The Grand Experiment: Week 14(!)

Holy cow, I can't believe it's been 14 weeks since I started up The Grand Experiment. Results so far:

Book Country: Never got off the ground. Their terms of service smelled rotten to me.

Authonomy: Rank 5,584. Five chapters up. Tabled while I concentrate on Wattpad.

Wattpad: 5,546 reads. 144 votes. 49 comments. 34 chapters up. Ranked #42 in Fantasy and #643 in Teen Fiction. Has been ranked as high as #25 in Fantasy and #15 in Adventure (before I switched its genres). Also, I got an invitation to participate in the site's Writer Partner Program.

So as you can see by the statistics, I've been focusing on Wattpad, in large part because of the promotional opportunity they've extended to me and in large part because it's got the most readers in the audience I want to reach (teenagers and young adults), and also because I just like the community feeling the best.

Also important is that I've accelerated my revision timetable by about 6x in order to get the full manuscript in shape and get it up on Wattpad before it gets promoted. That has severely limited the time I have to do anything that is not either writing or related to paying bills (like keeping up with this blog. Sorry!).

I've been tracking several statistics on Wattpad with the help of a handy spreadsheet, which I will share with you below:

Click on it to make the words and numbers readable sized.

I share it with you because it's an example of a benefit to posting on Wattpad that I absolutely did not expect. I can collect a ton of remarkably granular data on how my book is doing day by day (really, I could track it more often than that, too, and perhaps I should...but that would mean a lot more work and less time for...drumroll...writing). And because I'm collecting all this information, I can track some interesting things. Like, for instance, I can see that my reads are showing exponential growth.

Or I can investigate the relationships between my genre rankings and how many new reads I get every day.

(There's a bad data point on 9/4 that screws that graph up a bit, but I still think it's interesting).

Or I can look at any number of other things. When I change covers or cover copy, I can see if it has a statistically significant effect on my reads. I can see the same for my ranks or my posting patterns. And once I've finished writing the book itself (which is still the most important thing, no matter how many bells and whistles and numbers I put into orbit around it), I'll be able to take a look at all these numbers and see if I can't figure out how to goose them.

And at the very least, that's a new, fun kind of problem to play with.

Speaking of cover changes, I'm playing around with an idea for a new cover for Soulwoven, and I'd love to get some opinions on it. It adds the subtitle of volume one (I am, after all, writing one story in four parts) and a tagline, which I rather like. I've almost made it live on Wattpad several times, but after the horrible, fall-on-its-face failure of cover variant #2 during my last vote-a-thon, I think it wise to consult my readers before doing so.

Said cover to follow. Let me know what you think. I hope to have Soulwoven up on Wattpad in its entirety by the end of the month, at which point I will become a more active blogger once more and begin playing around with all kinds of markety type ideas which should make for interesting blog posts. Thanks for bearing with me, and if you're jonesing to hear from me, I'd suggest you follow me on Facebook, or Twitter, or Wattpad, because it's easier to post tiny things on those sites than sit down and compose blog posts for me right now.

And in the meantime, go read the book! It's more than halfway up, and it won't be online for free forever :-).

New cover here:

The Grand Experiment: Analytics!

Well, sort of, anyway. I've been taking a look at the statistics of Soulwoven as it stands on Wattpad and want to share a couple of things.

First off, my rankings have dropped off significantly since last week, and I've seen a corresponding drop in reads. I'm averaging more like 40 per day at this point. So it's clear that a lot of people find new stories to read on Wattpad through the rankings.

Beyond that, because Wattpad tracks reads for each chapter individually, I can note the following.

The first chapter of Soulwoven has been viewed 314 times.

About half of those people (156) made it to Chapter 2.

Everyone who read Chapter Two made it to Chapter 3.

134 people made it to Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, 123 reached Chapter 6, 104 reached Chapter 7, and only 69 made it to Chapter 8. Chapter 9 has 64 reads, and by Chapter 10 I'm down to 48. Chapter Eleven has 40 reads.

Chapter 12 just went up yesterday, and it has 29 reads, and in the two hours since Chapter 13 went up, it has 18.

I'm making the major assumption here that my own and other people's views of the chapters mostly cancel each other out (i.e. nobody is repeatedly viewing Chapter Seven and only viewing Chapter Eight once).

I can also see that I've got around 30 or 40 readers keeping pretty on top of the book as it updates. I have a suspicion that that may be mostly traffic from my Facebook links, which would help explain why many of the latest chapters only have votes and comments from people I know.

