Hi readers. Sorry if I interrupted the story for you. I'll only be doing this once, and this is actually very important to the story itself, but you can skip this chapter if you wish to continue with the main plotline.

Chapter Meta– The Irony of 'Everyone Loves Min-maxing'

Hello, author here. Let me explain the reason I am abruptly releasing such a weird chapter. Actually, scratch that. Let's go back to the beginning, and let me explain why I released such a strangely named, off meta, experimental story in the first place.

The story Everyone Loves Min-maxing was always meant to be a meta novel. Its premise was conceived from a rather scathing review I received on one of my previous stories, which I wholeheartedly disagree with for reasons I'm sure readers understand by now by chapter 9.

The review

Four chapters in and I'm already dropping this crap. I'm used to VRMMOs in web fiction being simplistic and tacky so that the MC can shine by simply being competent, but this one is utter trash and the MC is even dumber than the game is.

MC gets arbitrarily given an extremely min-maxed class focused entirely on dodging and "dimension" magic, with literally zero defensive growth. Already bad but a smart MC could use it to great effect. What does this MC do? Put all his points in physical defense.

No.

I'm done.

This review is simply wrong. But how could I answer it? A more deranged portion of my brain decided that the best way to prove it to be wrong was to, rather comedically, write an entire fantasy saga with hundreds of chapters of dragons and magic and swords and treasures and monsters and hidden areas and quests, explaining why this review is wrong.

However, I may have made a crucial mistake. I named this story "Everyone Loves Min-maxing", and it is beginning to attract, to my absolute horror, Delve readers.

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As a veteran author, I gauge what kind of readership I'm receiving by taking a quick peek at the favourite lists for people reading my story. Rather morbidly, I don't pay attention to much on there, but rather scan their favourites list for one particular story– Delve.

But why? Good question.

To understand why those two words Delve readers inspire fear in my soul, we'll have to talk about the royalroad rating system, The review™, and the non-target audience theory.

Royalroad ratings are generally a good representation of a story's quality. I will not discount all stories with high ratings– all of them are written exceptionally well. Many of them are written better than this novel. I am well aware of my creative and oratory deficiencies, and I am humbled to have the good reception I've had so far.

However, there is room to basically gaming the system and receive higher ratings than normal, and that is through the non-target audience theory.

It's simple. You want to discourage people who are inherently biased against your story from reading your story, and you want to encourage people who are inherently biased towards your story to read your story.

This lets you accumulate positive biased reviews from readers who will overlook your (my) shitty writing because they like the premise, and dodge negative biased reviews from readers who will be overly critical of your (*ahem*, my) shitty writing.

A lot of highly rated stories aren't actually "better" than other well written stories, the authors just gamed it better.

For high ratings, a story needs either widespread appeal (think harry potter), which very few stories have, or you need to very very carefully manicure your readership by discouraging certain readers that inherently don't like your story, from reading your story.

I saw an example of this in one reader's profile of my previous story. That person REALLY knows guns. Rifles, shotguns, their chambers and clips and all that stuff I have no idea about, you name it, he's an expert. He gives 0.5 harsh ratings to any story that has factually inaccurate stuff about guns. That's his thing. But if the story is more fantasy oriented and still has a ton of mistakes, he won't notice them. Or even if he notices them, he won't call them out. Because his primary interest is guns. He never complained about my previous story, even though my previous story had so many problems and errors. He didn't leave an angry review. Why? Because his inherent bias was against illogical gun literature, not against illogical fantasy literature.

Dissuading readers who are inherently biased against your story is relatively simple.

If your story is an anime-style or smut-heavy story, and you want to dissuade readers who are inherently biased against that from reading , it's simple–put an anime cover on your novel. If your story has a scantily clad anime girl on its cover, readers who aren't into that generally won't read your story, and rate your story. So you're doing them a favor by clearly communicating what your story is about, and they're doing you a favor by sparing you the review.

I saw on best rated #2 a few days ago that one story basically had its synopsis screaming "if you don't like lgbt elements be warned you might not want to read this" for the same reason– to dissuade readers who are inherently biased against their story from reading.

If your story basically spends the entire story shitting on the min-maxing mentality... yeah, probably not the best idea to sarcastically name it "Everyone Loves Min-maxers". Fucking oops.

So I think I might have made a big mistake naming the story "everyone loves min-maxing", because this is bringing in the opposite of my target audience–min maxers. I'm surprised because some people who actually enjoy min-maxing are rating this story well. That's beyond my expectations, and I guess I also made a false assumption about delve readers receiving this story poorly...

So thank you, delve readers, for giving my humble novel shitting on min-maxing a chance.

And I hope my readers can laugh at their author's unfortunate miscalcuation. Writing a story that shits on min-maxing, and then giving it a title that attracts min-maxers.

Yeah, the author is an idiot. I'm an idiot.

Tastytots out.