Reading heatmap

Comments tell you what a reader wanted to say. The reading heatmap tells you what they did: which lines they slowed down on, which ones they skimmed, and the paragraph where they closed the tab.

Turn it on over your own published piece and the prose shades. Warmer paragraphs held readers longer. Cooler ones went by fast. A red edge and a small “Readers drop off here” flag mark the line where the most readers stopped.

Turning it on

Open your published piece and look for the Reading heatmap button above the text. It is off by default, and only you can see it. Readers never see any of this.

If your piece has a book cover, the button sits on the cover page too. Tapping it there turns the heat on and carries you to the first page of prose, where there is something to shade.

You can also reach it from a piece’s analytics, under View reading heatmap.

Reading the shading

The legend sits next to the button:

• Cooler paragraphs: fewer readers stayed, or they moved through quickly.
• Warmer paragraphs: readers held here longest.
• Where readers leave: a red edge marks the paragraph with the sharpest fall in readership.

The scale is relative to the piece in front of you. The warmest paragraph in a quiet essay and the warmest paragraph in a thriller each sit at the top of their own range, so you are always comparing a piece against itself.

Where the numbers come from

When someone reads your published piece, we count how long each paragraph was actually on their screen and add it to a running total for that paragraph.

That total is anonymous and aggregate. We keep one row per paragraph, never one per reader. You see the shape of attention across everyone who read, and never who read what. There is no way to pull a single reader back out of it, by design, including for us.

Your own reads never count. Opening your own piece does not warm it up.

What it needs before it says anything

A paragraph has to sit on screen for about a second before it counts. Scrolling past at speed records nothing. Until a few people have read, the heatmap says so plainly rather than shading noise.

Reads from the mobile app count too. The app measures attention a page at a time instead of a paragraph at a time, so those reads shade a page evenly.

What to do with it

A cold opening paragraph is worth rewriting before anything else on the page. A drop-off flag partway down usually means the paragraph above it handed the reader a reason to stop: a slow patch, a confusing turn, or an ending that arrived before the real one.

Warm does not always mean good. Readers also slow down when a sentence is hard to parse. Read the warm ones aloud and decide which kind of slow you are looking at.

Plans

The reading heatmap is part of Inkbreaker Pro, and the free trial includes it. Reading is recorded whichever plan you are on, so the history is waiting for you if you upgrade later.