"What am I going to read today?"

Code a story Recommendations Frequently Asked Questions
Code a story Five stage process - engage brain The creation of a StoryCode is a five stage process, that requires about five minutes of concentrated effort, and the movement of a few sliders. Each stage asks some questions about the story, that you need to answer by sliding the blue dot to a position that reflects your view of this part of the story. You may find it helpful to have the book with you when you code it. Garbage in - garbage out The quality of the recommendations that are produced by StoryCode.co.uk are directly related to the quality of the answers our readers give to the Code a story questions. Please take your time to think about the meaning of each question and give a considered answer. Poorly considered answers will produce poor recommendations and will dilute the effectiveness of any one StoryCode. Questions, questions Looking at the example: "Narrative Drivers - How much is the story driven by the plot or the characters?", consider carefully whether the development of the story is determined by things that happen to the characters or by decisions they make based on their own needs and desires. There are forty such questions that need answers, and it will be the first story you code that will take the most time. Once you are familiar with the process it takes only a couple of minutes to complete. The point of no return Once you have submitted your answers to the stage 5 questions, you will not be able to return to your StoryCode, it will become part of the StoryCode database. In the future we expect to be able to allow you to edit the codes you have submitted, provided you have created a My StoryCode page, which will allow us to associate you with your StoryCodes. StoryCodes and lots of them After you have submitted the answers to the questions in stage 5, your StoryCode will be processed and a list of recommendations based on it, and any others submitted for that story, will be presented to you. As the number of StoryCodes in the database grows, this process is likely to take longer and longer. We are anticipating this growth, and expect to be able to keep performance at an acceptable level, but please be patient, whilst we are in our early days of development.	Stage 1 - Code a Story Screen Example slider for answering questions
Recommendations Get recommendations To get recommendations based on a particular story, the best thing to do is to code your experience of it. If you haven't read it you can browse the StoryCode database and click on the 'Get recommendations' link next to the story you are interested in. The recommendations page The recommendations page holds the main details of the source story, including its average reader rating, its average readability score and its rating for recommended age, and then a list of 20 recommendations ordered by those stories with the closest StoryCode. Reader Rating The Reader Rating is based on the average rating readers applied to a story to show how likely they are to recommend it to other readers. Readability Rating The Readability Rating is based on the average rating given to the story for how easy it was to read; one or two ticks means it can be hard going, with many ticks meaning it is easy to read. Age Rating The Age Rating reflects the most frequent minimum age rating applied to the story by StoryCode readers, chosen from a selection of 18, 15, 13, 10, 7 and 5. The StoryCode Match The percentage StoryCode Match score is calculated by comparing the average score for the individual answers from each of the forty questions asked during the "Code a Story" section, with each and every story in the StoryCode database. The higher the StoryCode Match, the closer the answers are for the stories concerned and the closer the match will be. The recommendation list Clicking on the story names within the list of recommendations will promote the story to the top of the list and the listed StoryCode Matches will then be based on this story. The comparison of the StoryCodes is not a simple calculation, so stories sitting next to each other in their proximity to a featured story are unlikely to sit next to each other when promoted to the top of the list. Buy Now The Buy Now basket item takes you away from the StoryCode.co.uk site to the web site of one of our bookselling partners. To begin with, in the UK this will take you to Amazon.co.uk and in the US to Amazon.co.uk, but we will continue to provide options to visit the regional Amazon site of your choice, and to other booksellers. StoryCode.co.uk will be partly dependent on the commission we earn from referring sales to our bookselling partners, so please buy from them whenever it is appropriate for you. Email a Friend The Email a Friend item takes you to a screen that invites you to share your StoryCode enthusiasms with friends, family and colleagues in one easy step. Simply fill in the text boxes as requested, as send your email. We take privacy issues very seriously, so please be assured we do not record or store the email addresses of people who are sent StoryCode recommendations in this way. Printer-Friendly Page The Printer-Friendly Page item links to a reformatted version of the same recommendations page that is designed to fit easily on to an A4-sized piece of paper. You can print any recommendations page you like, which can be handy when browsing in your local bookstore or library. You can even try asking a bookseller or librarian to print off a page for you.
