I’ve been testing out Scribd today – another social publishing site. Scribd (pronounced like ad-libbed) claims to be the ‘largest social publishing company in the world, the Website where tens of millions of people each month publish and discover original writings and documents.’ Plenty of competition for reader attention then – although not all the documents are creative writing, not by any means.
My short story, Waiting For Orders, has done pretty well. Look – here’s a display of most of the short stories posted today.
So what do you notice? Well, my short story has far and away the most ‘reads’. But what else do you notice? Yes, it’s the only one with a significant picture – and one that’s likely to excite curiosity, I’d say. It’s one of only two where the title stands out.
Now when readers decide to click on a book or document to read it, they first select a category, and they might select to see a list of the most popular (= most often opened) books, or the new ones, or those which are rising fast, have received the best reviews, or are featured on the site. They select from a set of thumbnails, just like those above. Let’s assume that the reader likes the category, or he wouldn’t be on this page. So it’s the jacket illustration and the title which are the key factors in generating reader interest, probably in that order. The number of pages is probably less significant, as long as the short story is not too long.
With a click readers are taken to a second introductory page, showing a snapshot of the author, category tags attached to the file, the first page again, and an introductory sentence. I had to cut away at my sentence until I got it down to the right length for the whole message to appear. I ended up with:
An apocalyptic satire – on science, religion, consumerism and … Wordsworth.
I’m pretty sure that’s entertaining enough to have dragged in a few more readers too.
Did readers like ‘Waiting For Orders‘ when they started reading? That I don’t know. I’m waiting for my first comments and reviews – but have received none yet. Perhaps that’s a sign nobody likes the story. All the number of ‘reads’ tells me is how many people actually opened the book, not how many of them finished it. Perhaps they only scanned a page or two. So I’m certainly not going to call this test a big success yet. I need evidence of reader engagement first.
But this certainly illustrates just how important first impressions are to draw the reader in. (Perhaps too that’s why it’s important to begin the story with a bang – we only get one chance to get the reader’s attention – and if our book fails to make an impact, there are plenty of others that will.)
Go check it out for yourself. Can you see the correlation between a strong vibrant front-cover design and the number of readers? Find another recent posting with a strong early readership, and take a look at the design. Why does it succeed? Which types of cover work best? How important is the title? And the one-sentence description?
Who would have thought that book design and the jacket were so important in an ebook – and with a short story?
And how far would you want to take this? Is there a case perhaps for including more illustrations in our novels and short stories – like the wonderful work of Tenniel for Lewis Carroll or Phiz for Charles Dickens in Victorian times. Perhaps the idea of multimedia novels is not so very new after all.
If you’d like to see how Scribd works, take a new look at Waiting for Orders here. Click on the ‘Short Stories’ tab at the top of the page and follow the link to the story. What you’re seeing is exactly how it feels to be a reader using Scribd. Try the full-screen version too, and presentation in book format rather than scroll format.
WHO’S TALKING?