John Green's tumblr: On Gratitude
I am thinking tonight of a year ago, when Sarah and Henry and I were preparing to leave for Amsterdam, huge swaths of the book that would become TFiOS still either unwritten or horrible (and still without a title).
I was sick, and I was also overwhelmed with anxiety, all these constant humming…
So I went on goodreads to rate a book I just finished and I see this.
I’d like to thank my corporate overlords at Penguin for this very attractive advertising campaign on goodreads.
I’m obsessed with goodreads because writers have never before really known much about their readers, or even about readers’ responses to their books. (Like, I know that most of the people who choose to write me like my books, but that’s obviously a self-selecting bunch. I also know a lot about what nerdfighters think of my books, but the vast majority of people who read my books do not know that I make videos on the Internet.)
Goodreads’ user base is so broad (The Fault in Our Stars has been rated almost 27,000 times) that it gives you a much better snapshot of the collective response to a novel than anything that came before.
This kind of data can help us to understand—really for the first time—what people actually like reading, instead of just what they like buying and/or checking out from the library. (For instance, way more people have bought Twilight than TFiOS, but on average, readers prefer TFiOS to Twilight. In the future, we’ll be able to learn even more interesting stuff, like which of the two readers of both TFiOS and Twilight preferred.)
Obviously, writing novels isn’t and should never be driven by market research. But one of the oldest questions in publishing is whether books succeed on their merits or whether they mostly succeed because they have a lot of marketing money behind them (to pay for goodreads ads, for example). Goodreads can answer that question pretty effectively, because marketing may make people buy a book, but it will never make them like a book.
REQUIRED LISTENING: Tommy James and The Shondells, “I Think We’re Alone Now”
Elle Dark: A Mini-Glossary of Republican English
A small glossary designed for those who have watched the recent GOP debates and struggled to understand their use of certain English words :-
America - a country created by God to rule the world for the benefit of Republicans
Bible - old book which details the ways in which God supports the…
83% of American households have combined incomes under $100,000.
(But this points to something much more interesting, which is that almost all of us feel like we are middle class. Do you think that you’re middle class? I certainly do. I remember in high school, my European History teacher asked us to raise our hands if we considered ourselves middle class, and every single person in class raised his or her hand except for this one guy, who was the heir to a department store fortune. I laughed at the time, but in retrospect he was one of very few people who answered honestly. If you’re in that top 25%, meaning that you have two parents who work and who both earn more than $50,000 a year, you are much wealthier than most American families. Like, this guy comes off as a total brat, but most people in his position probably have the exact same experience.)
(Source: jonsn)
(Source: thecognitiveprocess)
