case study book goodreads

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet review – mind games as an artform

The fictional biography of a radical 60s psychoanalyst is expertly intercut with his pseudo-patient’s notebooks in this tightly constructed, hugely enjoyable mystery

L ike the star footballer who continues to play for his home town when bigger names come calling, there’s something pleasing about the author who, despite great success, sticks with their original publisher. Graeme Macrae Burnet’s second novel, His Bloody Project , was a runaway hit, shortlisted for the Booker prize and translated into 20 languages. His publisher, Saraband, is a small but brilliant independent press and has done a fine job with the elegant hardback of his fourth novel, Case Study .

It is ostensibly the biography – written by Macrae Burnet – of a (fictional) radical psychoanalyst in the mould of RD Laing, Collins Braithwaite. Braithwaite, who called himself an “untherapist”, was known as “Britain’s most dangerous man” in the 1960s, but his ideas faded until he was “barely a footnote in psychiatric history”. At the beginning of Case Study , Macrae Burnet tells us that he has come into possession of a series of notebooks written in the 60s by a patient of Braithwaite – a young woman, Veronica – who believes that the psychoanalyst has driven her sister to suicide.

Roberto Bolaño said that all novels are at their core detective novels. Macrae Burnet expands upon this, suggesting that the reader and the psychoanalyst – such intimate bedfellows – are both detectives gathering clues in pursuit of a final judgment that lies always just out of sight.

In her journal, Veronica tells us that she has gone to Braithwaite under a pseudonym, Rebecca Smyth, in the hope of understanding what happened to her sister, who threw herself from an overpass. “Suicide makes Miss Marples of us all,” she says. She endows Smyth with a character that is rakish, confident, provocative – quite the opposite to her own mousily downtrodden nature. Braithwaite analyses her – this fictitious self – as she attempts to winkle out revelations from him. These texts are intercut with selections from Braithwaite’s notebooks, from Macrae Burnet’s convincingly earnest biographical study of Braithwaite.

It’s a book that is enormous fun to read, a mystery and a psychological drama wrapped up in one. Buoyed by the evident pleasure Macrae Burnet takes in spinning such a tightly knit tale – the author’s note at the end is magnificent – Case Study is a triumph, and ought to give Saraband another success story.

• Book of the day

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Literature & Fiction

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Audiobook Price: $17.05 $17.05

Save: $9.56 $9.56 (56%)

Buy for others

Buying and sending ebooks to others.

• Select quantity
• Buy and send eBooks
• Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Case Study Kindle Edition

Shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize • Shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards • Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize • Longlisted for the 2022 HWA Gold Crown Award • Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

SELECTED BY NEW YORK TIMES AS ONE OF 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2022

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project  blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination. 

London, 1965. 'I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger,' writes an anonymous patient, a young woman investigating her sister's suicide. In the guise of a dynamic and troubled alter-ego named Rebecca Smyth, she makes an appointment with the notorious and roughly charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite, whom she believes is responsible for her sister's death. But in this world of beguilement and bamboozlement, neither she nor we can be certain of anything.

Case Study is a novel as slippery as it is riveting, as playful as it is sinister, a meditation on truth, sanity, and the instability of identity by one of the most inventive novelists of our time.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Biblioasis
• Publication date November 1, 2022
• File size 1290 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

Praise for  Case Study

“Encourages us to look more closely at the inherent instability of fiction itself … genuinely affecting … a very funny book.” —Nina Allan, The Guardian

“Brilliant, bamboozling … Burnet captures his characters’ voices so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging.” —Telegraph

“A riveting psychological plot ... tortuous, cunning ... clever. ” —Times Literary Supplement

“Burnet’s triumph is that it’s a page-turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted so as to reveal—or withhold—its secrets in a consistently satisfying way … Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.” —The Times

“Such is Burnet’s skill that he immediately convinces the reader that everything he is about to say is based on historical fact … brilliantly depicted … intriguing … compulsive reading.” —Irish Times

“You’ll be completely beguiled by this sly, darkly comic offering, with its unreliable narrator and its equally unreliable author.” —Mail on Sunday

“What’s real and what’s not is beside the point in this skillful portrait of a disturbed woman and her encounters with an experimental 1960s psychotherapist … Both strands quickly become compelling … I was hooked like a fish.” —Spectator

