You already know that you gotta know your followers. What you don't know, is that by knowing that you gotta know your followers, that doesn't give you the proper tools to know the people who know that they are your followers. You know?

  Woah, I'm getting a bad case of déjà vu over here.

   Okay, so I guess I'm starting to rehash old topics... but in this case, it seemed necessary. It was bad form to finger-wag those who don't engage with their followers, without even raising awareness for the most underrated utility in the Wattpadder's arsenal.

  What's this utility, I hear? Every multi-level marketer's dream: soulless, number-crunching statistics!

  Snooore. What else ya got?

  Not as exciting as 'follower death machine kill-bot', I get that. But this one is a whole other bag of sin; putting your content out there is only half the battle, the next part is analysing how well it has been received... and by whom.

  You can see your stats anytime my going into My Works, selecting your book and clicking on the Stats button. If you get lost, no one can ever help you.

  Wattpad Analytics is nothing new, although surprisingly few people are able to connect the dots. To show what conclusions can be drawn from a random pot, I'll be sharing the official numbers from this very book. Don't judge, though.

Overview

  This is the Overview, perhaps the only tab that needs no introduction. You've got your unique readers at the top (number of different people), total votes and comments. If you're scoring at least one or more unique readers every other day, then that's a good sign.

  Votes are the number of (gasp!) votes your story has received on a given day. Comments are the same, but both of these can uncover ongoing trends; specifically, which days of the week your story receives the most attention.

Engagement

  Here we can see 'Completed Reads by Part', which tells you the percentage of people who have read a specific chapter from start to finish. Don't fret if this seems low, you're generally looking for anything upwards of 70% for a genuine novel.

  Again, the bottom two are pretty much the same as before, except that they now refer to the chapters themselves. Using all this data, I've been able to identify and highlight a surge in interest for Part 11 of this story — more specifically, Sin #10: Mary Sue.

  What does this tell us? For one thing, more people read this chapter from start to finish in a single sitting. The votes were a teeny bit higher than the drop I'd went through, and more people commented on this chapter than any of the last 10 or so.

  If I was any sort of professional—

  HA!

  ...If I was any sort of 'professional', I would take this to mean that the topic of Mary Sues ignited a larger discussion in the comments section, and was engaging enough to hold the reader's attention.

  Taking that into account, it would probably benefit this series if I looked for new sins in the character stereotype family, pulling other ideas straight from TV Tropes. Let's all look forward to that Tsundere chapter coming soon!

Demographics

  *Sprays out Diet Coke* WHAAAT?!?

  That's exactly what I did, when I saw what appears to be the most vital tab. This one gives you anonymous percentage data on who is reading your story. Their age bracket, gender and country to be precise... and apparently, this series is a big hit with you ladies out there.

  Lucky duck.

  It's no secret that Wattpad is a female-dominated website, but with 72% female, 12% male and only 16% private? That's an immense skew in gender, especially for a book with 24k reads. But what exactly are my other stats here?

  Age Brackets:

  13–18 > 58%

  18–25 > 14%

  25–35 > 5%

  35–45 > 1%

  Private > 22%

  Location:

  USA > 55.758%

  UK > 6.157%

  Canada > 4.333%

  India > 2.395%

  Okay, I'm not going to list every country's percentile... but you get the idea. With all of this knowledge, you will be able to grasp who your novel appeals to, instead of just how well they receive it. I am now aware that teenage American girls are my primary target for marketing this writing guide. 

  *High fives to all my sistahs*

  This doesn't open a whole new world of opportunity in Non-Fiction, but think about it. If you're writing a fantasy novel and realise that 99.999% of your demographic are young males, you'll probably gain more mileage out of making your chapters action-based. More fire and beer and sword-wielding badasses, y'know.

  However, if you see that your fans are mostly female from 18-25, you might be more inclined to focus on heart-throb romances and intelligent themes. Yes, this is exactly as stereotypical of gender roles as it gets.

  BOOO! Down with the patriarchy! Bush did 9/11, Tyro31 forces gender oppression onto underprivileged babies!

  I understand that not every 20-something woman is a baby-making machine who reads Fifty Shades like a Bible. Even some guys would rather chill at home with a nice cuppa than go out pounding beers at the Cannibal Corpse concert. I am that chill guy, believe me!

  Sadly, we live in a world of probability and maths. This means that shameless pandering would risk alienating some fans, but your book will sell a heck of a lot better by appealing to the vast majority of sheeple.

  Demographics can be a cold mistress, but one entirely of our own creation.

----

  I just wanted to give this feature the spotlight today, since I genuinely believe that not enough people know it even exists. You can read the odd comment about your work, see how many likes a chapter has, but you never realise how it all stacks together. 

  Having a graph to show the trends, the ups and downs, it shines on what you aren't seeing between the cracks. If one chapter of your story has an abrupt spike in comments and votes, it could mean that a twist or revelation has been well-received. As a content producer, you need to know what gets you those ratings!

  Keep in mind, statistics like these won't help too much on smaller stories. Sample sizes are everything, and so it'd be best to wait until you have more than a thousand reads before drawing certain conclusions.

  That being said, I'm very interested in starting a discussion here. Let me know what your stats say about your books, or even your genre as a whole. Do you have more female or male readers? Which age bracket appeals to older generations? Let's combine our data and find out!

  Stop!! He's a freedom-hating misogynist! Don't do it, guys! 

  No guys around here. Just girls.

  R-Right! I forgot...