Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Statistics and Demographics

As a Wattpad 101 book, every once in awhile, I probably should describe some aspects of Wattpad. In this case, let's give you an overview of the statistics, which is something you may have been ignoring up until now. Some of you might be wondering how your book is doing. You click through each chapter and see you got 2 stars on this chapter, 1 star on this chapter, and a comment over here. I mentioned "reader drop off" in the previous chapter, and if you're the industrious type, you can write all the numbers down and figure out which chapters you started to lose readers. However, not only is this boring and provides relatively undetailed information, it actually isn't even necessary.

Here's something you might not have known. Wattpad already does the stats for you! With a simple click of a button, you can access a report that shows you all of your reads, stars, and comments in an easy to follow line graph. Another click and you can find out the age and sex of your readers.

When I keep saying my readers are mostly young women, I'm not just pulling that number out because Wattpad.com is notoriously popular with teenage girls. According to the demographics for Wattpad 101, over 70% of my readers are women and over 50% are under the age of 18.

If you click on your name and the works tab, you'll be taken to a list of all your works. You'll get "continue writing" and "share". And you'll also get "Stats", which is a button you may have avoided clicking until now because you didn't know what it did. Try clicking on it sometime.

You'll be taken to an "overview" which will tell you what days you're getting the best readership. Do you get more readers on weekends? More votes immediately after a chapter release? Your readership over the last month from day to day will be spelled out for you. The stat is based on "unique reads" not "chapters read", so this will give you an idea of how many people every day click on your book whom have NEVER clicked on it before... at least not since the last time they cleared their cookies.

You'll also get your voting and comments over the last month. You can see what putting up a new chapter gets you when you have a sudden jump in readers on those particular days. Regrettably, the list doesn't tell you when your chapters were released, so you'll have to check yourself before coming to this menu.

Click on the tab Engagement, and you get the same three bars, except over the chapters rather than over time. Out of how many readers start reading a chapter, finish reading that chapter. This is a quick way to tell you how engaging your story is. If you find people suddenly quitting in Part 10, maybe you need to figure out what you wrote that's scaring people away. This statistic is actually a little bit new. It's not # of reads per part, it's the # of readers that finish. In other words, the number that start reading and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, ie, finish the part. Expect your first chapter to be the lowest, since a lot of people may read the first chapter, only to realize they don't want to continue. On the other hand, everyone else who starts will probably keep reading, at least from chapter to chapter.

You'll also get votes by part and comments by part. I would not be surprised if there was a spike in the first 2-3 chapters and then a spike in the final chapter. That's just a testament to readers and how they like to think. However, if you see any odd spikes in the middle, maybe check what you did there and see what got everyone staring or commenting. If you know what works, maybe you can improve upon it in the future.

The final tab, demographics, shows you the age, gender, and location of all of your readers. If you were seriously trying to grasp what age group was reading your story, this is where you'll find it. Most likely most of your readers will be US, Australia, UK, and Canada. I mean, those are the major English speaking countries, so that's how it goes. If you find another country, maybe India or France having a surprisingly large number of readers, that might be one more thing you "ought" to think about. If most of your readers come from the UK, maybe you might want to cater to the UK crowd.

I know exactly jack frost about how to cater to a UK, Australian, or Indian crowd. HOWEVER, if you come from UK, Australia, or India, and are interested in collaborating on writing a chapter about how to cater to your country, throw me a PM and let's do an interview. I'd be happy to include that in Wattpad 101.