Indie Author SnapShot: Book Length and Readability

There were a few extraneous pieces of data which I also explored in my one-day snapshot for indie author sales in the fantasy genre, which might bear repeating.

For full length novels (books with 200 pages or more), the length of the book had no apparent bearing on its sales success. Shorter novels or novellas (books with less than 200 pages), on the other hand, did tend to generate fewer sales.

This trend should not be surprising. Novellas are often used as promotional tools by authors and are usually priced accordingly. The market has only so much appetite for shorter works of this kind. With regard to full length novels, traditional publishers have often shied away from publishing longer works because of the added printing costs. For indie authors, most of whom will rely heavily on eBook sales, the printing costs for the paperback are a secondary concern. If the story needs to run a little longer, as fantasy books with their world building often do, there is no reason to shortchange the reader.

An assessment for the effect of readability, or "reading grade level", on sales was performed for a limited number of titles. The readability metric was calculated from a short sample of text, extracted from the first chapter of each title, for the first book in each series. A total of 55 books were evaluated in this fashion. The readability metric was averaged by an online algorithm, using a number of standard readability metrics. Most of these metrics measure sentence length (number of words per sentence), and word length (number of syllables or letters per word) to arrive at a "grade level" score.[1]

On average, book sales tended to peak around a readability grade level rating of 5.5, with a trend towards slightly fewer book sales either above or below this value. To place this trend into context, a similar reading sample from JRR Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring had a readability grade of 9.9, and a sample from Sarah J Maas' Throne of Glass came up with a readability grade of 7.0.

Books with higher reading levels (longer, more complex sentence structures) can obviously do well enough. But authors should consider their audience and invest the necessary time into editing their novels if they want their audience to embrace their work.


References

[1] "Check Readability." StoryToolz, Kydala Publishing, 2016, https://storytoolz.com/readability