Can a computer program help you produce a better book?
I logged on to my paperback printer, Lulu, the other day to find a new button next to each of my titles, labelled ‘Buy a Helix review’. Thinking that this must be a variation on the notorious paid reviews, I clicked to find out how much money my printer wanted to not read my books and still give them five stars. However, it turns out that a Helix review is something different. It’s a computer program which reads your book and gives you a report, so that you can compare your book against “more than 100,000 bestsellers catalogued as part of The Book Genome Project.”
My curiosity and confusion increased in equal measure, mainly thanks to the marketing guff Lulu offered to explain this. According to the site, a Helix report contains metrics about your book under five headings: Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Can Helix Reviews Help You Produce a Better Book?”
In a month when the top story should have been the Frankfurt Book Fair, what excited many people was the news that UK retailer W. H. Smith suddenly removed all self-published books it had only recently started carrying. It did this because a customer complained that a search for children’s books with the keyword “Daddies” returned titles of an adult, and in some cases gross, nature. From this naive filter failure, it was only a short but entirely predictable step to the retailer reassuring its UK middle-class customer base that they would not have to suffer such distress any further, and blaming the uncontrolled orgy (pun intended) of self-published books for the problem.
Yesterday, the Evil Mastermind told me there was a problem with the reactor core in this Death Star of a blog. Yesterday, I went to have a look, armed with my trusty elastic bands and bits of dried chewing gum. But he didn’t tell me he keeps a very small (but quite friendly) black hole down there. I go down there for one night and return this morning to find months have gone by up here. Damn.