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17 July 2015

KENP

13:18 | | Edit Post

...and what I dislike about it already.


For those out of the loop if people now if people borrow George and the Dragon via Kindle Unlimited the way I get recompensed for this is via the number of pages red.

Here's a look at the chart I'm presented with that shows my Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) Read.



There are two huge spike, one over 500 and the most recent is 149. In between this there is a tiny blip of 5 pages on 13 July.

Now I'll be the first to admit sales of George and the Dragon aren't huge but this data is so incomplete I find it hard to be able to extrapolate anything from it.

It doesn't tell me how many pages it considers George to be. On the Amazon website it shows:

Length: 248 pages



So let's go with that.

How many people have borrowed George and the Dragon? I have no idea the data isn't available to me.

How many people have read the book in its entirety? Again I have no idea.

Does this data represent pages read that day or pages read over any kind of time or, as I suspect, pages read since the reader's Kindle device last connected to the internet.

Does this represent 60 people having read 10 pages each who then read no more of the book or 3 people who have all finished it but the data hasn't quite caught up with one or more of them.

Another issue I have is that I still have no idea how to consolidate this data along with my standard sales figures so I can get some idea of how well the book is doing when I look back over time.

All-in-all I can't use this data and have no idea how many people this is reaching.

George and the Dragon will be Free for all on Kindle on 1-3 August.

Once this promotion has completed and my 3 months initial subscription to Kindle Unlimited expires I don't think I will be continuing with it.

It was something I had to try for myself and it was unfortunate that Amazon changed things while I was doing it but I have learnt from it and that was important.

Phil
6 July 2015

"Said & Asked..."

23:56 | | Edit Post

...or use an alternative?" he queried.



This weekend just gone I was scrolling through Facebook and came across a group where someone had posted something like this:

The reaction it sparked I thought was both eye opening and hugely divisive. On one hand you had people arguing that these alternatives were perfectly acceptable. On the other were the group that would state any editor worth their salt would suggest replacing them with said, or asked in the case of a question.

There was even one comment where the poster said they would not read a book where the author used anything other than said or asked.

This evening I've just finished reading The Long War by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter - the first book I've finished in ages.  These are a pair of best selling authors working on a collaborative project. I'd like to think they and their editor/s know what they are about.

I have to admit they don't use said, asked or any of the alternatives that often. They are happy to leave speech to stand on it's own as part of the dialogue.

However there are plenty of times when they do.

There are examples of asked and said like:

Roberta asked, "Birds, or Dinosaurs?"

"There are other sorts here too," Yue-Sai said softly.

They also often write sentences like:

Joshua grunted. "Makes you proud."

But they also write sentences such as this:

"Are you sure?" Captain Chen murmured.

or elsewhere:

"Here, Captain," the engineer replied promptly.

So they are happy mixing up the way they handle their dialogues depending on the narrative. I'd like to think I treat my works similarly. Although I have to say I'm more aware of not over using alternatives to said and asked just for the sake of it especially as a lot of my dialog is telepathic and not spoken.

I would be more than interested to here people's thoughts on this.

Phil

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