How to Visualise Your Success

...in a non-self-helpy-buzz-wordy sort of way.

Being something of a nerd (you'd never guess ;) ), I keep detailed statistics on the performance of The Second Realm. This involves a huge 5-page spreadsheet, most of the content of which is obscure and unhelpful. What it actually boils down to is a handful of graphs, and I thought it might be useful to talk a bit about what they are and what I use them for.

The Most Important Graph:

This shows the running total across all (currently) 17 published episodes of The Second Realm. It's not actually very useful for telling me about how individual episodes are performing, or anything else really (though you can spot a few good weeks here and there). Why use it, then?

Well, the effect is psychological. This graph exists to take the sting out of bad weeks by showing how insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things - can you even spot the most recent bad week? It's not the dip in early January, it's the tiny little blip at the start of April. What this graph shows, more than anything, is that whatever momentum I have managed to establish isn't really diminishing at all.

In an ideal world, this would show an upward curve, indicating growing momentum, but I'll settle for what I've got for now. The reason this one is so important is that it keeps me going when all the other graphs turn discouraging.

Weekly Traffic:

This is probably the one I use most (and you've seen it before, a couple of times). The blue line is the number of total downloads across all episodes for a given week, and thus tracks overall performance on a weekly basis. The red line is a four-week rolling average (the total for the current week and the preceding three, divided by four), and the green is a twelve-week version of the same.

The red line is a bit obsolete now, but the purpose of the two averages is to even out the big spikes in the blue line (most of which represent the release of a new episode). What they reveal is that the end of last year went badly for me, but things have been picking up since the nadir in mid-February. It's worth noting, too, that the actual traffic nadir will have been earlier than the dip in the green line - this is the disadvantage of the rolling average measure.

The usefulness of this graph comes from the limit it places on what might be going on. A flat green line would mean steady traffic - losing as many readers as I gain. Crucially, it would also mean that my reach - the number of new readers trying out one of my stories for the first time - wasn't growing.

The slight upward trend means one of three things; growing reach (more readers trying me out), growing conversion (more reached readers coming back for another episode), or growing devotion (regulars coming back more often). Since all these cases indicate growing interest, they're all good things. Now, last time I made any predictions about the performance of The Second Realm, I was proved wildly optimistic, but I remain quietly content this time. We'll see how the rest of the summer plays out, which brings me too:

Traffic per Episode:

This is where things get a bit complicated. This is a graph of the total from the first graph, above, divided by the number of published episodes at the time. It's a slightly crude measure, because I didn't publish an episode at the end of November (some of the drop-off from then onwards is due to the effect of that artificial peak being spread thinner as time moves on). It also completely hides the massive jump (visible on both previous graphs) at the end of August last year, when episode 3.2 inexplicably brought in a massive slew of traffic. I still don't know why that happened...

Anyway, the red bars are basically the bars from the last few weeks superimposed on the equivalent weeks last year, which will in theory allow me to compare this year's performance to last year's. Hopefully this will allow me to start identifying seasonal effects (i.e. do people just download more free short stories in the summer? Is there a key popular time of year?), though obviously with only two years' data to draw on there's a limit to the conclusions I'll be able to draw.

As far as reading this graph goes, the important thing is the angle of the slope within a given segment. Each jag represents a new episode, and the angle of the slope tells me how well that episode did at generating new traffic for the series as a whole. There is a caveat to this, which is that because it's an average, as time goes on and more and more episodes appear, each individual download of an individual episode becomes less significant. I haven't quite worked out how to compensate for that yet.

A steady upward trend (such as appears for about the first third of the graph) would indicate that the increase in traffic each month was keeping up with this effect - and would actually be equivalent to a significant upward curve on both the previous graphs. Clearly that's not happening, but much of the drop-off in the last six months doesn't actually represent a lack of growth, just growth that's not keeping pace with the appearance of new episodes.

And finally, just for kicks, a graph that isn't useful at all:

I mentioned this one when talking about blogging as promotion last month, but didn't actually show it because, well, just look at the thing. It's a bit... chaotic, no? The blue line should be familiar, where it's visible at all - it's the same blue line as was on the second graph, above. The red and green lines here, however, are completely different.

