Definitions for review stats | Requests/Ideas

I’d love some clarity on what some of the review stats mean.

Does “diverse characters” mean diverse from other characters in the book, or diverse from current publishing standards? Like, if a book has only characters of color, or mostly characters of color, how should we track that?

What does pacing really mean?

Comments

Nadia

Mar 23, 2022

Regarding the "diverse characters" question, it's intentionally left open and readers can answer from their own perspective, similar to how we each have our own star rating system implicitly.

Over time, we'll likely conduct more focused research around it, and then maybe adapt it or add some help text or a tooltip sort of thing.

Pacing is how quickly you think the material in the book moves. It's not to do with the length of the book. You can have a 500 page book where it feels as if it's non-stop action, or a short story where barely anything seems to happen! Pacing applies to nonfiction books too — how quickly are you given new material, new stories/pieces of information to think about? How easy is the information to assimilate?

I hope that helps for now, and you can always leave any questions blank if you’re not sure what your answer is or you don’t feel that answering is appropriate!

robinwalter

Mar 24, 2022

Upvoted for the question I keep asking: "What does pacing really mean?" because so many, many times I've found that "You can have a 500 page book where it feels as if it's non-stop action (and the pace is marked "slow"), or a short story where barely anything seems to happen(and the pace is marked "fast")! It's gratifying to know I'm not the only one who hasn't cracked the code. 🙂

Nadia

Mar 25, 2022

The cases you mention just might be incorrectly tagged books (perhaps tagged with an earlier version of our machine learning model) which need updating and then there's also an element of subjectivity, just like with star ratings or any of the other review questions.

robinwalter

Mar 25, 2022

It's not remotely important, and does serve to give a cantankerous old contrarian something to whinge about, which keeps him happy. :)