If you’re looking for the updated section, scroll down to the part that says “2026 edit”. Carry on!
A few people have reached out to me since the publication of my lengthy treatise on fanfiction on Book Riot earlier this week. While the odd person was glad to have the words as I expressed them, others were more interested in my reference to tracking my reading, both of books and my stories. So I figured I might as well give someone the leg up if they were interested.
First, I start out with Tirzah Price’s Reading Log (formerly of Book Riot). I’ve been using this log for a few years, and I definitely keep it up much better than I do my goodreads account. Having it open on every computer and device that I use on a daily basis definitely helps for that, and it also just has a nice and easy format. Nothing like some good old fashioned data to keep me focused and honest.
When I started reading more fanfiction again (thanks in part to Her Majesty Cat Sebastian), I realized from some conversation and Cat herself that I wanted to track my reading. I spent many a year spending an unimaginable amount of time reading fanfiction, whether it was in the “computer room” in my family home, my bed or desk in the dorms, or on the couch in various apartments (and the bed, now that I both have a smartphone and know how to send longer fics to my kindle). What did that add up to? And what was a good way to record what I was reading in the first place?
So I thought of the most important bits of data to me and made up a spreadsheet. Title, author, grouping, when I finished, were all important. But the key thing to me? Word count.
Here is a template that you can use if you want! It’s view only so you’ll have to make a copy.
What I actually did was make that a tab in my reading log, but y’all don’t need to see that. And then, since I have a very minuscule understanding of how formulas and conditional formatting works, I went to the Stats tab and found a nice little place to add a row for my fics. All I was doing at that point was totaling up the number of fics I’d read, and the number of words that totaled (since fics can range from 100 words to a million).
(2026 edit) In 2026, I joined a very interesting part of the world in drowning ourselves in the dopamine that came with a quick, sudden influx of Heated Rivalry fanfiction (I actually started in 2025 but 2026 is where it got a little insane), and found the word count going up incredibly fast as I devoured fic after fic. At some point, I wanted to see what that breakdown looked like by month, so I used the formulas from the books section of the stats page to break it down by number of fics and word count each month. Then after a conversation with a fellow stats and spreadsheet geek, I decided to add one more cell: a book equivalency counter. I know books don’t really ring in at 50,000 words anymore, but that’s about the average when you think about how many novellas and graphic novels most of us are also reading. So I took a fics section that looked like this:
And turned it into this:
I realized I could just make this for you and add it as a second sheet in the sheet I made for you to copy, but in the case you want to do it on your own, or you messed something up and need to fix it, here are the formulas to do all of that using the cells in the fics tracker linked above:
Number of fics: =COUNTA(Fics!A2:A500)
Number of words: =SUM(Fics!C2:C501 )
For each month’s number of fics: =COUNTIFS(Fics!G:G,”>=”&DATE(YYYY,MM,DD),Fics!G:G,”<=”&DATE(YYYY,MM,DD)) for each month, the first (YYYY, MM, DD) set being the first day of the month and the second set being the last day of the month (you will probably have to recite “thirty days have September” over and over or at least keep looking at your wall calendar or phone).
For each month’s word count, enter: =SUMIFS(Fics!C:C, Fics!G:G,”>=”&DATE(YYYY,MM,DD),Fics!G:G,”<=”&DATE(YYYY,MM,DD)) Same deal as above
For book equivalency: =”book equiv: ” & ROUNDUP(DIVIDE(Stats!C69, 50000)) (feel free to change it from 50K to a number that feels better in your soul.)
If you change the name of the tab or move your rows, you’ll need to make a couple small changes in the formula, but it will definitely tell you by screaming ERROR!!! if something is wrong.
Et voilà! You are now tracking your fics. If you want to do anything else with your tracking, you’ll have to be way better at formulas than me. I’ve gotten a little better since 2021, but there are some folks doing coding I didn’t even know was possible. Are you one of those people (and obviously not using GenAI because fuck that shit?), tell me! I want to know!