Abstract:
The rapid growth of the self-publishing channels, such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
(KDP), has greatly changed the model of distribution of books across the world today because
authors are able to bypass the traditional publishing framework. The conventional publishers
have well-established editorial and marketing procedures, but the self-published authors have
full creative freedom with more or less quality control. However, in spite of this change, there
is a shortage of academic studies that use computational sentiment analysis to compare the per-
ception of books by the readers under these two models in a systematic way. In this work, this
gap is filled by comparing the attitudes of readers to self-published and traditionally published
books based on the large dataset of Goodreads reviews. The study aims at (1) determining the
patterns of sentiment between the two publishing models, (2) identifying the critical themes
that determine the perceptions of the reader, and (3) assessing the contribution of platform vis-
ibility and metadata in modulating the trend of sentiment. Text normalization, tokenization,
and publisher classification by metadata preprocessed the reviews. In identifying the reviews in
self-published and traditionally published classes, a TF-IDF vectorizer and a Logistic Regres-
sion classifier were used. This model was able to accomplish an accuracy of 0.80 with a test
sample of 125,757. The performance measures showed a precision of 0.82 and a recall of 0.78
for self-published books and a precision of 0.79 and a recall of 0.82 for traditionally published
books. Furthermore, a DistilBERT model was used as an additional robustness test. The find-
ings indicate that the sentiment of readers is fairly equal on both publishing models; however,
selfpublished books have a greater diversification of sentiment distribution. The consistency
of traditional books is probably higher because of the professional editing and the publication
organization. The research has implications for those publishing and those being published in
terms of marketing approaches, content suggestions and implications to authors in their choice
of publication pathway.
