ETFA Discussion and Fanartery

-Nepotism. I have on at least one occasion nagged a friend to give me a workable suggestion for an adventure.

This. IIRC the first Problem Sleuth book has annotations at the bottom of each page from Hussie, and he mentions having to nag his brother into submitting some of the first PS commands, albeit that's prolly more because of the breakneck pace Hussie made PS at more than an inability to find a command-suggesting readership.

From my experience (mainly 3 yrs on the MSPA Forums), readers tend to latch onto a few specific types of Adventure openings.

• Low-quality art, frequent updates (~weekly, if not more frequently), and lite-medium text of just about any quality.
  
• Low-quality art, infrequent updates (less than monthly), and heavy, well written text. The text has to carry these sorts of adventures, so it has to be good to keep readers coming back.
  
• Mid-quality art, frequent updates (~every two-three weeks), text amount can vary here, but it's tricky because well done, very lite text can work just as well as decent, very text-heavy writing. Balancing a variety of the two seems to work best for most long-running Adventures of this type.
  
• Mid-quality art, infrequent updates (~6+ weeks), text amount can vary again, but now it has to make up in both bulk and quality in order to account for the infrequency of updates.
  
• High-quality art. Readers will probably put up with just about anything text-wise or update-frequency-wise if you've got high-quality art.
  

As you may have noticed, I didn't list any Text-only Adventures. This is because, for better or worse, the people who are usually looking for new Adventures to read, are also looking for art to accompany it. This results in just about any quality of text-only Adventure not finding the readerships they prolly deserve. This of course is all anecdotal, and while finding readers is certainly tough, it's even tougher and trickier to get readers to reply and leave suggestions. Now that, is an arcane art.