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| Autumn is on its way |
James Bridle reports
that Manchester’s Comma Press, which specialises in short stories, has launched
something called MacGuffin. It is a self-publishing platform that gives
detailed analytics showing when readers get bored.
Read the whole article: here
“The clean, minimalist interface echoes popular
blogging platforms, and visitors are encouraged to search for something to read
by theme and length: trending tags at time of writing included #crime, #humour
and #10minuteread. Currently in beta on the web and launching mobile apps in
the next couple of months, the site already contains plenty of stories from
Comma’s own authors.
Alongside every story published are its open
analytics, visible to both author and readers. Mercilessly, these detail the
exact number of people who have opened a story, and the number of people who
actually finish it. They even display a chart of exactly when each reader
stopped reading: which, while painful, does give writers the chance to test
their narrative structure. Whether this will prove a digital innovation too far
for more sensitive writers remains to be seen, but if MacGuffin does take off,
mining this data for insights into human attention might be one of the smartest
things any publisher has done in some time.”
I’m half-tempted to try it.... except that I might not like what I see!
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