And, maybe most importantly, these numbers give me a great opportunity to look at where I'm losing people's attention. They're skewed right now because not every chapter has been up for a similar amount of time, but after six months or so that should be much less of a factor, and I may be able to identify problematic chapters (right now it's looking like I may be losing people at Chapter 7, for instance).

In order to see how I'm stacking up, I decided to take a look at the stats on Aaron Kite's A Touch of Poison, which has held the #1 spot in Fantasy on Wattpad for most of the summer. Its stats are as follows: 136,544 reads on the first chapter. 87,910 on the second. 82,017 on the third. 67,771 made it halfway through, and 36,355 finished it.

So viewing things in those terms, I guess I'm doing alright keeping the attention of my readers, though I find the 50% read-through rate of the first chapter a little discouraging. It will be interesting to see how things change when the full book goes up and people have the option of reading all the way through as quickly as they want.

You'll note I've stopped talking about Authonomy. That's because I've been offered a pretty fantastic promotional opportunity on Wattpad, and I want to focus on getting through a heavy-duty revision of Soulwoven in preparation for it. Once that's all in place, I'm going to turn my attention back to Authonomy, and possibly get involved with Figment (a smaller, Wattpad-esque community) as well.

Auf wiedersehen, friendly readers. I hope you're enjoying Soulwoven. :-)

The Grand Experiment: Week...um...well, update, anyway.

Phew! I am completely and utterly exhausted tonight, with more work ahead of me, but I'm going to try to squeeze in a quick update on The Grand Experiment.

First, the numbers:

There are currently six chapters of Soulwoven up on Wattpad. They have received a total of 434 reads, 23 votes, and 20 comments. As I write this, the book is ranked #25 in Adventure and #26 in Fantasy, out of 168,402 and 330,776 stories, respectively.

More on the ranking system later, but may I say---booyah.

On Authonomy, there are still only five chapters up, because time is short for me right now and updating on the site is a pain. The book's rank is 5543, which I'm fairly certain is where all books are sitting right now that have seen no activity whatsoever. I'm neither surprised nor disappointed---I haven't engaged with the site at all yet, but it's good to know that absolutely nothing is going to happen until I do.

So, my thoughts so far:

First and foremost, I think Wattpad is a much, much better fit for Soulwoven than Authonomy is. I can't say that will be true of all writers, but for me it is. Authonomy, so far as I can tell, is a community primarily of writers. I love writers. They make great books. Every once in a while, one sends me an amazing manuscript and I get to recommend it for publication and help him or her make it better and share in the joy and delight of it getting out to the world.

But writers are no better arbiters of what readers will like than editors and agents are.

Which is to say, they're not bad, but their judgment pales in comparison to that of large groups of readers themselves, which is precisely what Wattpad has. More specifically, Wattpad has large groups of teenage readers, who are the people I wrote Soulwoven for in the first place.

The second reason I prefer Wattpad to Authonomy is its rating system. As far as I can tell, Wattpad's ranking algorithm tallies up the number of people who have either voted for (indicated that a book is good) or added a book to their reading list over a rolling two-week period. And it doesn't take much (right now) to move into the higher rankings. One vote (I think) in the period was enough to push me to around a rank of #100. A few more got me to around #50. Since then it's become much more difficult to keep track, but I still only have 23 votes in total (since I started posting, not in the last two weeks), and I think I'm on fewer reading lists than that.

But because Wattpad places 15 books on each page of its listings when you browse, I'm on page 2, well within standard browsing range, and I'm getting hits, votes, reading list adds, and fans from complete strangers in faraway lands.

A.) That's very, very, cool and helps me keep slogging through revisions even though I'm having near-nightly crises of confidence about my writing skills.

B.) That's what I need to go viral, and I haven't even pulled out everything in my bag of tricks yet. The book isn't complete, which I've heard tends to really boost readership. I haven't added photos, maps, background material, or a soundtrack (I will though---I was planning out which chapters are going to get which songs today) either, which are other things I've been told will help draw attention.

Wattpad doesn't have metrics, and my brain is flying in a thousand directions right now between trying to meet various work-related deadlines and finish a full, three-read revision (more on my shiny new revision process, perhaps, in a later post) of Soulwoven before BIG NEWS in September, but I'm fairly certain that when I posted Chapter 6 of Soulwoven to Wattpad yesterday, I had 314 reads.

I'll leave the math to mathy people, but I'm very, very excited.

P.S. Some of my new readers/fans have mentioned that it was the cover that drew them in initially. Thanks to all who helped me pick it.

P.P.S. In the time it took me to write this blog post, Soulwoven got 7 more reads on Wattpad. Did I mention that I'm excited?

