Bruce Beckham's Blog - Posts Tagged "koll"
Cover to Cover
Did you know when you borrow a book from Amazon the author gets paid by the page? While your Kindle is online, Amazon monitors your reading progress. The more pages read, the more the royalties.
It didn’t take long for some sneaky publishers to invent ways to trick Amazon. For instance, putting the Contents at the end of the book, with a hyperlink at the beginning. Apparently Amazon’s supercomputer can’t tell the difference between the speed of normal reading and the speed of light!
Recently Amazon began suspending books partaking of such shifty practices. And all hard-working authors would say, ‘Here, here’ to that. But I think it highlights a more important matter – and that is delivering the promise to the reader.
According to a formula devised by Wisconsin mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg, only 1.9% of people finished Hard Choices by Hilary Clinton. As for Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, the figure was 6.6%. And just a quarter of readers completed Fifty Shades of Grey – although perhaps one can draw other conclusions for why that might be the case!
Okay, we’ve all been defeated by certain books (in my case it’s Middlemarch, twice – hard to believe, I know) – but surely the one true measure of an author’s achievement is that their works are read to completion?
Sir Walter Scott, Caledonia’s literary giant, noted that: “the author must pay heed to the time and patience of the audience.” Nowadays, when the writer fails in this regard, it’s not just the reader who is disappointed, but also the author who takes a hit in their pocket.
It didn’t take long for some sneaky publishers to invent ways to trick Amazon. For instance, putting the Contents at the end of the book, with a hyperlink at the beginning. Apparently Amazon’s supercomputer can’t tell the difference between the speed of normal reading and the speed of light!
Recently Amazon began suspending books partaking of such shifty practices. And all hard-working authors would say, ‘Here, here’ to that. But I think it highlights a more important matter – and that is delivering the promise to the reader.
According to a formula devised by Wisconsin mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg, only 1.9% of people finished Hard Choices by Hilary Clinton. As for Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, the figure was 6.6%. And just a quarter of readers completed Fifty Shades of Grey – although perhaps one can draw other conclusions for why that might be the case!
Okay, we’ve all been defeated by certain books (in my case it’s Middlemarch, twice – hard to believe, I know) – but surely the one true measure of an author’s achievement is that their works are read to completion?
Sir Walter Scott, Caledonia’s literary giant, noted that: “the author must pay heed to the time and patience of the audience.” Nowadays, when the writer fails in this regard, it’s not just the reader who is disappointed, but also the author who takes a hit in their pocket.
