Melvin Burgess on character blogs

In The Times, author Melvin Burgess explains how he has created fictional video logs alongside his new novel, Sara's Face.

Adapting the blogs was not easy. After the first draft, I had something like twenty minutes running time — an average of five minutes each. No good. Users, I’m told, jump around online so quickly that two minutes is the maximum possible length, preferably one.

I’m not sure about this. Surely the aim should be to get people to linger? An on-going story is a good way of doing that. And how accurate is this stat? If it’s an average, does it tell us much about the people we want to reach? But that’s for another time.