The Grand Experiment: Uploading on Authonomy

So this week I finally crossed the 10,000 word threshold and was able to start putting chapters of Soulwoven up on Authonomy. My thoughts below:

The website has a clean, slick, step-by-step interface for uploading stories. First, you input a title, your pen name, a 25-word pitch, and a 200-word pitch, each of which is compulsory. Next, you have the choice of either uploading your own cover image or choosing from a range of stock Authonomy covers. I suppose that's a nice enough feature, but really, I can't see a book being successful without a unique cover, and I think Authonomy ought to at least make mention of that during their upload process. Personalized covers must also wait for Authonomy approval before they will be shown.

Once you choose a cover, you get to fill in some metadata. You can select up to four genres in which to classify your book, but there aren't a whole lot of choices. I ended up going with Fantasy, Young Adult, and Fiction for Soulwoven. You can also denote your story's age appropriateness as either Universal, Moderate (which means it has some scenes unsuited for children), or Over 18. I chose Moderate.

Like Wattpad, Authonomy allows uploaders to select tags. Unlike Wattpad, the site offers a tag cloud (and mentions it in its FAQ), though it takes some digging to find it. I ended up choosing "fantasy, magic, dragons, teens, serious, intense, love, romance, young adult, relationships, family, brothers, action, adventure," based in part on my own thoughts and in large part on popular cloud terms that fit my story.

After your metadata is in, you can upload your work itself. You have to upload each individual chapter as a separate document (.doc, .docx., or .rtf), and you need to scrub it of chapter titles or headings, because Authonomy puts those in itself. The conversion process it uses from .doc and .docx, unfortunately, is less than perfect. My chapters ended up with a lot of deleted paragraph tabs, and I hate the way its reader adds blank lines between paragraphs. It took significant, time-consuming tweaking in order to get the formatting to look decent, though the site's FAQs were able to help. And going back in to re-upload chapters or add chapters is needlessly time consuming, because you have to re-approve all your previous steps (title through metadata) before you can return to the "upload a chapter" page.

On a side note, I uploaded in several steps, and I was pleased to notice that Authonomy saves your book even if you don't finish uploading it all at once (I assume it saves when you click "Next" as you progress through the steps, but I didn't check that specifically).

Overall, I'd say Authonomy has a fine, very workable uploading system. It's a bit of a pain to have to wait for your cover image to be approved, and the monkeying around with formatting it required to get my book looking right was a pain, but it could have been much worse.

It took my cover several days to get approved, but now that it has been, and I'm over the 10,000 word mark, Soulwoven is up on Authonomy. We'll see how things go from here! In the meantime, you can keep reading on Wattpad as well. As of this posting, Chapters 1-5 of Soulwoven have 221 reads and 6 votes on the site, which puts my votes-to-reads ratio much higher than some of the most popular books on the site.  I'm pretty happy about that, and we'll see how things progress going forward.

I'll be on vacation next week, but when I get back I'll do a quick roundup of how things have gone on Wattpad and Authonomy so far, and I'm scheduling a couple of craft blog posts to go up while I'm absent.

Happy reading!

The Grand Experiment: Registering on Authonomy

I am now a registered user of Authonomy and Wattpad (Book Country didn't make the cut. I'll go into why later this week).

The registration process for each left me with quite different impressions, so rather than combine them into one uber blog post, I'm giving each site its due, starting with Authonomy.

(You should be aware that despite the fact that I discuss Authonomy's terms and conditions, I am not a lawyer, have never been a lawyer, and should never ever be relied upon as a reliable source of information when making a decision of any legal consequence. If you're worried about your rights, talk to a lawyer.)

And we're off!

Right off the bat, it's hard to find information on Authonomy from its homepage, but what is available can be found through tiny "About us" and "FAQ" links at the bottom of the page.

Authonomy is run by the U.K. operation of HarperCollins, one of the "Big Six" publishers. In order to post anything, users must submit a book of at least 10,000 words to the site. Once they do, it can be read and voted upon by Authonomy's users, with books that have been recommended by a lot of people for a long time floating to the top of a list to be read by HarperCollins editors.

To register, you're only required to put in a few very nonspecific pieces of information (e-mail address, display name, password, security questions). The site then asks you to read its terms and conditions, which it displays in a tiny, extremely-difficult-to-read box.

The terms are pretty benign overall. There's standard website language about users needing to have the right to post the content they put up. Authonomy is very clear about not claiming any rights to posted content, and the license you grant them is fairly standard for posting content anywhere online. I have a hunch it's probably less onerous than the terms for Blogger, which I haven't checked in ages and really ought to. I'll quote the license paragraph in full at the bottom of the post.

