Editing By the Numbers – Bring Out Your Data

A few months back, Jukepop authors got a huge leg up on understanding their audience when the Author Analytics tools rolled out. Unfortunately, it’s still a little difficult to get the data you really need in one place, but this series of posts should help you get your numbers in order. If we’re all lucky, Jukepop’s reading this right now and will make this whole article moot in a future update. For now, though, here’s how to get your stats to tell you something useful.

Chapter Numbers, Titles, and Publication Dates

To get a handle on your serial, you first need a list of its chapters and their publication dates. You can find all this tucked away under My Account > My Submissions > Edit Chapters (see below).

Just copy and paste the data you need into a spreadsheet, so you end up with a nice, neat list of your chapters and when you published them to Jukepop. This is important, because you’ll want those dates if you ever want to look at trends based on your posting schedule, seasonal events, or promotions you ran. Knowing that a big dip in your readers happened right after you took a month off from posting new chapters is important info to have, and it should convince you to be more considerate to your readers.

If you’ve got any chapters that are not live, delete these from your spreadsheet now – there’s no point in including chapters that aren’t visible to the public in your data.

Chapter by Chapter Numbers

Now we get to the tedious part. If there are any Jukepop admins reading along with the class, this is the part that most needs fixed. The useful data in the author analytics section has to be gathered by hand, one chapter at a time, but it would be swell to have that all available in an easy-to-download spreadsheet so I can delete this blog post.

For the authors out there, here’s how you get the good bits into your spreadsheet. Go to the Author Analytics section of your account. You want to click the All Periods link (1). Then check the box next to Include anonymous users (2). Finally, click the Update Analytics button (3).

This is where all the delicious data nuggets live. Ideally, we’d be able to download all of the data into a spreadsheet from a single place, but Jukepop hasn’t put that in place yet. Let ‘em know if you’d be interested in that fuctionality.

For now, just transcribe the data for each of your chapters into a spreadsheet. I’ve highlighted the areas that I’ve found most useful below. If you feel that any other data might be useful, grab it now, because you really don’t want to have to do this twice.

As you can see, you’ll need to add the following columns to your spreadsheet: View, Unique Views, +Votes, Reviews, Authors Reading, and Avg. Read Time. If your serial started after 2/1/2014, go ahead and transcribe the data for all your chapters into your spreadsheet right now. As a helpful guide, I’ve included a template spreadsheet right here > JPStatsTemplate.

If you’re serial started before 2/1/2014, the views data for your earlier chapters isn’t captured quite the same as the rest of your data. This is a bummer, because you’ll have to capture your data twice. First, capture just these columns: +Votes, Reviews, Authors Reading, and Avg. Read Time. Then go back up to the top of your Author Analytics page and change the From date to 2/1/14 and the To date to the current date. Update the analytics and now capture the View and Unique Views data for each chapter. Also add a new column called +Votes Feb and transcribe your updated +Votes info here.

You’re doing this so you can get a look at your total stats on the one hand, but also see just the stats that correlate to views and unique views starting in February. It’s a little confusing right now, but it will all make sense as we move ahead in this series.

Let’s Do Math

The next step is incorporates some calculated data (data I hope Jukepop will include in the future) into your spreadsheet. Add a column for Word Count to your spreadsheet, and enter the word count for each chapter. This is important, because it allows you to get a good look at how readers react to chapters of differing lengths and will be really important when you start analyzing your beats to see how they were received by your readers.

Now, add a column called Read Time Ratio. This is a calculated column that determines the ratio of time your readers spent reading a given chapter to the time they spent reading chapters on average. The formula for this is pretty simple. Assuming your Average Read Time is populated in column J of your spreadsheet, and row 1 of the spreadsheet is your headers, then your formula should be =J2/(AVERAGE(J$2:J$87)). Just copy and paste this into the cells for each chapter in the Read Time Ratio column. The closer to 1 the value for this column, the closer to the overall average read time your readers spent on this chapter. Those with a ratio less than one were fast reads that your audience whipped right through or, possibly, just skimmed and moved on. Those that have a ratio above one indicate that readers spent more time in those chapters, either because they were savoring your delicate prose, or because they were having trouble navigating your convoluted syntax.

Time to add a column for your Word Count Ratio. This is the ratio of the number of words in each chapter versus the average number of words in all chapters. Assuming your Word Count column is K and the first row is taken up with headers, then your formula will be: =K2/(AVERAGE(K$2:K$87)). Copy and paste this into each of the cells in the Word Count Ratio column. This will show you how each chapter stacks up when compared to the word count in other chapters. The closer to 1 a chapter’s ratio, the nearer it is to the overall average. Those chapters with ratios below one have fewer words than average, while those with ratios above one have more words than the average chapter.

Finally, we can use our ratios to make sense of time readers spent reading a chapter versus the number of words in that chapter. Add a new column called Average Read Time Ratio vs Word Count Ratio. Assuming your read time ratio is in column L and your word count ratio is in column M, then your formula for each chapter would be: =L2/M2. Populate this for each of your chapters.

This last ratio is very important. It shows you the ratio of time spent reading versus chapter word count. We’ll go into more detail about this in the next chapter of this series, but what you should see is most chapters with a ARTvWC ratio of 1, indicating readers are spending an average amount of time reading a chapter for its word count. When you see a ratio much lower than one, that’s a problem, where you see a ratio much higher than one, that’s potentially a very good thing. We’ll get into the nitty gritty of that in the coming weeks.

For now, gaze at all of your wonderful data. We’ll be digging into it in the next several posts, so I’ll seeya in a few days.