Why Wattpad?

I get a lot of questions from other authors about why I have work up on Wattpad. The most common is, "What do you get out of it?"

I've answered that in bits and pieces before. I get encouragement and feedback. I get to test stories before I decide what kind of a budget to set when I publish them. I get fans.

But Wattpad recently rolled out a new feature that will let me show you the primary thing I get in a way I haven't been able to before.

This is a map that shows where the Wattpad readers of Soulwoven are from. Darker countries have contributed a greater share of readers. White countries have contributed none.

And this is what I get.

Not the map. Bla bla business intelligence, yes, there's some information that's economically useful there, but it's not important.

The darkest country on this map is a place I can (and do) reach by self-publishing. But there are also a lot of countries on this map that I can't reach that way. Maybe most importantly, there aren't that many countries on this map with no shading.

Think about that for a second. Someone has read my writing in almost every country on Earth.

How many people in human history have ever been able to say that?

So the next time someone asks me, "Why Wattpad?" I will point them here with great happiness.

Sales Rankings

Hello, dearest readers.

Sorry this is a day late! Yesterday went far, far off the rails and blogging slipped my mind. Anyhoo, today it's time for a BUSINESS post. How exciting. Because my head is back on straight and I'm back to working on Soulwoven: Exile again and it's all very hush-hush, big secret, oh my God the things I wish I could tell you, etc., etc.

Also because people are asking me how Soulwoven is doing, and because at times I have absolute, panicky, mind-crushing anxiety about that very thing. This post about Amazon and its sales rankings has helped me put that into perspective. Come Monday, I'll crack the door open a little more about what my marketing and sales strategy has been with Soulwoven, what's worked, what hasn't, and what the next step is. It'll be a long one, or possibly a series, so consider this the primer.

And then enjoy your weekend. It's springtime in Indiana, and whatever else I may say about this state when it's -50F after wind chill and I haven't seen the sun in days, this place has beautiful, beautiful springs.

The Grand Experiment: A Brief Musing on Numbers

I've been continuing to noodle the numbers on Soulwoven over the last few days, keeping an eye on things like how many new people have looked at Chapter One (started the book) versus read up through the furthest chapter along ("finished it" even though it's not finished), monitoring my reads, experimenting with posting chapters at different times of the day, and generally starting to engage the marketing part of my brain as I get ready to launch this thing.

I have been mostly successful in pushing this thinking to the ends of the day, after I'm done with the writing, which is what matters most.

But this morning, as I logged into Wattpad to jot down some numbers, I noticed two wonderful, astonishing things: First, I got 170 reads over the last 24 hours (a new record! Hooray!). Second, I got 70 reads overnight (again, hooray!) Third, I think I converted (a word I'm using to designate what happens when a person who starts reading continues reading past the first chapter) every single person who started it last night.

There are 18 chapters up on Soulwoven at the moment. This morning, Chapter One had only 7 new reads. This leads me to believe that those 7 people read multiple chapters (they at least went on to Chapter Two, because it had 8 new reads).

So my writing, I think, is doing its job. People are enjoying the book. My ratio of reads from Chapter One to Chapter Two is as good as any of the highest ranked books on Wattpad, and my ratio of reads to votes is actually significantly higher.

I just need to get more people to open the book up.

And I'm working on that. :-)

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. :-)