Writers Tricks of the Trade Volume 6 Issue 2 | Page 28

STUDY FINDS MEN MAKE UP THEIR MINDS
ABOUT BOOKS FASTER THAN WOMEN
According to a March 8 article in the Guardian by Alison Flood, a reader
analytics company finds male readers want an author ‘to get to the point quickly
… or they are gone, gone, gone. That seems consistent with a lot of male buying
habits. Women love to browse and even make a day of their selections for many
items including clothing. The majority of men want to get in and get out.
Flood says according to analysis of reading habits by Jellybooks, men and
women are equally likely to finish a book – but men decide much faster than
women if they like a story or not,.
Jellybooks focuses on book discoverability and reader analytics, and has
tested hundreds of digital titles on hundreds of volunteer readers over the last
few months. The test groups were made up of significantly more female
volunteers, resulting in an approximate split of 20 percent male/80 percent
female. It is a little scary how much various analytics companies can find out
about us, but in this case a piece of JavaScript in the ebooks was utilized to look
at readers’ habits: when they pick up, complete or abandon a title. The study
was done in conjunction with many of the UK’s major publishers.
One of the interesting findings by Jellybooks was that whether the reader
completed reading the book was not at all gender-specific, nor did it matter
whether a title was fiction or non-fiction.
“In most cases, the likelihood that a reader will finish a book is not
correlated with gender; both sexes ha fR