Praise for Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project

"It’s only a story—or is it? Graeme Macrae Burnet makes such masterly use of the narrative form that the horrifying tale he tells in His Bloody Project ...  seems plucked straight out of Scotland’s sanguinary historical archives.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Both a horrific tale of violence and a rumination on the societal problems for poor sharecroppers of the era.” —TIME

“[A] powerful, absorbing novel … Authors from Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov to Gillian Flynn have used [an unreliable narrator] to induce ambiguity, heighten suspense and fold an alternative story between the lines of a printed text. Mr. Burnet, a Glasgow author, does all of that and more in this page-turning period account of pathos and violence in 19th-century Scotland … [A] cleverly constructed tale … Has the lineaments of the crime thriller but some of the sociology of a Thomas Hardy novel.” —Wall Street Journal

“Recalls William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in the way it portrays an abused people and makes the ensuing violence understandable … His Bloody Project shows that the power held by landowners and overseers allowed cruelties just like those suffered by the Virginia slaves in Confessions . Halfway between a thriller and a sociological study of an exploitive economic system with eerie echoes to our own time, His Bloody Project is a gripping and relevant read.” —Newsweek

“A thriller with a fine literary pedigree ... His Bloody Project offers an intricate, interactive puzzle, a crime novel written, excuse my British, bloody well.” —Los Angeles Times

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The First Notebook

I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger, and if proved to be right (a rare occurrence admittedly), this notebook might serve as some kind of evidence.

Regrettably, as will become clear, I have little talent for com­position. As I read over my previous sentence I do rather cringe, but if I dilly-dally over style I fear I will never get anywhere. Miss Lyle, my English mistress, used to chide me for trying to cram too many thoughts into a single sentence. This, she said, was a sign of a disorderly mind. ‘You must first decide what it is you wish to say, then express it in the plainest terms.’ That was her mantra, and though it is doubtless a good one, I can see that I have already failed. I have said that I may be putting myself in danger, but there I go, off on an irrelevant digression. Rather than beginning again, however, I shall press on. What matters here is substance rather than style; that these pages constitute a record of what is to occur. It may be that were my narrative too polished, it might lack credibility; that somehow the ring of truth lies in infelicity. In any case, I cannot follow Miss Lyle’s advice, as I do not yet know what it is I wish to say. However, for the sake of anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves reading this, I will endeavour to be clear: to express myself in the plainest terms.

In this spirit, I shall begin by stating the facts. The danger to which I have alluded comes in the person of Collins Braithwaite. You will have heard him described in the press as ‘Britain’s most dangerous man’, this on account of his ideas about psychiatry. It is my belief, however, that it is not merely his ideas that are dangerous. I am convinced, you see, that Dr Braithwaite killed my sister, Veronica. I do not mean that he murdered her in the normal sense of the word, but that he is, nonetheless, as respon­sible for her death as if he had strangled her with his bare hands. Two years ago, Veronica threw herself from the overpass at Bridge Approach in Camden and was killed by the 4.45 to High Barnet. You could hardly imagine a person less likely to commit such an act. She was twenty-six years old, intelligent, successful and passably attractive. Regardless of this, she had, unbeknown to my father and me, been consulting Dr Braithwaite for some weeks. This I know from his own account.

Like most people in England I was familiar with Dr Braithwaite’s uncouth Northern drawl long before I encountered him in person. I had heard him speaking on the wireless, and had even once seen him on television. The programme was a discussion of psychiatry hosted by Joan Bakewell.* Braithwaite’s appearance was no more attractive than his voice. He wore an open-necked shirt and no jacket. His hair, which reached to his collar, was dishevelled, and he smoked constantly. His features were large, as if they had been exaggerated by a caricaturist, but there was something, even on television, that drew one’s eyes to him. I was only vaguely aware of the other guests in the studio. I remember less of what he actually said than his manner of delivering it. He had the air of a man to whom it would be futile to offer resistance. He spoke with a weary authority, as if tired of explaining himself to his inferiors. The participants were seated in a semi-circle with Miss Bakewell in the centre. While the others sat up straight, as if attending church, Dr Braithwaite slouched in his seat like a bored schoolboy, his chin slumped on the palm of his hand. He appeared to regard the other contribu­tors with a mixture of contempt and boredom. Towards the end of the programme, he gathered up his smoking materials and walked off the set, muttering an expletive that there is no need to repeat here. Miss Bakewell was taken aback, but quickly recov­ered her composure and remarked that it was an admission of the poverty of her guest’s ideas that he was unwilling to engage in debate with his peers.