What they actually measure is my activity on this blog (i.e. number of posts per week) as a proportion of my average activity (total number of blog posts divided by total number of weeks). The key lists them both as percentages, but the green line is actually per-fifty rather than per-hundred. Basically, towards the right-hand end of the graph, you can kind of see a trend line curving gently downwards - that represents weeks where I actually blogged twice. spikes above it mean three or four posts, below means one or two. The red line is just crazy and should be ignored.

What I was looking for was evidence that activity on this blog translated into traffic for The Second Realm, because I'd developed the conviction that whenever I had a week away from blogging, traffic really dipped. If that conviction had been correct, though, there'd be a consistent correlation between dips in the green line and dips in the blue, but for every week that appears to validate the belief, there's one that refutes it. I keep the graph going these days mainly out of aesthetic curiosity and chagrin.

Anyway, that's a few of the perks and pitfalls of maths for tracking your progress as an author. Don't feel you need all (or any) of these graphs, but if you think you'll find them useful, excel makes things fairly simple (although, apparently, too complicated for Harvard economists) to implement. Just make sure you've got plenty of data to draw on - the more data you have, the less discouraging an individual bad point will be.

I should add - these are very simple measures, and I'm no statistician. There are all sorts of other techniques I could use, except that I have no idea how to set them up or what they'd mean.

Nobody knows anything!

To call the feedback I got from my first two beta readers for Heaven Can Wait 'glowing' would be putting it mildly. I knew while I was writing it that I was on to something good, but even my most optimistic self-appraisal was outdone by those responses. I blogged here about dealing with that (very pleasant) surprise and the need to get other opinions.

The process of additional feedback is now pretty much complete. I've had three other detailed responses to the book, and a few bits and bobs from a couple of other people. All three have been less positive. My mother sent me a long email explaining how a couple of scenes were 'terrible' (her exact word - never let anyone tell you you can never trust your parents to be critical!), and listing several other problems, though when pressed she admitted she'd enjoyed the book as a whole. I took on board all but one of mum's criticisms, because all the novels that have been big influences on Heaven Can Wait have been books I've borrowed from her - she knows the genre very well.

A close friend (and, to a lesser extent, his girlfriend) who's a big reader of fantasy but not a writer brought up one stylistic problem - I have a tendency to write the early parts of my books a bit like scripts, with long passages of dialogue that need breaking up - and raised some issues over character motivations that needed clarifying in the climax. Those changes went in pretty much as requested because when I looked over the bits that were mentioned, I could clearly see the flaws highlighted. He clearly enjoyed it immensely, though, because he won't stop pestering me for a look at Some Kind of Angel (I'm enough of a gitwizard to have asked him to wait until the second draft).

The third response came from a friend who is a writer, who's read the latest draft. By the standards of the other responses I've had, it has been catastrophic. She found my characters flat, my environments blank and the amount of dialogue overwhelming. It's almost impossible for me to believe she read the same book as my first two readers, particularly given that the main focus of the changes over the last two drafts has been breaking up the dialogue and adding detail to the environments.

Can all five readers be right? I think it's impossible for any of them to be wrong, as it happens. When a reader gives you their response to something, you have to accept it - they can't be wrong about their response. But what the example shows is that you can't please all of the people all of the time. I am in the process of going through the book again looking for obnoxiously long passages of dialogue and blank rooms, but I'm not looking very hard - I've more than satisfied 80% of my readers so far (statistics are fun, aren't they?), so it can't be that bad.

One of the things I found really hard to deal with about this last response was that a lot of what I was told went against my instincts as a writer. The reader in question really knows her stuff, so I'm prepared to let my instincts be challenged, but it shook me so much that I actually went back and looked at some of my favourite books to actually study what worked for me as a reader.

Let's just say I won't be recommending many of my favourite books to this reader. The first book I picked up was Dan Simmons' 'The Fall of Hyperion', one of my two or three favourite books I've ever read. I opened it at random and found myself in one of my favourite chapters... and the chapter in question is almost entirely dialogue for about ten pages, with a few action tags, and almost no setting. Granted, it's a confrontational, highly-charged scene, but of the scenes I looked at it was the one I found most exciting.

