cost per word

Every author has to fight off the urge to obsessively check her book's Amazon.com sales rankings, as well as the compulsion to read all the reader reviews (which I can assure you, can be quite painful. Some of the ones posted about my own book at Amazon have left me close to tears, sensitive writer-type that I am.)

Now, however, as my friend Andi points out, Amazon has added some bizarre new features to book listings.

They only seem to have added this feature to certain books, but the ones that have these new stats are broken down in weird ways like "cost per word." What this means is that they take the sale price of the book and look at how many words appear in the book and then break it down, sort of like the "price per unit" tag under the cereal bars at the grocery store.

It's quite strange. I guess it will appeal to the extremely serious bargain shoppers out there...