The following day’s newspapers were filled with condemna­tion of Dr Braithwaite’s behaviour: he was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modern Britain; his books were filled with the most obscene ideas and displayed the basest view of human nature. Naturally, the following day I visited Foyle’s during my lunch hour and asked for a copy of his most recent book, which laboured under the unappealing title of Untherapy . The cashier handled the volume as though it carried the danger of infection, and gave me a disapproving look I had not expe­rienced since I acquired a copy of Mr Lawrence’s disreputable novel. My purchase remained under wraps until I was safely ensconced in my room after supper that night.

I should say that, prior to this, my knowledge of psychiatry was exclusively derived from those scenes in films in which a patient reclines on a settee and recounts her dreams to a bearded physician with a Germanic accent. Perhaps for this reason, I found the opening part of Untherapy difficult to follow. It was full of unfamiliar words, and the sentences were so long and convoluted that the author would have benefited from follow­ing Miss Lyle’s advice. The only thing I gleaned from the intro­duction was that Braithwaite had not even wanted to write this book in the first place. His ‘visitors’, as he called them, were individuals, not ‘case studies’ to be paraded like sideshow freaks. If he now set out these stories, it was for the sole purpose of defending his ideas against the scorn poured on them by the Establishment (a word he used a great deal). He declared him­self to be ‘an untherapist’: his task was to convince people that they did not need therapy; his mission was to bring down the ‘jerry-built edifice’ of psychiatry. This struck me as a most pecu­liar position to adopt, but, as I have said, I am not well versed in the topic. The book, he wrote, could be seen as a companion to his previous work, and consisted of a series of narratives based on relationships he had entered into with troubled individuals. Naturally, the names and certain identifying details had been changed, but the fundamentals of each story were, he insisted, true.

Having got past the baffling opening section, I found these stories frightfully compelling. I suppose there is something reassuring about reading about those duds who make one’s own eccentricities pale by comparison. By the time I was half­way through I felt positively normal. It was only when I came to the penultimate chapter that I found myself reading about Veronica. The most sensible thing, I think, is simply to insert these pages here:

About the Author

From the back cover.

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination.

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character.

In Case Study , Graeme Macrae Burnet presents these notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling—and often wickedly humorous—meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09XY5495P
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Biblioasis (November 1, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 1, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1290 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• #490 in Psychological Literary Fiction
• #1,653 in Historical Literary Fiction
• #2,012 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)

About the author

Graeme macrae burnet.

Graeme Macrae Burnet is the author of the 'fiendishly readable' His Bloody Project, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Awards. It won the Saltire Prize for Fiction and has been published to great acclaim in twenty languages around the world.

His 2021 novel Case Study was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. Hannah Kent (Burial Rites) called it 'a novel of mind-bending brilliance.'

He is also the author of a trilogy of novels set in the small French town of Saint-Louis and featuring detective Georges Gorski: The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017) and A Case of Matricide (October 2024).

"If Roland Barthes had written a detective novel, this would be it," was the Literary Review's verdict on The Accident on the A35

Born and brought up in Kilmarnock in the west of Scotland, Graeme now lives in Glasgow.

You can find him on twitter at @GMacraeBurnet.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Start Selling with Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Do-it-yourself book marketing tips, tools, and tactics

What all authors can learn from book marketing case studies

I’ve trained myself not to read the comments that appear below articles online. I rarely learn anything new, and more often than not, they’re negative.

Whether it’s The Wall Street Journal , HuffPost , USA Today , or lesser-known sites, the article feedback rarely makes me smile. It’s often depressing, in fact, as strangers argue with each other about something neither side knows much about.

But when an author friend mentioned the comments on one of the Goodreads book marketing case studies that I shared in the Build Book Buzz book marketing group on Facebook , I broke my own rule.

I read the comments.

Table of Contents

Good news/bad news

There’s good news and bad news.

The good news? The first few comments are positive. Yay!

The bad news? There’s a lot of whining. A lot of it.

It’s a very good book. (I read it.) If there’s a formula for psychological thrillers that readers love, this book uses it. So there’s that, right from the beginning.

Of course the publisher’s staff knew this book could take off with the right support.

