The dreaded dropoff ratio · 2:22am Jul 24th, 2014
I am always fascinated by Bad Horse's blog posts, and this one is no exception. I zeroed in on this particular statistic:
The number of people who read chapter 2 is usually 40% to 70% of the number who read chapter 1. The exceptions to this rule are not good stories, but very, very bad stories. For this gem, for instance, it's 93%.
And this conclusion of his contains about 55 percent pure burn:
All the effort I've made to write "well" then seems silly. It's just setting the difficulty level higher. And that is the sort of thing that makes sense mainly for people who write for themselves, who are playing solitaire (to win) rather than hearts (to have fun with other people).
I am minded of Janis Ian's reference (in "At Seventeen") to "cheat ourselves at solitaire," which, on the face of it, sounds like my approach.
That said, I went to gather the numbers -- on The Sparkle Chronicles, simply because there are more numbers to be gathered -- and minded the decline:
Chapter 1 - 2299 views.
Chapter 2 - 1454 views.
Chapter 3 - 1368 views.
Chapter 4 - 1377 views.
Chapter 5 - 1264 views.
Chapter 6 - 1628 views.
Chapter 2 readers, compared to Chapter 1 readers: 63.2 percent. In the ballpark, though not in the Major Leagues. (I assume the burst of enthusiasm for Chapter 6 is due to people wanting to make sure it's over.)
Of course, the startling statistic is the fact that all these numbers have four digits; I was expecting maybe a couple of dozen reads, and no more, before the rest of the world lost interest. We have since established that I am no good at projecting these things.
I would love rates that high. Of readers who start Quizzical only one in 20 finishes.
2312539
I expected a much steeper dropoff than I got. Then again, Quizzical was -- what, 11 chapters?
Let's see what I get for Second Act:
Chapter 1: 921 views.
Chapter 2: 636 views.
Chapter 3: 1137 views.
Chapter 4: 739 views.
Already anomalous: Chapter 3 has the most reads. (Then again, it's the "technical description" of the ponification process; I suspect some folks looked at that just to make sure it wasn't Conversion Bureau stuff.)
Chapter 2/Chapter 1 ratio: 69 percent. Go figure.