Frequently Asked Questions Doesn’t StoryCode take some of the magic out of choosing and exploring new books? Not at all, we believe that StoryCode will provide unique new book recommendations that transcend traditional ways of choosing books and suggest stories that you would not normally have considered. In addition, the Reader Rating, Readability Rating and Recommended Age, all provide valuable additional information to help you choose a story to read. Why should I add a Code to a story that has already been coded many times? Our experience is that every time a story is encoded, the complex relationships between all the stories within StoryCode shift sufficiently (via the collective wisdom of all code contributions) for significant differences to recommendations to occur, even for stories with the highest number of encodings at StoryCode. Every single coding is equally valuable, so please be assured that all your coding efforts are both welcome and important. Can I change or delete the entries for my Code? Unfortunately in this current release of StoryCode, you cannot change or delete a code once it has been submitted. We anticipate this being available in later releases. For the moment, as StoryCode works on multiple codes for each story, we recommend that you just recode the story. The top matches for the story I chose are nothing like each other? Our recommendations are based on the answers given by all of our readers and analysed using our unique StoryCode system. By taking into account all the different opinions we develop a harmonized viewpoint for each story that may not reflect your specific point of view. Do you manually review the individual codes? Currently the vast majority of the codes are not reviewed manually, but automatically contribute to the StoryCode database. We do have monitoring systems watching for individual codes where the user ratings vary significantly from the current code. Whilst we welcome a diversity of views, in these instances, we may choose to review the individual code and amend or delete it. You say your coding process takes averages from the codes submitted, isn't there the chance that all codings will end up the same? It is almost impossible for this to happen. The averages we calculate are for each individual question; we do not average across the forty questions we ask for each story. We take an average score for each question so that we can represent this as our readers’ consensus view for that story. This can then be compared to the averages for the same question across all the other stories. As a result of the huge diversity of stories, the likelihood of two stories being identically coded is therefore very low, let alone the likelihood of more than two, or the whole database, being identical. The resulting database of StoryCodes generates clusters of stories that are similar to each other, based on these averages, which is the power and uniqueness of StoryCode and which forms the basis for our StoryCode Match score. I am a bookseller, why should I encourage my customers to use your site when you are referring them on to Amazon? StoryCode is a commercial venture and our referred sales are an important part of our early revenue stream. We will, nevertheless, be delighted if booksellers use our site in-store to help make recommendations to their customers, because wider use and awareness of StoryCode will improve its value to readers. Also, our recommendations page is designed to print nicely, using the Print-Friendly Page link, so we encourage readers to take lists of recommendations to booksellers who will be able to assist them further with making choices, and booksellers to use this feature in-store. In the future we expect to be able to offer services to booksellers that do not refer readers on to competing retailers, so that they can manage their own customer relationships. How are you deciding which characteristics are more important than others? We are not. The characteristics identified by our forty questions are considered equally when the StoryCode Matches are made. How come there are no literature academics on your team helping structure the StoryCode questions? StoryCode was conceived from the beginning as something that could answer the question "What am I going to read today?" and not the question of "What is the pure essence of a story?". The difference is very important, because we wanted to produce a service that was accessible to most readers of stories and that would make some common sense to them when they tried to code stories. Whilst there are no literature academics on the team, the management team of StoryCode has 75 years of experience in the book trade and are confident that the StoryCode questions and the resulting recommendations will come very close to answering that question that really matters to readers. Why is the mass of opinion more important than a few smart intellectuals coding? The StoryCode team subscribes to the notion that the many are smarter than the few, when it comes to forging meaningful opinion. We don’t believe the mass of opinion is more "important" we just believe it is likely to arrive at a more representative opinion of each story, which in turn is likely to be more useful to readers. Will the erotic classification allow the choice of inappropriate titles for particular audiences? At present there is no option to choose stories based on their characteristics. We do, however, expect to offer this service soon, at which point we will take our responsibilities seriously when considering how the erotic classification can be used.