Who Is My Wattpad Audience?

S. J. Pajonas February 10, 2015
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Did you know you can read REMOVED for free on Wattpad? Let’s get that out of the way first, in case you’re interested in reading it RIGHT NOW? Lol.

It recently crossed the 61,000 reads mark! Oh my god, right? That’s a lot of reads of this book, my debut work. I worked on uploading it to Wattpad all last summer, and then around the time that REUNITED was released, REMOVED was featured by Wattpad on their recommended readings page. It was a lot of fun to see the numbers climb and hear from people that they were enjoying the story.

Now, many months later, at 61k reads, I thought it was a good time to share some stats on this book and the audience it has grabbed on Wattpad.

A few pieces of data to start:

1) I link to this book on one of my most popular blog posts on the website and many people click on the links in that post to go to Wattpad. I can only assume that some of those people convert to actual reads. The majority of traffic to that blog post is from Indonesia and the Philippines.

2) The book stays in the recommended reading area on Wattpad but changes placement over the weeks. In the beginning, it stays in the top five pages, and after that, it floated around the back end of the list. Every now and then, I get a spike of traffic to the book, which usually means it has floated up to the top pages of the recommended reads again.

REMOVED is a science fiction romance book. The protagonists are in their early twenties. It could be classified as a New Adult book. The story is multicultural, featuring a half-Japanese heroine and many other Japanese characters. Japanese language and culture play a large role in the story.

I currently market this book to ages 18+ (due to sexual content), lovers of Japan and science fiction. Marisa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles books (CINDER, SCARLET, and CRESS) are probably the most comparable books, but lovers of YA dystopian and science fiction love these books too.

Stats

Wattpad’s statistics are divided into three areas…

Overview

Okay! Let’s get on to the stats. Wattpad is offering stats in beta right now, and I really like their first offering. I’m hoping they become a little bit more granular over time, but this is a good start.

Screen Shot 2015-02-01 at 032DOY, Sun 02.01.2015   3.36.32 PM

It’s nice to see the Unique Readers graph. Because 61k reads is a great number but it doesn’t tell me how many unique people are actually reading my work. Whenever I see a spike in the graph, I know my book floated towards the top of the recommended reads are OR there was a lot of traffic from my website to the book on Wattpad.

There are two other graphs to go along with Unique Readers, Votes and Comments, but since I don’t get much of either of those, I’m moving on.

Engagement

You can gain some good data here!

Screen Shot 2015-02-01 at 032DOY, Sun 02.01.2015   3.42.26 PM

This graph is very telling. First, it’s measured on percentage. So, the very first part of REMOVED, which gets the most reads of ALL the parts, only 15% of people completed it. Right now, the reads number is at 28,582 which means that 4,287 people read the whole first chapter and then went on to read more. You can see by the chart that the completed reads ramps up after the second chapter. Usually I’ve hooked people by the third chapter and the stats on Wattpad seem to bear this out. If they finished more than 80% of a chapter, I consider that a true finish because of the sketchiness of measuring these things. The graph scrolls to the right, and you can’t see it all in this screenshot, but I can tell you that it stays above 75% reads to the end.

Lesson learned here is HOOK THEM IN THE FIRST CHAPTER. Lol. 🙂 Yeah, it was my debut work, and I’m getting better at this now.

Screen Shot 2015-02-01 at 032DOY, Sun 02.01.2015   3.42.37 PM

The Votes by Part chart is going to tell you where you’ve wowed your audience. The parts that get the most votes are the ones where I did a lot of things right. So go back and look at what the audience loved and learn from it.

Screen Shot 2015-02-01 at 032DOY, Sun 02.01.2015   3.42.48 PM

The Comments by Part chart will also tell you where you’ve spiked the interest of your audience. You’ll have to look at the comments themselves to decide if people loved it or hated it. Sometimes a chapter will garner a lot of comments because of typos or grammar mistakes. Other times a chapter will get comments because they LOVED it and wanted to tell you so.

Engagement

These are my FAVORITE GRAPHS EVER.

Screen Shot 2015-02-01 at 032DOY, Sun 02.01.2015   3.57.03 PM

Let’s start with Age! This one blew me away. I had no idea my audience was so young.

