Is Kindle X-ray Worth the Extra Work for Authors and Readers?

[Melbourne Guy]

I've started adding X-ray to my latest novel, but I can't immediately figure out the benefit to me or readers.

On my side, adding peripheral detail to characters and terms triggers a huge amount of work, because I had not elaborated the novel's universe sufficiently to know when everyone is born, or what planet they're from, or all the ship classes in the navy, or even how many guns each ship might have. And because I'm doing it retrospectively, I need to hunt through the text of the novel and make sure the details are consistent.

Amazon suggests that readers seek out X-ray enabled novels, and maybe they do, but I was wondering whether anyone has used it and what their opinion of it is?

 

[jedishrfu]

Xray just allows you to add annotation references to your book without it obviously being a link.

I think readers would like to know more about events in the novel or historical events described on wikipedia.

It can give some depth to your story.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I think readers would like to know more about events in the novel or historical events described on wikipedia.

If it's your own annotation, @jedishrfu, you only get 1,200 characters so the extra detail I can add is minimal. And because my novel is set six hundred years hence, the Wikipedia entries are not as useful, though I have used a couple for terms that describe fundamental aspects, like distant stars.

I've asked around some readers of my novels, none of them were aware of it, so I think Amazon might be erring on the side of hyperbole by suggesting readers look for X-ray enabled books

 

[sysprog]

I think that writing a good index for a book is troublesome enough.

 

[jedishrfu]

Of course it depends on what your novel is about. But what if you provided a genealogy of your character or skillset or something that would help the reader read your story. You can provide links to any website I think provided you didn't violate Amazon restrictions.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

Of course it depends on what your novel is about.

Mine is a military-minded space opera, @jedishrfu, and I typically establish a couple of hundred genealogy items in a spreadsheet so I have a lot of backstory. I can say that if you're planning on using X-ray then jotting down the content from the start is easier than retrofitting them. So far, I've written up about 60 cast and terms in X-ray, with three times that to go. My bad, I went wild on characters with this novel

You can provide links to any website I think provided you didn't violate Amazon restrictions.

Not from what I've seen. Amazon offers a list of Wikipedia entries you can choose from, or 1,200 characters of plain text that you enter.

I think that writing a good index for a book is troublesome enough.

Gotta admit, I've only done that for a couple of books, and not novels, they were technical user guides. But that was reasonably easy, as I planned for it and tagged the indexed words as it was written and the word processing app built the index automatically. Doing it retrospectively would be painful, I'm sure.

 

[sysprog]

Mine is a military-minded space opera, @jedishrfu, and I typically establish a couple of hundred genealogy items in a spreadsheet so I have a lot of backstory. I can say that if you're planning on using X-ray then jotting down the content from the start is easier than retrofitting them. So far, I've written up about 60 cast and terms in X-ray, with three times that to go. My bad, I went wild on characters with this novel Not from what I've seen. Amazon offers a list of Wikipedia entries you can choose from, or 1,200 characters of plain text that you enter.Gotta admit, I've only done that for a couple of books, and not novels, they were technical user guides. But that was reasonably easy, as I planned for it and tagged the indexed words as it was written and the word processing app built the index automatically. Doing it retrospectively would be painful, I'm sure.

Before word procesng, even assuming that you tagged important words, you had to keeo track of page number changes during the editing process, and the publiger might want you to cut e.g. 25%, even after you had turned in the 'final' galleys.

 

[jedishrfu]

Here's the Amazon writeup on XRay:

(can't add this link kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202187230)

Reading it makes me think this is another way to learn about what readers like and what Amazon could sell them. I suspect they haven't rolled out those features until enough readers latch onto the XRay idea.

Yes, you're right I misread what's allowed. Amazon scans your book, adds the x-ray annotations, and then allows you to select what you want your readers to see.

They must have partnered with Wikipedia to allow only those links. They are taking a chance that some questionable content will slip through though Wikipedians will usually catch those shady practices.

 

[sysprog]

hey must have partnered with Wikipedia to allow only those links.

I think that wikipedia would not 'partner' with Amazon.

From Wikipedia:

The only Wikipedia content you should contact the Wikimedia Foundation about are the trademarked Wikipedia/Wikimedia logos, which are not freely usable without permission.​

​

(and)​

​

If you wish to reuse content from Wikipedia, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section. You should then read the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License.​

​

I don't know whether Amazon makes donations to Wikipedia, but I trust that if it does, there's no quid pro quo.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

Before word procesng

Okay, yeah those were dark days! My father wrote a novel on a little standalone typewriter cum computer that allowed you to enter a line at a time on the screen, and that was bad enough. I've never written anything substantial in manual mode, @sysprog, and I salute everyone who has!

Amazon scans your book, adds the x-ray annotations, and then allows you to select what you want your readers to see.

It does, and as with most AI, it does a terrible job, @jedishrfu. It has missed major characters but included a fleet of ship names as 'cast'. You can add references, which is helpful, but I'm slumped in terms of completing the entire list for my novel, I might get back to it next week, but the weather is warming up and I'd rather go down the beach. Clearly, I'm not sufficiently committed to my readers

 

[sysprog]

Okay, yeah those were dark days! My father wrote a novel on a little standalone typewriter cum computer that allowed you to enter a line at a time on the screen, and that was bad enough. I've never written anything substantial in manual mode, @sysprog, and I salute everyone who has!

