Tyranny of the metric
Amazon to pay self-published authors based on number of pages read.
Online retailing behemoth Amazon is changing its pay structure for self-published authors. Rather than pay once for a whole book, it will now pay each time a page is digitally flipped.
It’s a subtle tweak to business strategy that could change both the style and profitability of selfpublished books, from fan fiction to memoir. But it is also reflective of a force that has swept over all the creative professions in the digital age, nearly killing some of them, and forcing others to dramatically adapt to survive — the tyranny of the metric.
From shares, likes, retweets and comments to clicks, favourites and page views, nearly every aspect of modern creative culture is evaluated, bought and sold via countable nuggets that aspire to reduce quality to quantity.
It is not just creative writing. The trend is evident across the humanities, from psychology’s obsession with data collection to philosophy’s flirtation with experimentation. But writing has felt it most deeply, with the most drastic industrial effects.
“Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers,” the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier wrote this year. “Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be.”
Likewise, in Harper’s magazine this month, writer Caleb Crain identifies a “new kind of disenchantment” in literature, in which value has blurred with measurable popularity.
“The catalyst, I believe, is the recent revolutionary advance in counting,” he wrote.
This disenchantment was evident in the howling lamentations that followed Amazon’s announcement, similar to concerns about the music industry in the age of free streaming. Some called on Taylor Swift, or her literary equivalent, to rise up and slay the corporate dragon, as Swift did over Apple’s plan not to pay artists for the first three months of its Apple Music service, which is free to subscribers.
But writers command smaller cultural armies than musicians, self-published ones especially.
Under the new plan, which begins Wednesday, the amount authors will be paid will be based on their share of total page views of books in the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
Amazon, which declined an interview request, described it like this in a press release: “We’re making this switch in response to great feedback we received from authors who asked us to better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read.”
A look at the numbers, though, recalls the joke that the difference between a writer and a pizza is that a pizza can feed a family. The average payout barely cracks $1 a book. Only the first reading of a page counts. Books that are reread, on this scheme, are of no greater value. And the unread novel, which has been an important part of the publishing industry if not literature, will be worthless.
John Degen, executive director of the Writers’ Union of Canada and chairman of the International Authors Forum, compared the new payment system to the old Nielsen television ratings.
“There was a little bit of voodoo, a bit of magic involved in trusting those statistics,” he said. “It’s so hard to talk about this stuff because who really truly understands or even truly trusts the technology (of page view tracking)?”
The novelist Chuck Wendig put it more artfully in a blog post: “For all we know, there’s a chimpanzee high on DMT throwing darts at a bingo chart taped to the wall.”
Amazon says its page flip algo- rithm standardizes font and spacing so that pages are common literary currency, but it remains a proprietary black box. And like the Nielsen ratings, a lot of money hangs on it.
“Do we want to trust those stats when we’re making industrial decisions around payment?” Degen said. “Because as soon as we start to trust a stat like that, someone figures out how to game it … It’s kind of an untrustworthy thing to introduce into an industry that does actually depend on real attention.”
On the other hand, he has heard many self-published authors are happy about the change because they expect it will make them more money.
“It scares the hell out of traditional authors, and I think it should,” Degen said. “The idea of a per-page royalty on a tradition- al book, a book that depends on single-copy sales, it’s kind of terrifying.”
The traditional model is that once the sale is made, the writer is paid, even if the book goes unread, or it is put down in boredom, or sits on a coffee table as a conversation piece or aspirational décor, like countless copies of The Goldfinch.
“Asking the writer to be responsible for what happens to the book after it leaves the bookstore is entirely unfair, because the author has done their work and sold their product, and they should expect their compensation,” Degen said. “So, I would not want to see the per-page royalty come across to single-copy sales.”
One theory about Amazon’s gambit is it could push self-published authors away from the pressure to produce many novels of middling value, toward a few good ones. Another is that writers will internalize it, and write stories fit for digital purpose — in effect, click-bait novels.
As David Sanderson wrote in The Times of London, the ideal book “will now be a 700-pager with a cliffhanger every few pages and a couple of pictures in each chapter.”
This effort to reduce a book’s value to its page count taps a deep vein of insecurity among writers. How can you compare something you can read in an afternoon — The Sense of an Ending, Heart of Darkness, Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea — to something you can barely get through in a lifetime — Ulysses, À la recherche du temps perdu, Infinite Jest?
It is a perennial artistic mystery to which Amazon has offered a modern corporate answer, but it is unlikely to be the last word.
As Degen put it, “If you want to start a fist fight, go to a group of writers and suggest that a shortstory writer does less work.”
For all we know, there’s a chimpanzee high on DMT throwing darts at a chart