is that I didn't include a bunch of PG and PG-13 rated fics that don't have any topping action going on anyway. So I could have claimed a much larger sample to draw from (indeed my full unedited database has nearly 3000 HD fics) but it wouldn't have meant anything because there would have just been lots more no-sex fics that wouldn't have changed the overall percentages of top/bottom results anyway. I limited myself to 1490 because those were fics that at least had the potential for sex :)
So that's a lot of words to say that I really don't know how to answer your question :) Certainly the smaller the pool of authors, the greater the effect of any one author's preferences will be. I guess the question is how many authors are enough? And I really don't know :)