The 1% (of readers)

The data behind why we keep waiting for readers to comment on our work or leave reviews

Jul 18, 2023

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

On blogs (and Tumblr and Ream and AO3 and Wattpad and RoyalRoad), the cry often goes up:

“Why aren’t more people leaving comments on my writing? 😥😥😥”

It could be just that they don’t know what to say. They are readers, not writers!

Or, possibly — hear me out! — there has never been a time where readers leave a lot of comments on fiction they read online, and it’s really a numbers game with low odds.

In short, it’s not you; it’s them.

We hope, as subscription authors, that since we are perpetually online and updating our stories regularly, that engagement will be better than what we see on our posts.

It won’t, but here’s why you think it will: because you look at really popular writers who have dozens, nay, hundreds of comments on each chapter/episode/update of their story.

What you are not looking at are the percentages, which are all that matter. And the percentages are always abysmal. The bad news is that, generally speaking, less than 1% of readers will leave a comment.

You want a lot of comments? First you need A LOT of readers.

I base this claim on some back-of-a-napkin research I’ve done, which I’ll get into in a bit, but to start with I think we need to accept that our perception of popularity is entirely jaded by the publishing industry. When someone buys a book, that is all that counts in the metrics which are tracked and recorded. It matters not at all if a person reads the book, just that they bought it. This means “reader engagement” is based on sales, not readership, much less engagement. We optimistically want to equate 5,000 purchases with 5,000 happy readers even if objectively we know that cannot possibly be true, and even if that was true, it is useless data for online subscription authors who are serializing our work.

Instead, we look at sites like goodreads for reviews, which might be considered a form of “comment” on a story, and consider the number of reviews as measured against the number of sales. As we all know, that is a pretty miserable ratio.

But this supports my theory, since you can go to a really popular book’s goodreads page and see, maybe, five thousand reviews. Amazing! …of course that book has sold hundreds of thousands, if not millions of copies. Five thousand reviews aren’t even equal to the number of copies the book sold in a large metropolitan area.

The only exception to this system so far has been Kindle Unlimited, which does actually count how much of a book someone reads. That’s helpful data for things like retention/read-through and popularity, but engagement? Not so much. Readers can “star” it and leave a review, but as any author in KU can tell you, good luck with that. They have to beg and bribe readers to do so.

Let’s get back to my half-assed calculations based on a very small (but representative!) data sample, because there are platforms where readers can read and leave comments which have been around for years. All that data!!!! Just sitting there!! So sexy!!!!!!!!!!

Allow me to introduce you to Wattpad, RoyalRoad, and AO3.

I have direct experience with the latter. I’ve been publishing fic on AO3 since about four days after it launched. My original user ID there is #264, while currently there are over six million users. (That’s not even a humble brag, that is straight up bragging, yo!!!)

Ahem.

Anyway, one of my most popular stories there is an MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) fic called A Bureaucratic Nightmare, which is a novella-length story in twelve chapters. The numbers break down as follows:

Hits: 44,292
Kudos (aka “likes): 3,790
Comments: 513

That is a readers* to comments percentage of a whopping 1%.

Tip jar!

Honestly, that number holds pretty steady across all the fic I’ve ever written. And that is in fandom, where readers are very engaged with the story and actively want to support fanfic writers. Over the years, as fanfic authors have gathered together to bemoan the lack of comments, we’ve often done similar math (on LiveJournal, before AO3) and it always came out the nearly the same. A few really active small fandoms might get up to 5% engagement for some very popular stories, but that was rare.

But lest you think I am taking the piss out of you, let’s look at one of the most popular stories in my current fandom (MDZS/CQL), Lynchpin by ShanaStoryteller. Here’s the breakdown:

Hits: 369,371
Kudos: 21,147
Comments: 3,905

And, yep: 1% of readers commented on the fic. Even if you take “hits” very skeptically (how valid of you!) and chop that number in half, well now you’ve got a whopping 2% of readers leaving comments. Woooo hoooo.

Okay, you say, but that’s AO3. What self-respecting Author (capital A for pretentiousness) would compare to a fanfic repository?

Fine, lets go to Wattpad, which you may not respect more than AO3 but is a legit long-standing platform (in internet years) for original fiction. It’s hard to dig into comment numbers there, but I picked a popular werewolf romance called Alpha Kaden by Ancientt and scratched out some calculations. This is just for chapter one:

Views: 83,100
Stars: 22,000
Comments: 423

That’s .5% of readers commenting on the chapter. Maybe that number goes up for the story as a whole, but I’d bet it does not get above 1%, if it even gets close.

That leaves us with RoyalRoad and Mother of Learning, one of the top rated stories on the platform. Hold onto your hat:

Total Views: 15,510,775 (total views for all chapters)
Average Views: 142,301 (number of views per chapter)
Ratings: 10,769
Comments: 10,900

Now here things get dicey, as I had to randomize looking at multiple chapters to see how many comments they had, and then average them out. Roughly, I figured out that the average number of comments was 100 per chapter, and the story has 109 chapters, which is where I got 10,900 commments.

However, whether you use “total comments:total views,” or “chapter comments:chapter views,” the percentage comes out at roughly .07%. Not even point one percent.

Which proves that fanfic readers are more engaged than readers of original fiction, but not by very damn much.

An important thing to keep in mind is that the way all three of these platforms are set up means readers can comment multiple times on a single chapter, so these comment counts are not 1:1 for readers. In fact it’s probably more like each reader leaves several comments on each chapter. So that “1%” does not mean that 1% of your readers leave comments, but more like .1% of your readers leave ten comments each. (I also did not parse out instances where an author might respond to comments, which would artificially inflate that percentage even more.)

Am I claiming that this is always true? No, of course not. There are “hot topics” that draw in readers who have something to say and who are not shy about saying it, but frankly, I expect that to be far more likely with non-fiction writing such as political journalism or health/diet newsletters.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news like this, but I think it is important for writers to stop self-flagellation for not getting more comments on their work. The vast majority of readers are passive in their appreciation, and even if all they have to do is click a star/kudos/rating button, only a minority do it.

We all love comments and want more of them, just keep in mind the odds. Encourage commenting by asking questions and offering comment starter suggestions. But in the end, focus on your job: write the words people want to read.

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* Hits and views are very squiffy numbers to be counted as “readers,” to be honest. It is incredibly hard to keep track of “how many times an individual user loaded this one specific page on purpose in order to read it.” For instance, if you leave a tab open so that it is one of the tabs that are automatically loaded when you re-open your browser, it is counted as a hit/view. That said, it’s the best we got, so those are the numbers we use.