From a Wattpad press release:
Wattpad has released an advance look at the 2011 Q1 metrics report which, in addition to examining broader eReading consumption habits, reveals new trends and popular genres.
Over 150,000 new stories are uploaded to Wattpad every month, providing insight into readers’ preferences and habits across over 1,000 different mobile devices, tablets and PCs.
Trends in Genres & Categories
-Wattpad saw incredible growth in Short Stories (with ~20,000 titles total), as readers look for shorter titles to read quickly without investing in full‐length novels.
‐ The most substantial genre growth was in Humor which now has over 51,000 titles and surpassed the growth in Vampire (44%) and Paranormal (62%), long the category growth leaders.
‐ The increase in the newly introduced category “Historical Fiction” to over 6,000 stories, reflects a strong uptake in stories about royalty, timed around the Royal Wedding in April.
‐ Romance continues to account for the largest portion of stories, with nearly 300,000 stories in English shared through Wattpad
Trends in Themes
In addition to tracking category and genre growth, Wattpad examines the most popular description tags chosen by writers to describe their stories. These tags provide high‐level detail into popular plots, themes and emerging trends. Of the millions of tags chosen by users, we saw the largest increase in stories tagged: “angels” “war” “dreams” “music” “witches”“magic”“history
