Something I have always wondered is what point-of-view do most readers subconsciously enjoy the most?  How many readers actually pay attention to the words versus the number of readers that just let themselves be swepted away by the writing?

Yes, I know, blah blah blah, just write what you enjoy.  That’s not the point of this post.

What I want to know is do publishers track these statistics?  Do they know that 3rd person perspective novels over 400 pages where the main character is a man will sell twice as much as a 200 page novella about a leprechaun in the 1st person perspective.

I know that there have been basic readability index studies done which shows that a novel written for the grade 5 education level will sell better than any other.

I’ve been working through Google Docs lately and noticed that with the Word Count feature comes a number of readability index values:

• Flesch Reading Ease
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
• Automated Readability Index

The Flesch-Reading Ease value can be between 1 and 100, the higher the value the easier the content is to read.   The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Automated Readability Index are representative of the grade level required to be able to read the content.

My question is,  how important is the reading level?  The values for the current short story I’m  working on are 91.17, 2.0 and 3.0 respectively.  The novel I am working is at 80.44, 4.0 and 4.0.  Should I be aiming for a more advanced reading level, is grade five the standard for universality.

I did some research and it seems that the top selling authors are at the 80% level.  From what I’ve been gathering everywhere these are the average values that the best selling authors are falling under:

• No more than 4.25 characters per word
• No more than 5% passive voice
• No less than an 80% readability on the Flesch Reading Ease scale
• A Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 5

The following article explains how sentence structure can affect the readability index.