"I am researching the various books available that describe how to sell books online and I found some that have a section "Inside This Book" where customers can preview parts of the book and see some of the statistics about the book.  Can you tell me why the product pages for your books don't have this section?"

 

My Response

The reason is that I just recently got around to submitting my books to Amazon to have this added to my product pages because I have been out of the country for the past month.  It will take 4-8 weeks before this information will be available for previewing my books, but in the meantime I ran an analysis of the file used for the paperback and I can give you some of the statistics that MSWord(tm) provides.  When this information is added by Amazon, the numbers should be very close to those I am providing here:

Words                                 69,984

Characters                         326,788

Paragraphs                              3,126

Sentences                               2,452

Sentences/Paragraph                  2.2

Words/Sentence                      25.6

Characters/Word                       4.4

Flesch Reading Ease                  56.3

Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level          11.6

I also calculated the following for the paperback edition:

Words per Dollar:  2,334

Words per Ounce:  5,644

A few other statistics that might be of interest are:

Photographs: 36

Graphs: 10

Other Figures and Tables: Several

I taught engineering statistics and probability theory in a university and I do find these statistics interesting.  I can also see that they shed a very favorable light on my book when I simply compare them to those of other books on this topic, but I will leave it to you to be the judge. 

There is an old saying, "Figures don't lie, but liars figure."  I am certainly not saying that these numbers are not representative of the quality of my book, but there is more to judging the book than simply comparing the statistics to those of a book by another author.  So, while these types of numbers are interesting and may reflect on a book, don't get too wrapped up in making your decision based solely on this type of information.  I have several other books about online bookselling myself, and like any other author, I am inclined to think my work is better and more comprehensive, but I will also admit that at least a couple of the other books on this topic are well written, and done so by authors with credible experience.

Do as you like with the figures and interpret as you wish, but please consider that "You cannot judge a book by its cover" and similarly, you cannot recreate one or cite its contents by knowing these types of statistics alone.

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