Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

Chris and I were looking at some stats and thought you might be interested in them too. The new site will have a permanent stats page that will include these -- amongst a host of other stats -- all tricked-out in pie charts and graphs and images, etc. so everyone can see where we're at and how much our community is growing.

BOOKS
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Total: 43,509

• SF: 21,579
• Fantasy: 19,223
• Horror: 5,293

Book Awards: 29
Book Lists: 51

AUTHORS
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Total: 8,208

• Male: 4,907
• Female: 3,219
• Non-binary: 78

PUBLISHERS
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Total: 1,716

MEMBERS
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Total: 7,696

Member Reads: 478,135

• Male Authored: 373,483
• Female Authored: 121,502
• Non-binary Authored: 1,690

Member Reads by Book Type:

• Novel: 413,853
• Collection: 18,662
• Novella: 15,295
• Omnibus: 8,024
• Short Story: 7,702
• Novelette: 5,866
• Anthology: 4,136
• Graphic Novel: 3,089
• Non-Fiction: 987
• Light Novel: 280
• Miscellaneous: 194
• Poem: 39
• Play Script: 8

Reviews: 13,799

• Novels @ 413, 853 is high - this is almost ten times the total number of books (43,509).
• Even excluding Novels, the total of the remaining 12 types is 64,282 - again greater than the total number of books.
• Omnibus @ 8,024 seems high - this would mean that more than one sixth of all book records are omnibuses. Another way of looking at Omnibuses: most Omnibuses contain two or more Novels/Collections, so, at a minimum, there are 8,024 x 3 = 24,072, leaving less than 20k for Novels/Collections that have not been included in an Omnibus, as well as all the short fiction, Anthologies, Non-Fiction, Light Novels, etc. I'd guess the total to be no more than 500 or so.
• The same issue for Novellas/Short Stories/Novelettes. The total of these three is 28,863, which would represent 66% of all book records, which seems high.
• Graphic Novel @ 3,089 also seems high - we're very picky on Graphic Novels - they almost never get in unless they are award nominated or are on a list. I'd guess the total here to be no greater than 100-200.
• Light Novel @ 280 is low. Skimming the Original Japanese publication page, there looks to be around 1,500 Light Novels.

That's a great idea. I could add that to the stats page or maybe it makes more sense to create a "top 10's" page in the books section under WWEnd Lists for those. Would probably get more traffic there. What do you think?

OK, this is where I screwed up on my labeling and lead you astray. That section was supposed to be "Member Reads by Book Type". I've corrected it above. That should take care of all the math errors except for the author genders. Those numbers are not going to add up because of multi-authored books.

Thanks for the reply and pointing out the errors. 

I think sorting by YA and children's books is a much needed update. We don't have that in the first round of updates but it should follow after the initial launch. I'd really like to bump up both of those categories to expand our coverage for the younger generations of readers. We skew rather sharply to an older crowd and we need to bring along some younger folks into the community. Those categories would be helpful to the older gen who likely buy gooks for family as well.

Yes, we will most definitely be covering other categories in the awards and lists. Our Ubers have been adding lots of shorts, novellas and anthos etc. to the site -- we just have to get the categories set up. Our Google sheet for new awards and award categories has over 30 of them in the queue. It's our plan to introduce a couple new cats or even new awards each month.

Ah - that really explains the stats.

It's interesting that of the ~1,500 Light Novels, there have only been 280 reads. Even Non-Fiction has almost four times as many reads. We just haven't tapped into the Light Novels audience somehow.

And now that I think about it, how would this be displayed on the stats page - The total number of reads for all of the top 10 in each category? And have the "list" version show each of the 10 top ten items along with the reads for each item? Each approach is useful, and the differences mean that we're not just posting the same thing in two different places.