Sunday, July 01, 2007

Imaginary Biography Book Stats

Amazon.com seems to have scanned in all of my new book Imaginary Biographies, so that when you search for stuff on the site it searches into books to give you results. For example, putting my name into Amazon gives you not only the books I wrote, but a few books in which I was quoted.

They have a new feature now called Text Stats, which has produced some probably true but odd statistics about Imaginary Biographies.

Cannot, death, fact, figure, god, lost, spirit, time, tradition, and tv are among the top 100 most used words.

The Flesch-Kincade index for readability (whatever that is) says that only 18% of books are harder to read than mine. Ok. Now is that all books throughout time in all languages? English books Amazon has scanned? Is this something I am choosing to care about today?

16% of the words I used are considered "complex" words, but, since only 44% of books have more that seems normal.

Only 13% of books have more words per sentence than Imaginary Biographies. Long sentences are a bad habit. I need to write shorter sentences.

The book has 613, 114 characters, and gives you 1147 words for every dollar you spend on it.

Weird.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I bought your new book, would you feel obligated to hang out with me next time I'm in your area

Anonymous said...

?

Streeborama said...

Geoff needs to start going to conventions and giving lectures at panels to help get the word out on his theories in How to Read Superhero Comics and Why! We are halfway through the modern superhero age, Geoff! It's time to give this wave some direction.

Anonymous said...

Hey Pat,

If you buy both my books, I'll have coffee with ya if you're ever in my neck of the woods (Victoria, BC)...if you spring for the coffee, that is.

Streebo: I agree, Geoff doing lectures/presentations at cons would be great!

Mitch said...

Lectures, yes.

Dante Kleinberg said...

Those stats are always so weird and mysterious.

I've run a Readability Check in Word just now on my (unpublished) first novel.

COUNTS
Words: 69,248
Characters: 299,744
Paragraphs: 3,059
Sentences: 6,968

AVERAGES
Sentences per Paragraph: 2.4
Words per Sentence: 9.6
Characters per Word: 4.0

READABILITY
Passive sentences: 1%
Flesch Reading Ease: 86.6
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 3.5

Despite what Word thinks, my book isn't a children's book. Too many swear words. Take that, 4th graders.

If you really want to get way out there, have Word (assuming you wrote them in Word or something Word can understand) auto-summarize one of your books.