The right support

It’s that “support” that commenters seem to take issue with. In general, the negative feedback includes one (or all) of these messages:

• Oh, sure, if I had a traditional publisher with a lot of money to market my book, I could have this success. But I’m self-published, so I don’t.
• If my Rolodex included famous, successful authors who could blurb my book, it might be a best-seller, too. But I don’t know any incredibly popular authors.
• Indie authors just can’t replicate this, so the system is rigged against us. We’re screwed.
• Why doesn’t Goodreads share case studies about successful self-published authors? Now that’s something we can learn from!

Let’s look at each of these points.

A different perspective

Complaint 1: big money.

Most authors — even those who have written excellent books published by big name publishers — don’t have this kind of financial support. To get this kind of marketing budget, you need to write a book with best-seller potential, get an agent, shop it around, and hope that a publisher sees the potential. Even then, there are no guarantees of anything.

This can mean making a choice between writing what the book-buying audience wants to read and writing what you are moved to write.

If you want a publisher that will start hyping your book a year before it’s published, study the books that are getting this treatment. Figure out the story success formula. Then write a fantastic book that follows the formula.

Complaint 2: Famous blurbers

This is true. Most writers don’t have famous author connections. But what connections do you have? Who can you ask to blurb your book?

For lesser-known authors, the fact that anybody says nice things about your book is better than nobody saying nice things.

Mine your network. Take action. (If you don’t know how, my affordable training program will walk you through the process.)

Complaint 3: It’s rigged against us

No, it isn’t.

Look at what goes into a top-quality traditionally published book and replicate it. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, a book that sells well usually includes:

• Excellent content
• A whiz-bang cover that’s appropriate for the category or genre
• Professional editing
• Professional proofreading

This is how the system works. The content comes from you, but the rest is available to every author. Whether you take advantage of it or not is up to you.

This was in place long before self-publishing was an option. There’s no reason to change it. Readers want good books; this is what’s required to publish good books.

Complaint 4: Goodreads should share indie author case studies

Goodreads doesn’t owe anybody anything.

Goodreads is a business that exists to make money. It does this by providing a service to readers, not authors.

To help do that, the company provides a platform that all authors and publishers can use for free. Publishers have the money required for the add-on services that Goodreads offers, so of course the company is going to cater to them.

Lots of us would enjoy reading about indie author success stories on Goodreads. Maybe we’ll see a few in the future. But that’s a decision the company will make based on what’s best for its business, not on what authors think the company should provide.

(In the meantime, read the success stories on this site, including “ How one indie author made $74,000 in 16 months and quit her day job (and what you can learn from her) ,” “ Memoir author’s book marketing success story ,” and “ How to sell out at a book signing without being a celebrity .”)

Goodreads has to provide what readers want while making it possible for publishers and authors to help provide that, too.

Focus on what you can learn

At the end of the case study, the writer summarizes what others can learn from what Celadon Books did to market The Silent Patient . You’ve seen it here on this blog before — start early , give away a lot of advance review/reader copies (ARCs), be creative .

There’s no reason why an indie author can’t do all of this.

I took another lesson from this, though: Librarians are your friends. The first phase of this campaign involved giving ARCs to librarians and booksellers.

Does your work as an author include connecting with and learning from librarians? You might be surprised at what they can teach you about book packaging and positioning as well as what readers want.

There’s no question that indie authors don’t have the resources of big publishers. But sell enough books on your own to attract a publisher’s attention, and that might change.

What has been your most successful book marketing tactic? Please tell us in a comment.

Like what you’re reading? Get it delivered to your inbox every week by subscribing to the free Build Book Buzz newsletter. You’ll also get my free “Top 5 Free Book Promotion Resources” cheat sheet immediately!

Sandra Beckwith is an author, book marketing coach, freelance writer, and national award-winning former publicist whose Build Book Buzz book marketing blog is ranked 7th among thousands globally and has been honored as a top website for authors and writers seven times.

My very modest successes were (1) hyping a book before publication, even though I have learned that I didn’t start early enough or thoroughly enough, and (2) building relationships with booksellers and librarians. You’re right, Sandra, they do know their business and are usually willing to share. Of course, none of this would have been possible without Build Book Buzz, and no, that wasn’t meant as flattery. Apropos of learning from others, why not study success stories? They happen for reasons that we can all emulate to some extent. CEOs, redhot designers, best-selling anybodies — they know stuff. Thanks for asking~~

Thanks, Karen! (And your check is in the mail!)

For your next book, start early by engaging readers in the process — recruit beta readers, ask people to vote on cover options, get their feedback on character names or book settings, etc. Help them become attached to your writing in a way that’s genuine for both them and you, so they can become your advocates when the book is published.

