As many of you noticed, JFGtS was the M-Rated Advertisement yesterday. Several of you asked how that works, what it was like, was it worth it, and so on, so here's a quick blog post to answer those questions.

How do you advertise? Is it like being featured?

Being featured means your fic has received huge numbers of upvotes. My fics aren't even in the running for that, unfortunately. But anyone can advertise. That only takes karma points. I've been saving up my karma points for almost a year now, just so I could advertise. I had about 10k points when I placed the ad. But when things got competitive at the end, several readers chipped in with extra points to make sure I'd win. (Thank you to those who helped. ILU! ♥) You can advertise on the regular or M-Rated calendars. The M-Rated calendar is usually slightly cheaper, but every now and then it gets super expensive. Like the days I was trying for. OTZ Anyway, all of my long fics are M-Rated, so I had no choice. But if I were you, I'd go with the regular calendar. You can bid here.

What was it like? 

It was cool! It was really exciting to see my little fic all over the site. My goal was to share that fic with people who would never know it existed otherwise, and I definitely accomplished that. I had one person say JFGtS was only the second YunJae fic she'd ever read, so it felt great to know I'd shared my OTP with people who don't really ship them. And a lot of people who read JFGtS went on to subscribe to my other stories, so I gained some new readers. Awesome! ^^

Was it worth it?

That's harder to answer. I gained about 120 new subscribers for JFGtS and maybe 40-50 subscribers for my other fics. I had an incredibly high number of people subscribe, read, then unsubscribe. Super depressing. That almost never happens to me normally, but yesterday it happened all the time. The ad cost a LOT of karma points. I somehow have a knack for picking the most expensive times. I knew I wanted a Saturday because that's the busiest day, but the ad ended up costing thousands more than all the Saturdays I'd been keeping an eye on. (But still less than it cost today's winner.) Was it worth the 10210 points I paid for it? Ehhh... If I did it again, I'd pick a different day. And I'd set a limit on what to pay. I'm not sorry I did it, but it wasn't the real boost I'd expected. 

I'm going to advertise one more time, on a less popular day and with a limit on how much I'll pay. I'll update this post if my experience with that is different. ^^