One of my most popular chapters from Wattpad 101 is my chapter on the Ranking System. However, as many of you noticed and pointed out, the ranking system was suddenly changed last month. Like before, I decided to read through the faqs, bug the Wattpad admins, and even run a few experiments of my own. This is a new analysis of the Wattpad Ranking system and what has changed.

Some of you might be wondering why I'm keeping the old ranking system chapter. The reason for that is simple. Despite popular opinion, not very much has changed. Yes, tags will play a larger roll in rankings in the future, but otherwise the main points of my last chapter remain unchanged. Readership, stars, comments, popularity... these all continue to play a role in Wattpad Ranking. Just because there are more rankings beyond genre doesn't negate this fact.

So... if you haven't read my last chapter, you might want to, and then use this chapter as an upgrade patch to your understanding of the Wattpad Ranking system. So, without further ado, here is how things differ from before.

The absolute main difference between how rankings work before and how rankings work now is that before they depended heavily on the Discover option, and more specifically the popularity within each genre. This meant that the top 1000 books got noticed, and not much of anything else. The new system instead takes focus away from the genres, and instead puts them into your tag selection.

Another way to put it is that the focus is less on the pre-rendered genres, and more on the search terms people use to find books. When you create a book, you need to select tags to attach to the book. In the past, the genre you picked automatically became the first tag. After that, you were encouraged to select more tags to represent your book. At the moment, there is a total of 25 tags you can select per book.

A lot of you might not have taken tags very seriously in the past. A lot of search engines will scan your blurb, your book title, and even your text... so having tags almost seems meaningless when it's just repeating a term that the search engine already picks up. However, with the new changes, tags on wattpad become more important than ever.

I might end up writing a chapter later on how to select tags for your book, but for the moment, I'll just explain the basics. Tags are essentially the terms that reflect your book the best. Yes, your book might be a romance. But is a teen romance? Is it a comedy romance? Is it a teen comedy romance with a bad boy and ghosts? Well, when you as a writer, trying to get readers is like a spider catching flies, and the search terms are the web you're casting out to entrap them. You want to catch people who are not just looking for something funny but you also want people who are looking specifically for teen romance as well as people who like bad boys or ghosts. So, you might pick a teen tag, a romance tag, a ghost tag, comedy tag and a badboy tag.

Picking the best 25 tags that not only accurately describe your book, but expose your book to the largest number of people who may actually read it is the name of the game now. I've said before that you're probably not as creative as you think you are. Your book has been written before. Fortunately, there is a large audience of people who want to read the same junk over and over again, and your book just happens to be the junk they're craving.

So, rather than coming up with the most unique tags to differentiate your book from anyone else, your goal is the exact opposite. You want the terms that will get your book exposed the absolute most. You want the terms other people will think about and write when looking for a book like yours. However, as I've mentioned before, if you pick a term that is too popular (like badboy), your book will get drowned out by the masses of people who all write badboy stories. Thus, there is a balance between picking tags that are popular, but also picking stories where your book is likely to show up and, more importantly, be read by people who look up that search term.

For example, you may have written a science fiction romance story. However, are you going to cater to the science fiction, or the romance audience. Of course, you can go for both, however, there are people in romance who may become disinterested when they see a science fiction tag, and many science fiction fans who really aren't interested in romances. Now, you can write a science fiction story with romance, and most people won't care if there is a little romance in it, but once you give it a romance tag, you're stating the story is "about" romance, which may repel them.

So, once again, I could go on for ages about the art of picking tags, but the important thing to know is that this is what the ranking system has now been attached to. When someone is looking for a book, they might type "badboy romance" into the search engine. If your book has a badboy tag, and a romance tag, then your book will come up on the list.

The new rating system quantifies this and let's you know how high you rank on any given search term. This gives you more opportunities to be "first" in any given tag. Now, you can pick tags that are incredibly common, like badboy, or you can pick tags that are relatively uncommon, like "fluffenheigensmeiser".

One of my first questions to Wattpad is how many books must contain a certain tag before it becomes recognized and ranked. Their answer was that there is no limit. In theory, you can be #1 in "fluffenheigensmeiser" allegedly out of 1. However, since no one else has ever used this tag, and no one is likely ever going to put it in the search engine, being #1 out of 1 for an obscure term that is absolute meaningless to your overall rankings.

