The best way to detect boredom is to identify where readers are quietly giving up and abandoning the book. If readers are jumping ship in Chapter 3, for example, then it suggests that either Chapter 2 was a low-value grind (thereby exhausting them before they got to the good stuff), or that Chapter 3 is. There’s no perfect way to detect this, but you can make a fairly accurate estimation by noticing where a reader’s comments stop. Using comments as a proxy for engagement isn’t perfect data, but it’s close enough to point us in the right direction. Yes, it’s possible that the reader’s life may
...more