2,628 Words Per Dollar

Two thousand six hundred twenty-eight words per dollar. That's what you get for your buck when you buy my book, Lost in the Ivy, from Amazon.com. How do I know this? Because that's what Amazon tells me.

The list price on Amazon is $19.95 and the total number of words is 52,429. That, Amazon calculates, equates to 2,628 words per dollar.

This is one of the new Inside the Book features on Amazon. Just go to the Amazon sales page for Lost in the Ivy, scroll down to Inside the Book and there, among many other things, you'll find a section labeled Concordance and Text Stats. There, in addition to learning how many words per dollar you get when you buy my book, you can also find out the words per ounce, kind of like buying a piece of meat.

There are also stats telling you the book's readability level. On three readability scales, Lost in the Ivy rates between the fifth and seventh grade level. This I credit wholly to my master's degree studies in journalism because it was at that time, in my 18th year of formal education, I was taught to write as if my readers would be sixth graders. (Parental Warning: The fact that your kids could read my book doesn't mean that they should. Amazon neglects to include such an advisory, so I'm putting one here. There are adult language and themes in the book that I didn't learn about until my sophomore year in college and which most kids today probably don't learn about until, well, at least the eighth grade.) 

How does my book stack up? In comparison, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is nothing short of a bargain, coming in at 50,357 words per dollar. But you'll end up paying the price, either in time lost that could have been spent doing other things or in the cost of that new stronger prescription you'll need for your eyeglasses.

My book, however, is a better buy than Pick-Up Lines that Work: Get the Girl Tonight! in which you only get 2,315 words for that same dollar. And, hey, you'll probably get just as many girls by buying my book.