Once your rankings have been posted, you can click "see all rankings" and look at each of the tags you've picked. I currently have a tag on this book which is #2 out of 15. This is a tag I should remove, because it does me no good in people finding my book.

Now, many people have been distraught over seemingly losing ranks since the new system has gone into effect. Perhaps you used to rank 50 out of 1000 on Romance, but now you're like 400 out of a 1000. What happened?

The likely culprit to this change has to do with how they calculate relevance and accuracy. Accuracy is a bit of a tricky pony. Basically, when someone looks for a tag that you have in your book, how likely are they to click on your book and actually read it? This is the measure of accuracy and relevance. Here's an example of how this comes into play. Let's say you wrote a self-help book on people's love life. You tag the book romance and self-help, because it's a self-help romance book. In the old system, your books popularity as a self-help book raised its popularity and with the genre being romance, it ended up 50/1000 on Wattpad. Good Job!

However, everyone who looks at romance usually is looking for a fictional story about a boy and a girl. Typically, that's what people are usually thinking when they write romance in a search engine. So... most people that do click on your book from search terms don't usually type the 'romance' term, and a lot less people click on your book when searching for romances. As a tag, it's accuracy is lower, and now you are 400 in romance. On the plus side, you might have skyrocketed in the self-help term, which previously wasn't even a ranking.

This was the most obvious example I could come up with, but this sort of "shifting" likely affects all kinds of books and their respective tag choices in ways you can't predict. You'll start to see what kind of terms people use when they want to read your book, and thus through optimization learn how to best select the tags that hit the greatest audience.

Also, note that falling to 400 out of 1000 in romance isn't a reason to remove romance from your tags. Yes, when someone types romance, your book is low on the list, but when someone writes romance self-help, your tenth place in self-help is going to be teamed up with your 400th place in romance, and you'll be top of the list.

The other new word on top of relevance is "trendiness". The faq mentions both popularity and trendiness, but how do these differ? They ultimately are both a measure of people reading and interacting with your chapters. Interacting can be simply clicking and reading, it can be voting, commenting, or even sharing your story with others.

What separates trendiness is that it takes in the popularity of the search term. So, if a LOT of people search for Romance, and your tag is romance, then this theoretically means your term is "trending" and gets a boost. However, this isn't necessarily always true, because if a term that is popular in search is almost certainly a term that is popular in the number of people tagging it. So yes, you'll get a boost for being in a romance tag that people more often search, but you'll also be competing against a LOT more books as the 20,000+ books that use the romance tag more than overshadow the popularity of romance.

However, if for whatever reason you have an unusual tag, say WreckitRalph, and then Wreck it Ralph 2 trailer gets announced, you might have a sudden surge of people searching Wreck It Ralph, which increases its trendiness, and the rank of your book. Popular things are popular. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone. And more than that, One direction is probably at it's most popular right after releasing an album or having a tour. This algorithm takes that into account. Your One Direction will be most popular when One Direction as a search term is most popular. Please note I'm shifting to discussing "overall" popularity from "rank" popularity here. No matter how trendy your search term, it'll get the same boost as any other book with the same term. Where trendiness matters most is in deciding your "most impressive ranking".

Some time ago I wrote a chapter or two discussing niches. No body can write the perfect book. There is no book everyone will like. Your popularity will always exist within a niche. You will find people who want to reach not just a specific genre, but a specific type of book. I like to read stories where a protagonist goes to another world, gets superpowers, and lives in a world with RPG like monsters and game mechanics modified for real world use. That interest (often called isekai) is alot more specific than your standard genre.

I think that goes for most people. There are people out there who love reading book after book of an innocent high school girl falling for a bad boy while in high school. That's why this story gets repeated again and again and again.

The new system allows people to find their niche books easier. I'm not saying it doesn't have its setbacks. Your book in the past might have attracted more people to your niche and created fans that didn't exist. You might have picked up someone just looking for romance who never realized what they really liked was romance where the guy was younger than the girl and also there were aliens. However, I've said before that the best way to have your book perceived the best is to properly set up your environment. By focusing on the tags, you can cater to your true fanbase and properly prepare your environment, reaching out to your niche fans much easier.

Love it, or hate it, one thing is for certain: there is no stopping the new system. The new system is here to stay. And I, for one, welcome our new tag-specific overlords. I'd like to remind Wattpad that as a trusted blog personality, I can be helpful in rounding up Wattpadders to toil in their underground writing caves.