Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

An Update on the New Ranking System!!!

One of my most popular chapters from Wattpad 101 is my chapter on the Ranking System. However, as many of you noticed and pointed out, the ranking system was suddenly changed last month. Like before, I decided to read through the faqs, bug the Wattpad admins, and even run a few experiments of my own. This is a new analysis of the Wattpad Ranking system and what has changed.

Some of you might be wondering why I'm keeping the old ranking system chapter. The reason for that is simple. Despite popular opinion, not very much has changed. Yes, tags will play a larger roll in rankings in the future, but otherwise the main points of my last chapter remain unchanged. Readership, stars, comments, popularity... these all continue to play a role in Wattpad Ranking. Just because there are more rankings beyond genre doesn't negate this fact.

So... if you haven't read my last chapter, you might want to, and then use this chapter as an upgrade patch to your understanding of the Wattpad Ranking system. So, without further ado, here is how things differ from before.

The absolute main difference between how rankings work before and how rankings work now is that before they depended heavily on the Discover option, and more specifically the popularity within each genre. This meant that the top 1000 books got noticed, and not much of anything else. The new system instead takes focus away from the genres, and instead puts them into your tag selection.

Another way to put it is that the focus is less on the pre-rendered genres, and more on the search terms people use to find books. When you create a book, you need to select tags to attach to the book. In the past, the genre you picked automatically became the first tag. After that, you were encouraged to select more tags to represent your book. At the moment, there is a total of 25 tags you can select per book.

A lot of you might not have taken tags very seriously in the past. A lot of search engines will scan your blurb, your book title, and even your text... so having tags almost seems meaningless when it's just repeating a term that the search engine already picks up. However, with the new changes, tags on wattpad become more important than ever.

I might end up writing a chapter later on how to select tags for your book, but for the moment, I'll just explain the basics. Tags are essentially the terms that reflect your book the best. Yes, your book might be a romance. But is a teen romance? Is it a comedy romance? Is it a teen comedy romance with a bad boy and ghosts? Well, when you as a writer, trying to get readers is like a spider catching flies, and the search terms are the web you're casting out to entrap them. You want to catch people who are not just looking for something funny but you also want people who are looking specifically for teen romance as well as people who like bad boys or ghosts. So, you might pick a teen tag, a romance tag, a ghost tag, comedy tag and a badboy tag.

Picking the best 25 tags that not only accurately describe your book, but expose your book to the largest number of people who may actually read it is the name of the game now. I've said before that you're probably not as creative as you think you are. Your book has been written before. Fortunately, there is a large audience of people who want to read the same junk over and over again, and your book just happens to be the junk they're craving.

So, rather than coming up with the most unique tags to differentiate your book from anyone else, your goal is the exact opposite. You want the terms that will get your book exposed the absolute most. You want the terms other people will think about and write when looking for a book like yours. However, as I've mentioned before, if you pick a term that is too popular (like badboy), your book will get drowned out by the masses of people who all write badboy stories. Thus, there is a balance between picking tags that are popular, but also picking stories where your book is likely to show up and, more importantly, be read by people who look up that search term.