Hey guys, I wanted to get a feel for average drop off rates of Royal Road stories. I calculated mine and I drop about 7% of my readers from chapter to chapter on average. This is my first story so I am sure it will probably be one of the higher drop off rates. Anyone comfortable posting their own? Also, this is a pretty good metric to test the strength of your chapters. When I notice a certain chapter has a drop off rate higher than my average I know I need to improve it.
I usually look at the retention... so 93% read-through is great. Do you see any chapters that have a bigger drop-off? That might be somewhere to look at more closely. For finished books, anything over 50% read-through from book to book is "decent" as Bubbles would say. Not sure about chapters. I imagine it should be higher.
So my total read through is only 16%, which tells me I should probably work on my summary so people know what they are getting into. Or it tells me that my summary is performing way better than my actual story. The chapters are mostly consistent at a 7% drop off rate besides the first few chapters. I counted them in the average but probably shouldn't have since people where probably just testing it out. I am sure the first few chapters always have a larger drop off rate that would throw off the intent of this metric.
Wattpad, not RRL, but I think this still applies. As with most stories, I have the highest drop off rate in the first chapter. Someone clicks, doesn't like it, and doesn't finish. From there, I usually have about a 4-7 percent drop off except for one midway chapter. At that point, I have a 15% drop off. It's strange because the chapter isn't one of high importance or low importance. Total read through, I have no idea how I'd even calculate that from the data that I have.
Maybe, it's just such an odd point. Asking others that have made it past what they've though, they simply said it was a regular chapter. No one could really explain it.
Don't trust reader drop off rate, this is the view count of my chapters and I'm high in RRL rankings... it's determined by too many uncontrolled factors, such as time of day, day of the week, who's on, how fast the recent updates list is ticking by, how long since you last updated, how long you get at the very top of the list, first language of the reader (it's always best to release in time around 17:00-22:00 US time give or take two hours because of timezones). The long and short of it is to ignore view rates except as a way of counting how many people have read your fic (also, i believe RRL also counts bots so it's intrinsically flawed as a measurement system)
I love BookBrawl, but Travis is still having some of the main coding done on it. So I'm not sure how good it is to go right now? Little things like recent postings etc aren't activated yet. So unless you specifically know what you're looking for at the moment, it's difficult to find the books. I basically just post mine as practice LOL
