{"id":6372,"date":"2007-10-31T14:36:51","date_gmt":"2007-10-31T19:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/2007\/10\/31\/a_book_s_readability_vs_sales\/"},"modified":"2007-10-31T14:36:51","modified_gmt":"2007-10-31T19:36:51","slug":"a_book_s_readability_vs_sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/2007\/10\/31\/a_book_s_readability_vs_sales\/","title":{"rendered":"A Book&#8217;s Readability vs. Sales"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.stevenberlinjohnson.com\/2007\/10\/this-may-be-old.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Steven Berlin Johnson<\/a><\/strong> wrote an interesting post about the readability of books.  He graphed data that came out of Amazon.com&#8217;s &#8220;text stats&#8221; and had some interesting conclusions regarding sales vs. sentence length and word complexity.<\/p>\n<p>Basically, the <strong>better selling authors had shorter and easier to read sentences<\/strong>.  To me, this makes perfect sense in terms of word-of-mouth marketing.  If readers don&#8217;t enjoy a book (it&#8217;s hard to read), they will not recommend it.  <\/p>\n<p><strong>This concept fits in perfect<\/strong> with my <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/category\/thirst-methodology\/\">THIRST&trade;<\/a><\/strong> concept &#8230; as authors we need to do everything we can to make the book enjoyable to read.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Maybe I can make a tool<\/strong> that would also graph the reading complexity of each page of a novel.  That would help highlight problem areas.<\/p>\n<p>The graph he came up with can be seen here.  Click it to see the full size version.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com\/photos\/uncategorized\/2007\/10\/21\/chart.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"194\" width=\"400\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com\/photos\/uncategorized\/2007\/10\/21\/chart.jpg?resize=400%2C194\" alt=\"Book Readability Graph\" title=\"Book Readability Graph\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Views: 17<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-summary\">\nSteven Berlin Johnson wrote an interesting post about the readability of books. He graphed data that came out of Amazon.com&#8217;s&hellip;\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/2007\/10\/31\/a_book_s_readability_vs_sales\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &ldquo;A Book&#8217;s Readability vs. Sales&rdquo;<\/span>&hellip;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41,28,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-reading","category-on-writing-fiction","category-thirst-methodology","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/chart3.jpg?fit=800%2C388","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p67v0M-1EM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.epictales.org\/treskillard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}