{"id":7600,"date":"2014-05-14T13:51:07","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T17:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennytrout.com\/?p=7600"},"modified":"2014-05-14T13:51:07","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T17:51:07","slug":"jenny-reads-after-chapters-10-12-or-dont-forget-where-you-belong-at-this-party-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennytrout.com\/?p=7600","title":{"rendered":"Jenny Reads After chapters 10 – 12 or “Don’t Forget Where You Belong (at this party, forever)”"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may have noticed that this is not Wednesday blogging. I got behind in a bunch of stuff, so I skipped out on that one this week. However, you can read about shitty jobs my Wednesday Blogging peeps Tess Grant<\/a>, Kris Norris<\/a>, Bronwyn Green<\/a>, Gwendolyn Cease,<\/a>\u00a0and Jessica Jarman<\/a>\u00a0have toiled away at in the past.<\/p>\n

Before we get into the recap, I want to discuss some bullshittery. 700 million “reads.” That’s the\u00a0stat on the story’s WattPad landing page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One assumes that when the average person\u2013 someone who doesn’t worry about things like unique page views and click-throughs and ping-backs\u2013 sees that number, they’re not going to think, “Many people have clicked on each individual chapter multiple times,” but “700 million people have read this book.”<\/p>\n

This number, and the unspoken claim behind it (because WattPad is aware that they’re trying to make people think that 700 million individual people have read this story, or else they would be presenting a more realistic statistic) struck me as so ridiculous, I had to do some puzzling to try and put this claim into perspective.<\/p>\n

Okay, let’s take the “700 million reads” claim in the spirit with which it was intended, and that is, to dupe you into believing 700 million people have read it, and break that number down a little. I combined the estimated populations of countries in which I knew large numbers of people spoke English. These countries were selected through the very scientific process of being countries I remembered as having significant populations of first-language English speakers without having to actually look anything else up, and they are as follows: United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. And the number I came to was\u00a0494.8<\/strong><\/em> million.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, a note on the reason I chose populations with first-language English speakers: because I’m convinced that anyone whose secondary language skills in English are just semi-fluent wouldn’t be able to understand a flipping sentence in the grammar and spelling nightmare that is\u00a0After.\u00a0<\/em>You’d have to have some mad proficiency skills to sift through the errors, and it’s harder to find an estimate for “mad proficiency English language” on Google. I’m an author, I work with the English language every day, it’s my first language that I have spoken for thirty-two years of my life, it was the primary language used throughout my education, yet I\u00a0have difficulty figuring out what’s being said in some of these chapters.<\/p>\n

<\/em> So, let’s look at that 494.8 million figure. To reach that number, it means every single person in all of those countries would have to read\u00a0After.<\/em>\u00a0 This would include individuals who are:<\/p>\n