There were a few things that jumped out at me when I read the terms, however.

1.) Authonomy makes no guarantee of even attempting to give you notice when they change their terms. They agree to post them, and the onus is on you to check them regularly.

2.) Authonomy reserves the right to begin charging fees at any time, though they do promise to give you notice about that. This leads me to believe that an HC staffer at some point said, "We may eventually want to charge for this. Make sure there's some language in there about that." It also reminds me very clearly that the company is in this to make money first and foremost.

3.) The terms ban "commercial activity," including affiliate links and probably links to purchase self-published books, in three separate places.

4.) They're clearly concerned about piracy and plagiarism. There are multiple references to both as breaches of site policy, and the user agrees to foot any costs faced by Authonomy if he or she is in breach of policy (i.e. if you post a plagiarized book, and Authonomy gets sued, you're legally responsible for their bills).

5.) Authonomy reserves the right to delete content at any time for a very long list of reasons, including racism/hate speech; harassment; sexual exploitation; images of nudity or violence; links to adult websites; soliciting or providing personal information; promoting false, abusive, or illegal activity; promoting piracy; being spam; containing restricted content (I assume this means content from behind a paywall on another site); promoting criminal activity; involving commercial activities; and including photographs posted without permission or sexually explicit, lewd, nude, etc., photographs.

6.) The site also bans criminal activity, advertising, obscuring advertising on the website (via browser add-ons, I assume), automated use, interfering with the service, impersonating someone else, using someone else's account or allowing someone else to use yours, selling your profile, using information from the site to harass someone, any kind of commercial activity (or even "friending" someone engaged in commercial activity), and other illegal activity.

From there, the language is pretty standard for website terms and conditions again, EXCEPT that the governing law is English. I have no idea what that means practically.

After you register for the site, you receive an e-mail with a link to authenticate your account. You can then sign into a profile that includes spaces for a photo, a bio, links to two websites, and a list of your favorite books. Comments, projects, and friends on Authonomy can be managed from the bottom of the profile, and your "bookshelf," which features prominently in the site's ranking system, is easy to find as well. The "retire my profile" button, which does not remove your work from Authonomy completely but does make it all private, is easy to find at the bottom of the "edit profile" page as well.

And finally, just in case you forget they're in it to make money, the welcome e-mail you receive after authenticating contains a link to Createspace, "our partner and a member of the Amazon group of companies" (for those who don't know, Createspace is Amazon's self-publishing arm for print books).

So that wraps it for registering with Authonomy. If you have questions, post them in the comments and I'll do my best to respond. More on Book Country and Wattpad in later posts this week.

* as promised, here's the license you grant Authonomy for your content: "By posting Content on the Website you hereby grant to us a license to use, modify, publicly display, reproduce and distribute such Content on the Website. The license you grant us is (i) non-exclusive which means you are free to license your Content to any one else, (ii) fully paid up and royalty free which means you will not be paid by HarperCollins or anyone else for the use of your Content on the Website, (iii) sub-licensable for the purposes of enabling us to host and maintain the Website via third parties and worldwide (which means the Content will be viewed on a global basis)."

The Grand Experiment

For several months now, I've been pondering whether to start serializing Soulwoven on Wattpad (for those who don't know, it's a free online writing community in which you can post and share novels or parts thereof). I created a profile. I puttered around, read a few stories, got a feel for the site. I checked out the legalese and was satisfied that yes, I would retain all rights to any work I put up there. I decided that I rather liked the community and might want to be a part of it.

But I wanted to wait and talk with a few other industry people about it before I took the plunge, just in case there were reservations I ought to have that I didn't.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to ask two agents and three authors about Wattpad at Litfest 2012.

The collective response?

"What's that?"

Somehow, despite significant coverage of the possibilities of the site in trade publications, it seems to be flying below the radar. So in the interest of bettering the general understanding of the trade, and because I am very curious about the subject myself, I am going to undertake a grand experiment.

I am going to post Soulwoven, chapter by chapter, on Wattpad, Authonomy, and Book Country (Authonomy and Book Country are similar efforts run by Harper Collins and Penguin, respectively, while Wattpad is independent as far as I can tell). And I am going to blog about my experience on each site week by week. I may pull the book from one or more at any time. At the outset, I am less than enthusiastic about Book Country in particular (it smacks of vanity publishing), and I have my doubts about Authonomy as well (while I approve of crowdsourcing the submissions process in general, it doesn't exactly turn me on as an author).

I think it's going to be quite fun.

And as a slight bonus, it means that those of you who have expressed repeated interest in reading Soulwoven will be able to start it shortly.