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Tech Tuesday - Reading Away in 2018

Myr

Entry posted by Myr in Technology Archive

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A few weeks back, our tech guru extraordinaire, A.J., compiled the reading stats to date for me.  I poked them around to see what I could see and I made a little pie chart for everyone.

Genre Tags for the top 700 stories read on GA

 

Now, any math person will tell you that you need context to understand what that means.  So here are the relevant details:

  • Data is compiled based on "reads" from Jan-April 2018.  This is about one quarter of the year.
  • The data shown here represents 2.89 million views, which compromised the top 717 stories.  The cut off for that number was 1000 views in the time period.
  • Stories can (and do) have more than one genre listed on them.
  • The displayed data was compiled this way:
    • Stories were ranked by most views Jan-April
    • All stories with more than 1000 views were left in.
    • We counted up the number of times a genre was tagged in those stories.
    • The pie shows the proportion of stories so tagged.

As you can see, people are reading Romance and Drama in high numbers.  Though, to be honest, many of the stories on the site are tagged with Romance in addition to whatever else someone wanted to be listed. Western is not shown but is half the size of Paranormal.

 

Enhanced story stats will be part of a future update to Stories.

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Carlos Hazday

Carlos Hazday 115,818

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Which came first, the egg or the chicken? Is romance so popular with readers because it saturates stories posted or are there so many romance stories because that's what people read most?

Can't wait until all the bugs are squashed and we have more reliable numbers. Good job with this stuff, Myr.

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FormerMember4

FormerMember4 34,581

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This doesn’t surprise me. I’m a more serious person. I prefer Drama... like mysteries and analytical stuff.

I think we all turn to romance to a degree. It connects us all as humans. We relate to circumstances of relationships. It allows us to put our own relationships in new light. For some, it fills a void.

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Carlos Hazday

Carlos Hazday 115,818

Posted

2 minutes ago, BlindAmbition said:

It allows us to put our own relationships in new light. For some, it fills a void.

 

So darn perceptive. Talk about nailing it!

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Brayon

Brayon 40,953

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Quote

Though, to be honest, many of the stories on the site are tagged with Romance in addition to whatever else someone wanted to be listed.

@Myr Is this something, as writers, we shouldn't be doing? Tagging stories with multiple genres is what I mean.

 

Thanks to you and @A.J. for compiling this data for us.

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Headstall

Headstall 306,749

Posted (edited)

4 hours ago, BHopper2 said:

@Myr Is this something, as writers, we shouldn't be doing? Tagging stories with multiple genres is what I mean.

 

Thanks to you and @A.J. for compiling this data for us.

Interesting question, BHopper2. I would think it unavoidable. We use tags for our readers' sake, to help them decide whether to open up a certain story, and that applies to genres I would think. If a story is a romance, but also a fantasy, or science fiction, the reader should know that. Just saying... :) 

 

And yes, thank you, @A.J., for your hard work.  And also, thanks to @Myr.

 

 

Edited by Headstall
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northie

northie 21,036

Posted (edited)

3 hours ago, Headstall said:

If a story is a romance, but also a fantasy, or science fiction, the reader should know that.

Yes, indeed. I don't use them frivolously, but most stories are a mixture of things and it is right that we promote them to the widest readership possible. For them and for us.  :)

 

Edited by northie
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Graeme

Graeme 16,882

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For curiosity's sake, only, I wouldn't mind seeing the same data presented with the genre combinations as separate slices. I've seen a lot of romance/drama stories, so I suspect the pie chart is overstating those genres because of the double counting. Simply because I'm curious, I would like to see a chart where each story is only counted once.

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Myr

Myr 32,920

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@BHopper2 @northie@Headstall The way I view genre tagging on a story is there should be 1 to 3.  More than that and you either have a much larger than normal story (Circumnavigation anyone?) or are a bit experimental or unfocused.  For example, I usually tag genres as primary and secondary.  Science Fiction and Adventure, for example.  The longer the story, the more likely you'll have 3 genres. With my own stories, my short stories have 1 or 2 tags and my longest one has 3 and they legitimately hit on those elements.

 

@Graeme right now the data is completely manual manipulation in Excel.  I'm an Excel generalist and not a superuser so it would take quite awhile to gather that.

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Graeme

Graeme 16,882

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@Myr, I understand. Don't go to any trouble for me. I was just curious. 

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William King

William King 3,102

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It's nice to see some stats. Probably a large majority of stories are labelled with romance and drama, don't most stories have a romantic interest and are dramatic? Whilst the prompts stories inclusion is interesting, it's not a genre, the same could be argued for free verse. 

 

If you were going to play around with the figures some more, I would be interested in only including in romance and drama those stories which have no other tag.

 

Commenting on the numbers, I find it odd that Sci-fi is so low, comedy so high, and historical is perhaps skewed because you don't have Arthur's Drummer Boy series, which was a huge success, although it's now been taken down and published commercially.

 

Thanks to AJ for the stats. and to you for making them available.

 

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