{"id":6290,"date":"2015-06-24T10:28:06","date_gmt":"2015-06-24T16:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6290"},"modified":"2015-07-26T15:14:30","modified_gmt":"2015-07-26T21:14:30","slug":"how-to-write-a-book-when-youre-paid-by-the-page","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6290","title":{"rendered":"How to write a book when you’re paid by the page"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"robot\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I first heard<\/a> that Amazon was going to start paying its Kindle Unlimited authors according to\u00a0the number of pages in their books that actually get read, I wondered whether there\u00a0might be an opportunity for an intra-Amazon arbitrage scheme that would allow me\u00a0to game the system and drain Jeff Bezos’s bank account. I thought I might be able to start publishing long books of computer-generated gibberish\u00a0and then use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to pay Third World readers to scroll through the pages at a pace that would register each page as having been\u00a0read. If I could pay the Turkers a fraction of a penny less to look at a page than Amazon paid me for the “read” page, I’d be able to get really rich and launch my own space exploration company.<\/p>\n

Alas, I couldn’t make the numbers work. Amazon draws the royalties for the program from a fixed pool of funds, which serves to cap the upside for devious scribblers.<\/p>\n

So much for my Mars vacation. Still, even in a zero-sum game that pits writer against writer, I figured I might be able to steal a few pennies from the pockets of\u00a0my fellow authors. (I\u00a0hate them all, anyway.) I\u00a0would just need to do a better job of mastering the rules of the game, which Amazon was kind enough to lay out<\/a>\u00a0for me:<\/p>\n

Under the new payment method, you’ll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it. …\u00a0To determine a book’s page count in a way that works across genres and devices, we’ve developed the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC). We calculate KENPC based on standard settings (e.g. font, line height, line spacing, etc.), and we’ll use KENPC to measure the number of pages customers read in your book, starting with the Start Reading Location (SRL) to the end of your book.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first thing that has to be said is that if you’re a poet, you’re screwed. That\u00a0page-normalization\u00a0deal is going to kill you. I mean, Walt Whitman might do okay. But Mary Oliver? Totally hosed. So that manuscript of dense, trimetric verse\u00a0you’ve\u00a0been fussing over for the last twenty years? Shred it.<\/p>\n

Now, turning to prose, where the prospects are brighter, it’s pretty clear\u00a0that the key is to keep the reader engaged without challenging the reader in any way. To maximize earnings, you need to ensure that\u00a0the reader moves through your pages at a good, crisp, unbroken clip. You want shallow immersion. Any kind of complication or complexity that slows a reader down is going to take an immediate bite out of your wallet.\u00a0What you most want to avoid is\u00a0anything that encourages\u00a0the reader to\u00a0go\u00a0back and re-read a passage. Remember: you only get paid the first time\u00a0a page gets read. If you inspire the reader to read any of your pages more than once, you’re basically burning cash.<\/p>\n

So: You want fairly simple characters \u2014 no Russian names, no introverts\u00a0\u2014 with transparent motivations, and you want them to proceed quickly through a plot that takes lots of unexpected turns without ever being at all baffling or disorienting. And you don’t want to write too well or try to get\u00a0too “literary.” You don’t want the reader to savor your words. You want the reader to\u00a0gulp your words\u00a0down\u00a0like bar nuts. Hemingwayesque is probably okay. But Faulknerian is a no-go. Really, you’d do best to follow\u00a0Suzanne Collins’s lead. Lusty teenagers killing each other in workmanlike prose: that’s the ticket. Jackie Collins would also work pretty well\u00a0as a model. In fact, you really can’t go wrong mimicking any writer with the last name of Collins. Even\u00a0Billy, if you’re still\u00a0dead set on the poetry thing.<\/p>\n

My first instinct, to be frank, was to write a seventeen-volume series called\u00a0Tales of Ripe Naughtiness<\/em> consisting entirely of sex scenes\u00a0packed together like sardines in oil. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that sex is tricky\u00a0in a pay-by-the-page world. Moments of\u00a0passion\u00a0need\u00a0to be handled delicately. You want a certain degree of titillation to keep the reader tapping away at the screen, but you need to be careful not to overdo it. You don’t \u2014 how should I put this? \u2014 you don’t want the reader to linger<\/em> on any given page. There’s no money in that. The bodice can’t\u00a0be ripped. The bodice has to be unstitched, thread by thread, over the course of, say, forty-five\u00a0pages. And then,\u00a0when\u00a0the bosom heaves, you want to cut immediately to some other characters in some other setting. Patients playing dominoes in a\u00a0nursing home, perhaps. But don’t stay there for more than three paragraphs: too depressing.<\/p>\n

I just realized that I’m giving my entire strategy away. I need to learn to curb my sharing instinct. I’ll end by saying that I’m starting to see real possibilities in this idea of getting paid by the page for a book. I confess that in the past I’ve had my doubts, but now I’m convinced that Amazon has had the best interests of writers and readers at heart\u00a0all along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first heard that Amazon was going to start paying its Kindle Unlimited authors according to\u00a0the number of pages in their books that actually get read, I wondered whether there\u00a0might be an opportunity for an intra-Amazon arbitrage scheme that would allow me\u00a0to game the system and drain Jeff Bezos’s bank account. I thought I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6290"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6372,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6290\/revisions\/6372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}