Starting at 12 o’clock on the pie chart and going clockwise…
13-18 years old (purple): 23%
18-25 years old (green): 23%
25-35 years old (red): 9%
35-45 years old (teal): 5%
Over 45 years old (pink): 4%
Private (orange): 37%

There are lots of young people on Wattpad, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Still, I have just as many in the 18-25 years old range, which is more my target audience.

Screen Shot 2015-02-01 at 032DOY, Sun 02.01.2015   3.57.18 PM

Gender was not surprising, but I’m glad I have some male readers!

Starting at 12 o’clock on the pie chart and going clockwise…
Female (bright purple): 63%
Male (green): 9%
Private (dark purple): 28%

Screen Shot 2015-02-01 at 032DOY, Sun 02.01.2015   3.57.37 PM

This is probably the most exciting graph in the whole section! You know what amazed me? 5% of my readers are in India! I wish I could get into Flipkart in India through my usual distributors. I’m waiting for Draft2Digital to partner with them (hopefully soon!) and then I’ll be distributing in India for sure.

Top 12 countries REMOVED is read in:
1) USA – 36.559%
2) Philippines – 11.57%
3) UK – 6.452%
4) India – 5.018%
5) Australia – 3.584%
6) Canada – 3.226%
7) Indonesia – 2.867%
8) Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Italy, Brazil, Vietnam – 1.434%
9) South Africa, New Zealand – 1.075%
10) Ghana – 0.935%
11) Mexico, Norway, Iran, Kenya, Pakistan, Malaysia – 0.717%
12) Iraq, Poland – 0.51%

Conclusion

I’m still very glad to have my book in its entirety up on Wattpad. I’ve gained a lot of readers who have gone on to read the rest of the series (I know this because they’ve messaged me) and the stats they provide me are very helpful in determining marketing approaches. I still highly recommend putting full novels up on Wattpad!

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  • Sarra Cannon

    Great post! I have been considering getting my debut works up on Wattpad as well, but I wasn’t sure how much work was involved or what could be gained from it. Thanks for posting such a detailed report and wow, congrats on over 60k reads!!

    • It’s worth it if they promote your book! All you have to do is contact them, tell them you’re willing to put your whole book up there, and they’ll work something out with you. Once I had my whole book up, the featured it and that was when the fun began. Many people have told me they’ve gone on to read more in the series, so I think it’s definitely worth it.

      • Sarra Cannon

        That’s definitely good to know. The first three books in my series are free now, so I’d be willing to put all three up. I honestly haven’t done it yet because I’ve been nervous about the backlash of readers angry that the rest of the series wasn’t up for free. Have you had any of that?

      • So I guess other people have had that problem but not me. Maybe because I was really upfront about it being the first of a series and the rest were for sale elsewhere? It’s right in the description on Wattpad. I’ve had one person ask me if I was going to put up the rest of the books but she was polite and understanding. Others have written me to say they are going on to buy the rest. So I consider that favorable.

  • Another awesome post, Stephanie. Bookmarking for later this afternoon!

  • Very informative. Thanks!

  • Lola R

    How interesting and I love seeing all those graphs. They really give you some insight in who is reading your book. I never really used watpad myself, as I don’t like reading books on my computer, but I have heard of it a few times. And I am glad to see it’s working for you. That country graph is one of the more surprising ones and it’s fun to see how people from all over the world are reading Removed!

    • I definitely think the world graph was super cool. I like seeing where people are reading and it gives me some insight into who may be interested in Japanese culture outside of the usual countries.

  • Brinda Berry

    I love your blog posts. This one is especially insightful. I joined Wattpad last year and have never done a thing with it. I’m now considering it more seriously. The stats are awesome.

    • Thanks Brinda! I love sharing stats in the hopes they’ll help someone else make decisions. I think putting a whole novel on Wattpad that’s already free, and stating that it’s free elsewhere and that it’ll be the only book of a series free, works great. Because I’m upfront about the whole series being available on other vendors, I don’t get any backlash from people wanting the rest of my books for free.

  • Great post! Question: I know you released your chapters about once per week with little notes in between the installments (I got them all via Wattpad lol) Did you find this to be a better audience builder than releasing multiple chapters at the same time?

    • Hmmm, I’m not sure because I’ve not published to Wattpad any other way. I would need to try both methods and see.
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