Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2016

Machine Learning Tests Amazon Novels and Shows Book Covers Reflect Genre

We already know readers judge books by their covers. If you are still fighting this social truth, then close your eyes, take a deep breath and release your rebellion to the universe. Repeat after me, "Readers judge books by their covers". If the above is true (and it is), can we say books in specific categories or genre s have similar and distinct styles, fonts and images used in book cover design? A quick scan of Goodreads can provide a visual for us to examine, but we could never go through as many books in as short a time, or with as much brain power as a computer could. Brian Kenji Iwana and Seiichi Uchida conducted a study at the Kyushu University in Japan to determine if book genre could be guessed by cover design. What's interesting is they used a "Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict the genre of a book based on the visual clues". In case you care... Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), in particular, are multilayer neural networks

From Toonies to Rupees to Pesos: How to price your novel for sale in other countries

While loading my novel, "Girl Desecrated" onto Draft2Digital , I was faced with the opportunity to change the price of my book for different sales regions. Meaning, I can choose how much my book costs in Sweden, and how much it costs in Hong Kong, instead of just allowing an algorithm to calculate $3.99 US into every other territorial price. As a Canadian who pays more than Americans for many things, this is a great feature. The algorithm default jacks up my book's US price of $3.99 to a Canadian price of $4.99. Well, I ask, why should those North of the border pay more for an eBook that has no tangible upfront costs to produce? And I say, Draft2Digital has given me the option to control the pricing, so I am going to price my eBook the same for American and Canadian purchase, eh? (We'll continue this train of thought at Tim Hortons, first thing in the morning). Controlling pricing is also good because there are a few golden rules on novel pricing, and I thi