NOT EDITED

I'm not really sure what this is. Rant? Opinion? Some sort of essay-type free write?

Who knows?

So, I've noticed a couple of people complaining about this sort of thing lately, and I decided that I'd express an opinion on it as well.

Why do some people get so upset when one of their books/series is more popular than the others?

Unless you're relatively famous on here, it stands to reason that not everyone will find an interest in all of your works. Some authors on here have a loyal enough following to easily get a million reads, eventually, on almost all of their stories.

Keep in mind, it's taken them years to gather their audience. They are successful, but it took perseverance to reach that point.

However, this isn't the case for a lot of us.

While some of us can get several thousand reads on a particular story, we might not achieve the same level of success on every single thing we happen to publish.

So, recently I've stumbled upon several people who have been complaining about this.

The most common complaint on it, at least that I've seen, is a rather dramatic one.

The argument goes something along the lines of: "If my story, ______ is the only one getting a lot of reads, why should I keep posting anything else? Why not just take the others down?""

I don't really understand the logic, and here's why.

Sure, we write for the readers, but we also write for ourselves. Who cares if your story is popular? If you enjoy writing it, then by all means keep on posting it.

Aside from this, even if your book only has a couple hundred reads, there's a good chance that someone who stumbles upon it will enjoy it enough to anticipate the updates. I've read impressively written books on here, and some of them only have a few hundred reads.

The numbers do not necessarily indicate how well-written or how enjoyable a story is!

This brings me into a subcategory of this topic, something I've been planning to talk about for a while now.

When should you take down a story? Should you do it?

A couple of people have asked me questions which relate to this sort of topic.

I've been asked several times if I'm going to take down The Distance. Don't I know it's not as popular as my other books? Doesn't that mean, people ask, that it's not as 'good' as my other books? That it's not as 'enjoyable' to read?

The answer to the all-important question, whether I'll take down The Distance, is no.

For those of you who don't follow it, The Distance is a sci-fi type story set in the modern times. It hasn't been updated in forever, and only has about four hundred and fifty reads.

So, why on earth won't I take it down?

As I've mentioned up above, the numbers don't tell you anything when it comes to the enjoyability of a book, and some well-written stories only have a handful of reads.

Now, I know that The Distance is far from my best story, and that it has a scattering of grammatical errors that are pretty obvious if you're looking for them.

No, I don't believe The Distance is one of those exceptions to the rule, an unpopular story with an impressively well-developed storyline and sentence structure.

It's quite far from that.

Still, I'm not going to take it down, to forget it never saw the world of Wattpad.

Here's why.

I've taken stories down before, many different times. All of those half-forgotten drafts from the tenth grade, stories I've lost interest in over the years.

All of them disappeared, erased from every corner of the Wattpad universe.

Now, I wish I had left them here.

Many of them weren't, by any means, brilliant works of art, but they were mine. They showed off my old writing style, giving people a way to see how my style has changed over the years. I've left The Distance on my profile because it, too, is a piece of the old me. It reflects a bit of the writing style I had in high school, before I started taking college-level writing classes and improving my work further.

If I still had them, and had the opportunity to leave them here for the world to see, I would repost some of my older books, so that people might have something else to enjoy, and so they could see more of the changes in my style.

So, when should you take down a book?

In my humble, personal opinion, I don't believe that you should. Even if you don't think people are enjoying your story, chances are that someone will. If you enjoy writing it, someone will enjoy reading it at some point.

Even if the book in question doesn't accurately reflect your current writing style, it's still a part of your past. It shows your readers/followers who you used to be, lets them see how you've evolved since those long-ago days.

Both of these realizations have led me to decide that I will not take down any current or future project, because I think that leaving them up can be beneficial in a way, even if it doesn't seem like it at the time.

What do you guys think? Should you leave up any and all books, or take them down if they now seem irrelevant? Let me know how you feel down below.