{"id":"910","date":"2018-11-12T07:00:24","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T15:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pickfu.com\/blog\/?p=910"},"modified":"2021-05-07T11:02:42","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T18:02:42","slug":"data-insights-for-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.pickfu.com\/data-insights-for-authors\/","title":{"rendered":"3 data insights for authors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Caleb Kaiser at Reedsy.com for contributing the following guest post.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The publishing world earned its reputation for being opaque. If you want even basic data points, like book sales for a given title, you\u2019re forced to cobble together numbers from a variety of sources \u2014 Nielsen BookScan, Amazon rankings, etc \u2014 just to get a vague estimate.<\/p>\n

This dearth of data is part of what makes PickFu valuable to authors. PickFu gives you a quantifiable way to approach decisions like picking a cover image<\/a>, writing a book description<\/a>, or settling on a title<\/a> based on data.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re an author interested in taking a more analytical approach to your writing and\/or publishing, you should know a handful of insights. We\u2019ve listed our top three below, starting with\u2026<\/p>\n

Every niche has an ideal word count<\/h2>\n

An interesting but often neglected data point for authors is ideal book length. Artistic sensibilities might dictate that a story should take as long as is necessary, but book sales disagree.<\/p>\n

For example, between the Kindle Fire\u2019s debut in 2011 and 2017, the average nonfiction New York Times<\/em> bestseller became 42% shorter<\/a>, clocking in at 273 eBook pages (or 68,250 words, assuming the standard 250-word pages of most digital readers).<\/p>\n

Fiction, on the other hand, has a different ideal length for each niche. A recent survey of editors on how many words a novel should be<\/a> turned up these results:<\/p>\n