Advice - In The Form Of Rants

Ranking and Read to Vote Ratio

Honestly, on Wattpad, there isn't a way to know which books are the best by quality. Trust me, there isn't a measure anywhere when it comes to books: not the Watty's, a major competition or a traditional publisher.

The only things that will tell you the quality of something are the following:

Yourself - your taste, style and willingness to listen to others.

Blind, harsh critics. People who know nothing about the author/director/studio, people involved, initial story or anything else- but still have knowledge of the field. They are the most likely to be honest, because they have no reason to do otherwise.

But, some people believe that Wattpad's ranking system is a determination of quality, and nothing else.

Oh boy, aren't you wrong! The ranking system shows the top 999 books of a category, by activity. This data is processed using an algorthym over a certain period of time. This algorthym processes activity- reads, votes, comments, additions to public and private libraries. If your book gets more than 800 notifications within the span of 2 weeks, you should most definitely rank.

But keep this in mind.

Just because your book is ranked, it doesn't mean it's good. It means it is popular. But, often popular books are good, even though that is subjective.

So if you notice that your book isn't ranked, don't fret! It doesn't mean the book is bad, it means it hasn't got a lot of (interactive) readers as of now. If you are too focused on ranks, you'll lose sight of your goal.

Another show of the popularity is the read to vote ratio. Wattpad doesn't calculate this for you, so if you're interested, you'll have to work it out yourself.

How to work it out:

Amount of reads ÷ Amount of votes = Direct proportion of votes to reads

For example, as of now, my first book has 6.16k reads and 1.05k votes. It also has 26 chapters. So this is how my direct proportion would work out:

6160 (I always round down) ÷ 1050 = 5.87 (rounded)

That means for every vote I get, I have about 6 reads. That's not too bad of a proportion!

But, read to vote proportion always changes. The best proportions you'll ever get is the time you publish: when your most dedicated readers will read and vote. This is usually when you have more votes than reads... and it's pretty much the only time that will happen.

But again, this is a measure of popularity more than quality. Then again, it's quite rare that popularity and quality go hand in hand.