It's a bit of an extreme example, too; the other scenes I looked at (one from 'The Ships of Merior' by Janny Wurts, one from 'Lord of Chaos' by Robert Jordan, and one from 'The Name of the Wind' by Patrick Rothfuss) were more balanced, but all of them, consistently, went against the piece of advice I'd been most suspicious of - mixing environment description in with the dialogue.

The point I'm getting at is NOT that the reader in question was wrong. I know this person wouldn't lie to me and I trust her judgement, but I think her tastes and mine probably overlap a lot less than I thought. There's no point my trying to write a book which does things differently to the books I'm really passionate about - how could I find enough passion to do a good job of it? - but that does mean that people who like different books, who are passionate about different things in writing, aren't going to be able to help me write a book I am passionate about as much as people who share my tastes are.

The title of this blog post is a bit facetious - it's not that nobody knows anything, it's that when it comes to writing advice, two people can disagree and still both be right. Sometimes you have to go with your own passions and make your own judgements.

(A quick thank-you to James Tallett for setting my head straight on this issue while I was still reeling from the critique).

I am still hoping to publish 'Heaven Can Wait' sometime this week, but I doubt it will be out by Thursday, which I was originally aiming for. Soon, though.

Biting the Hand that Feeds Back

Having confidence in your writing ability - even once it's been proven - can be a very hard thing to do. Yep, buckle up, folks, this is another one of my jaunts into the psychology of writing. I'm dealing with a slightly unusual topic; receiving positive feedback. There are loads of blogs about how to deal with negative feedback, criticism and general negativity, but sometimes positive feedback can have its own psychological knots attached.

I'm in just such a situation right now. I'm in the process of getting feedback from various friends on 'Heaven Can Wait' - while in the meantime trying to sort out cover art, world-building and an outline for book 2. So far, I've only had one response, from AJ Alto, AKA @AJAlto, AKA 'Run!'

Without wanting to blow my own trumpet, let's just say the feedback AJ sent me was very good. With wanting to blow my own trumpet (and hey, no-one else is going to do it for me. No, not that trumpet. Perv), AJ told me the book is engaging, exciting, moving and - but for two minor grammatical points and a couple of character tweaks - ready to publish. Given that less than 6 weeks before sending her a copy, I hadn't even dreamt up the idea, that's incredible.

And therein lies the problem. I wouldn't go quite so far as to call AJ sane and rational, but she's an experienced writer and I have a great deal of respect for her wit and judgement. Therefore, I should - and do - trust her. But if the book's that good, and I can write a book that good in six weeks, why the hell would I do anything else? I should be dropping everything else and writing book 2, while rushing to get book 1 up on Amazon.

Actually, I sort of am doing that, but I'm not rushing nearly as fast as I could - centrally, I haven't started formatting the text for Kindle or EPub yet. So do I actually not trust AJ? If you trust someone, you follow their advice - that's what trust means. If you believe someone's judgement correct, it's irrational - mad - to go against it. So am I mad?

I'm cautious. Caution is a good virtue for a writer to possess. I spent too long as a teenager fantasising that the new project, the one I was then working on, was the one that would make me rich - once or twice, I even put money where my dreams were and got burned (low point; starting a zine, getting a hundred copies printed, and selling only 25).

There's a balance to be struck between caution and trust, as there is in all human affairs (okay, that was obnoxiously pretentious). In this case, I'm leaning - and possibly erring - on the side of caution because I want to take the time to get my launch right (though I'm still seriously entertaining the idea of publishing in early July).

I'm also seeking the opinion of other beta readers, because there is always the possibility that for some reason 'Heaven Can Wait' resonates specially for AJ and not for other people, and you should never assume one person's opinion is univesal, however knowledgeable that person is.

Incidentally, if you're interested in 'Heaven Can Wait', there are two (overlapping) samples here and here, and I'm still happy to accept more betas - message me on twitter (@eatthepen) or leave a comment if you're interested.