My first and last books, Ghost Map and Interface Culture had the exact same words per sentence, down to the decimal point: 24.6. In other words, each of us has a certain sweet spot of complexity that we come back to book after book. Wilson would have been in that general area as well.) But what I thought was so striking was that even in that cluster, each author’s books are closer to his other books than they are to the other two author’s books. (From eyeballing some other Amazon pages, I think Dawkins, Michael Pollan, E. There’s a clear cluster of Hitchens/Johnson/Pinker in the center. I compiled stats for 3–4 books for each author, except Gladwell who has written two, and then plotted them on a scatter chart, with the y axis representing % complex words and the x axis representing words per sentence. So I spent a few hours last week plugging in the numbers for my books, as well as a few other authors that I assembled in an entirely unscientific fashion: Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, Seth Godin, Christopher Hitchens - and then, just to see how far I’d come, I threw in my intellectual (and, sadly, stylistic) heroes from my early twenties, the post-structuralist legends Michel Foucault and Frederic Jameson.

(Perhaps there’s a literary Rotisserie league lurking somewhere on those Text Stats pages.) So this kind of material is fascinating to me, partially because it lets me see something statistically that I’ve thought a great deal about intuitively as a writer, and partially because I can compare my own stats to other writers’ and see how I fare.

Text Stats is a pretty wonky page - everything from some of the “readability” indices, to overall word count, to what Amazon calls “Fun stats” like “Words per dollar.” (Quotes you never hear at Barnes and Noble: “This copy of Infinite Jest is such a bargain at only 39,574 words per dollar!”)īut the two stats that I found totally fascinating were “Average Words Per Sentence” and “% Complex Words,” the latter defined as words with three or more syllables - words like “ameliorate”, “protoplasm” or “motherf***er.” I’ve always thought that sentence length is a hugely determining factor in a reader’s perception of a given work’s complexity, and I spent quite a bit of time in my twenties actively teaching myself to write shorter sentences. I noticed it because my last book The Ghost Map just came out in paperback (go read it people - it’s a lot more fun than this post will turn out to be) and so I’m back into the swing of checking Amazon a few times a day. This may be old news to some of you, but I just noticed the other day that Amazon has added a whole panel of “text stats” for many of its books.

Infinite jest barnes and noble