The Metrics Of Authorship · 2:49am Jun 26th, 2015
The Metrics Of Authorship
I apparently enjoy writing. The first metric is therefore the number of words I have written here, and that number is - not counting my current story 'Cross The Amazon' - a grand total of 1,226,447 words.
That million-plus is broken into 1,103,892 words worth of fully completed works and 122,555 words of works still in progress - one in hiatus, the other a story collection with no immediate final page.
So, how long would it take to read all of my works? And how would that stack up against other writers? Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found, and adapted, a data graphic that answers both of these questions. I would like to share it with you because it is interesting, and because the information is applicable to your own writing, or the writing of other people you like to read.
The average reading speed of an educated adult is 300 words per minute. Thus, we can have a wonderful infographic like the following, which now includes me - I'm right near the bottom. Check it out.
Woah, huh? Bit of a mind blower, put in this way isn't it? Apparently I have been a prolific little pony, but now I know just how dedicated I am. I am 68+ hours pony-insane. Now that is a metric.
- Petal Chatoyance, 2015
*somewhere in the world, somepony's head just exploded*
Mine...
And 68 well-spent hours they were, too.
As an aside, while I know I can read faster than that, it's right about bang-on for my uninterrupted reading speed. I never could understand why someone would want to speed-read something that they're reading for pleasure. It'd be like scarfing down a slice of cake instead of savoring it.
Sometimes I read at 300 words per minute or even faster. But when I really like what I read, I slow down, to savor every word. I suspect it would take me significantly more that 68 hours to re-read all of your wondrous stories, Chat!
Come on!!! Get with it! George is kicking your flank!
Very impressive indeed!
I just remembered how short and sweet Antigone was... But seriously... like Zontargs said. 68 hours of excellent reading indeed...
Your number one grovelling fan
- HallyConn
Bet I could do it in 50. Sans bathroom breaks, of course. I'm not that hard core.
Nice infographic. And congratulations on having written so much. :)
I really hate how everyone measures literature in words. You can't even define what a word is! Is R2-D2 one word, or two words, or if I discard all one letter words besides 'I' and 'a' is it zero words? What about words with apostrophes, and how do you differentiate those from quotations? What about contractions? Those are two words but no algorithm is going to figure to count those! I'm like "Oh boy Don Quixote is 300,000 words by some unspecified calculation of word that probably missed a bunch which I cannot apply to my own story because all I have is the graphed result, not the algorithm."
Do we really need to treat authors as less prolific if they ever use any words over 5 letters, like prolific for instance?
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
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Well, then, we could use letters. The average number of letters in an English word is 4.5, so if we take my 1,103,892 words and multiply that by 4.5, we get 4,967,514 letters on average. Unfortunately, I, and my writing are not what - I think, reasonably - any sane person would call 'average' (weird, bizarre, queer as fuck, ect - ) so this pretty much means nothing.
It is, however, the actual phone number of Genesis Restaurant Services in Garland, Texas. This, of course, means less than nothing.
So let us agree to agree that I wrote at least a metric fuckton, and leave it at that. Scientifically stated, I wrote a fucktillion hoof-units of Pony and that ain't no small thing. Huzzah and shit.
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I read that it was 5.1. Even that figure isn't solid. Besides an individual author isn't going to be in line with an average human writer, so just multiplying is probably a vast underestimate. COME TALK TO ME WHEN YOU HAVE WRITTEN A MILLION WORDS WITH YOUR MOUTH
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I prefer using my hooves - and my special typewriter that came all the way from Manehattan.
Some stories I have enjoyed enough to read twice... or more. I love how there is a continuity of characters between your stories; they make me want to read, re-read and cross reference between them.
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You honor me. Thank you.
I recall that it took me about five days or so, give or take, to read all that you have on the Conversion Bureau universe. I loved every bit that I've read and want to let you know, and ask for permission, if I could base my C.B. story off your universe?
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Of course you can. The Bureau is a completely open genre, no one person owns or controls it. My vision of it was created in the hope that others would play in it and with it.
The only requirement in order to count as being within my version of the Bureau is that your story follow the three standardized rules of the Conversion Bureau Genre. The rules are simple:
Beyond that, please, be my guest. And please submit your story for consideration for inclusion in the Bureau archives of the Conversion Bureau Group. Besides - I'd love to see it!
wou, that make me happy that I don actually read any fanfiction otherwise I would never find the time to draw. fortnightly with the advent of audio-readers I can lessen to any story that I like and draw at the same time, plus I can speed- up the reading to about ten time normal human speech.
Well, this is an interesting way of looking at it. Hmm...
402,837 words, according to Fimfiction. Somewhere between Don Quixote and Gone With the Wind. (Gone With the Windmill?) About 22 hours, 23 minutes. I'm roughly a third as pony-crazy as you. Good to know.
Amazing, is all I can say.
3182969 Huh, this is very interesting. Now that you mention your points, my story can fit in, but just so that you know, I'm currently writing a story that's going to crossover with the other universes, from Steampunk to Fallout to the C.B. universe, with their own separate side stories telling the encounter from the others' point of view. So the universes might get a little screwy than their original ideas with the crossover.
> The average reading speed of an educated adult is 300 words per minute.
Wait.
Wait, what?
That's it? O.o
Now, I mean, I know I read fast. When I have a reason to try, in ideal conditions, I've hit as high as 1600wpm. And I get through most of your chapters in under five minutes. The last chapter of Little Blue Cat took me less than two minutes of actual reading time (though I had to pause to look up what the first song Luna was singing was), and then I re-read it later in under one minute just for the fun of reading it again. I don't hit as low as 300 unless it's poorly written (and therefore takes extra effort to comprehend) or has a lot of dialogue that sounds pleasing when vocalized (at which point I read over each statement a few times figuring out how my mental voice actors want to convey each line).
I often have to puzzle over why people complain that they lose 45 minutes of their day when some of the more verbose authors I follow post a chapter, when I can get through them in under 20 minutes.
... Now I understand WHY.
I know I read fast. I didn't realize I read THAT fast.
I laughed at Twilight being so long. XD
Way to go. I'm burning through your books pretty fast considering. So far, Recombinant 63 is quite good. <3
Congratulations! My informal spreadsheet says over 600K, but that leaves out some old works.
Info-graphs make me hard.
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Your statement made me laugh!
This is a fascinating graphic... and just proves how wonderful and fun your work is <3 as a multi-time reader of your work myself, I can't say a day spent reading has been a day wasted.
Of course, your 1,103,892-word figure doesn’t account for your works on Jenniverse.com. I bet reading Unicorn Jelly, Pastel Defender Heliotrope, and To Save Her collectively took me about 30 hours, which you can add to your 68-hour total.
Those older works are longer than their page counts imply, since as webcomics, their pictures must be digested as well as their words.
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That's a very good point, Roryokane. Huh. I don't know how to translate that into a metric to compare. Drawing totally exhausted me. Writing is soooo much less tiring.
Heh - if a picture is "worth a thousand words", then, by that metric, my total overall word count must be in the billions!
And... thank you, for reading my comics, too. Super Yay!