I think that writing without a word processor reduces the inclination to edit as you go. One tends more to edit successive full drafts. I still used typewriters in the '70s.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I think that writing without a word processor reduces the inclination to edit as you go. One tends more to edit successive full drafts. I still used typewriters in the '70s.

I find editing an interesting process, @sysprog, but even using MS Word, I have to go back over the completed novel multiple times before it's finally¹ edited. But I do edit along the way, absolutely, at the line, paragraph, and chapter level. Sometimes that is really beneficial, especially when the plot goes in a different direction to what you were planning, or when you are considering a narrative choice and need to write it out before deciding the better option.

Anyone who wrote books on typewriters deserves kudos for their perseverance!

¹ 'Finally' is a notional concept here, as I always find things to fix, even after they're published.

 

[sysprog]

I find editing an interesting process, @sysprog, but even using MS Word, I have to go back over the completed novel multiple times before it's finally¹ edited. But I do edit along the way, absolutely, at the line, paragraph, and chapter level. Sometimes that is really beneficial, especially when the plot goes in a different direction to what you were planning, or when you are considering a narrative choice and need to write it out before deciding the better option.

Anyone who wrote books on typewriters deserves kudos for their perseverance!

¹ 'Finally' is a notional concept here, as I always find things to fix, even after they're published.

That's on the the upside $-$ you craft near-perfect sentences, as you to toggle beteen wring and editing $-$ a downside is that you risk too much interence with flow, so that you can miss out on articulating some of your best ideas $-$ many writers find it best to get it all out, with only minimal corrections, while churning out everything in bulk, and then going back over everything to clean up the errors, and improve the style.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

That's on the the upside $-$ you craft near-perfect sentences, as you to toggle beteen wring and editing $-$ a downside is that you risk too much interence with flow, so that you can miss out on articulating some of your best ideas $-$ many writers find it best to get it all out, with only minimal corrections, while churning out everything in bulk, and then going back over everything to clean up the errors, and improve the style.

Not sure about others, but there are lots of errors when I write, including an embarrassing number of missed words, because when I'm in the flow, I don't edit as I type. At least, not on the computer, I'm editing in my mind, but somehow my fingers find conjunctions offensive and refuse to type them

 

[jedishrfu]

The movie Finding Forester had a scene where he teaches a young student the art of writing. The first step is to write until finished and then go back and edit what you wrote. They illustrated it by using typewriters.

Many of the modern writing apps follow this principle. I’ve used Hemingway, iaWriter, Scrivener and Editorial and they all have a minimal distraction free writing mode. Once written, you can switch over to edit mode where you'll see things highlighted with annotation recommendations of things to fix.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I’ve used Hemingway, iaWriter, Scrivener and Editorial...

Thanks for mentioning four writing apps I've never heard of, @jedishrfu, I am especially taken with 'iaWriter', that name suggest an ironic glance at the audience. Having used MS Word for decades, I'm now a barnacle welded to the rusty hull of Microsoft's flagship Office 365 battleship, though I do plug in Grammarly for penultimate proof reading, it is amazing how it finds at least ten times as many errors are there pages in my books!

 

[jedishrfu]

Yeah, I just started using iaWriter and so far like although I was hoping for more grammar checking as I'm not a fan of Grammarly and it's pricey subscription model. I do like Grammarly but haven't decided if I need its premier checking. I sue the freebie version right now.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I use the free Grammarly, because combined with Word's improved review function - which includes grammar - they catch about 98% of my simpler errors. Neither tool is stellar for works of fiction, though, and particularly science fiction, but at least Grammarly now has a memory of previous 'ignore' instructions. It used to just present the same "error" between edits, which was very frustrating.

I couldn't use iaWriter if it doesn't have grammar checking though, that's my Achilles heel when it comes to writing!

 

[jedishrfu]

IaWriter is good at flagging certain words like just, somehow, often, already, only, ...

And you can add filters using regular expressions to catch others.

For me it's irritating that it flags these words when I tend to talk that way and it seems to be okay. Oh well.

 

[jedishrfu]

One other iaWriter feature is colorizing word types: nouns are red, verbs are blue, conjunctions are green, adjectives are brown, and adverbs are purple.

You can't change the colors but you can selectively turn them on or off for each type in iaWriter settings.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

Just to close off the X-ray question, I've pinged a few readers of my novels and they had no idea about X-ray but are finding it useful. However, the X-ray content itself seems fragile. I've asked Kindle Support why around 100 of my entries disappeared and their answer seemed for a different question, so I've reverted. If they provide a cogent reply, I'll add that here, but my experience is that if you're going to use X-ray, don't enter the content directly in the X-ray UI, create the content elsewhere (like a Word doc) and paste it in so you can reapply it if entries disappear.

 

[jedishrfu]

I’ve found it to be true in other spaces too especially where its easy to mark and delete but not to undo.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I never did receive a sensible reply from Amazon, but trial and error shows that if you update your ebook content, any X-ray entries that KDP matches to a Wikipedia article will overwrite your previously customised content for that entry.

It also randomly overwrites your custom content for characters, but even having picked a novella to test with, I've not the stamina to keep trying different content combinations to figure out why it picks the ones it picks.

So, X-ray is definitely something to do at the end of the publishing process...and then never update that ebook again!