I suspect that building relationships with booksellers and librarians comes easily for you, and that you’re very good at hand-selling your books.

Thanks so much for sharing your experiences and validating this idea that we can all learn from the successes of others!

Thanks,Sandra, for your professional guidance. “Blowing my own horn”, so to speak, has never been in my nature. Maybe I can acquire it one day.

Sophia, I’d encourage you to see book promotion more clearly. You’re not tooting your own horn. You are sharing information about your book, not talking about yourself. You wrote your book for a reason — to entertain, enlighten, educate, or even offer hope. You can’t help people with your message — whether you write fiction or nonfiction — if they don’t know about your book. Don’t you owe it to the people you wrote the book for to help them discover it?

Sophia, this article on this site might help you: https://buildbookbuzz.com/uncomfortable-with-book-promotion/

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Get the free guide to

2024 literary calendar

Download and save your free 2024 literary calendar

The Build Book Buzz 2024 Literary Calendar

Case Study: Using NetGalley and Goodreads for Book Marketing and Publicity

Today I’m happy to share an exclusive with my readers: a case study on the book launch for  Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe   by Robert Matzen.

Sarah Miniaci at Smith Publicity and Kristina Radke at NetGalley review the marketing and publicity strategies that can help increase your book’s discoverability, word-of-mouth, and reviews. Any publicist or author can implement the tactics covered in this case study, which include (but are not limited to) how to incorporate NetGalley’s tools into wider campaigns.

Over 300 publishers and hundreds of indie authors use NetGalley to offer advance review copies of their books and generate early buzz in the book community. And  Smith Publicity is a full-service book publicity firm which, since 1997, worked with thousands of authors and publishers in promoting books from every genre—from New York Times bestsellers to first-time, independent titles.

Here’s an overview of what you’ll find in the hour-long discussion, with time stamps:

• 4:05: Getting to know the project and determining goals
• 9:05: What goals were set for the book
• 11:15: Action item #1: Create pre-publication buzz with consumer market targets (using NetGalley and Goodreads)
• 25:40: Action item #2: Obtain book trade reviews to establish visibility with buyers (librarians and booksellers) for holiday 2016 season
• 34:30: Action item #3: Generate major media coverage around release through Christmas 2016
• 42:15: Results obtained from action items #1 and #2
• 45:45: Results obtained from action item #3
• 49:00: Results recap
• 50:30: Key takeaways

Jane Friedman has spent nearly 25 years working in the book publishing industry, with a focus on author education and trend reporting. She is the editor of The Hot Sheet , the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World in 2023. Her latest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal. In addition to serving on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund, she works with organizations such as The Authors Guild to bring transparency to the business of publishing.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

[…] view post at https://janefriedman.com/case-study-using-netgalley-and-goodreads-for-book-marketing-and-publicity/ […]

Really interesting webinar – full of great tips that I wish I had known about before the upcoming publication of my book – most notable the book trade reviewers – have missed some of that boat – but great insights -thanks for posting the video!

So glad it could help! Appreciate the comment.

[…] Jane Friedman: an excellent case study on using NetGalley and Goodreads for book marketing and […]

[…] Case Study: Using NetGalley and Goodreads for Book Marketing and Publicity (Jane Friedman) […]

Goodreads is an online community for readers, writers, reviewers, and bookworms of all types. Started back in 2006, Goodreads is now one of the world’s most popular and complete repository of books with 90 million registered users as of July 2019.

While the iOS app for Goodreads has gotten rave reviews, the same cannot be said for the app’s Android version. Many users have complained that the app lacks the full functionality of its desktop counterpart and that the interface is frustrating and non-intuitive. As a user of Goodreads myself, I decided to take this opportunity to see how the Android app could be redesigned.

User Research

Demographics.

Based on the audience data of this app use assessment, I gained some interesting insights into the global demographic of Android Goodreads app users:

• users showed high browsing interest in college and university subjects, which can mean that the sizeable chunk of the audience attends college or is interested in attending college
• users were twice as interested in relationship topics compared to “family & parenting” topics, which indicates they are probably younger with little to no dependants
• users showed little to no interest in automobile, real-estate, or travelling, which re-inforces the idea that the majority of users are high school or college-age students who are not looking to make any major purchases or investments in the near future
• Android app users seemed to skew slightly more male compared to iOS and desktop users of Goodreads
• The app seems to appeal most to young millennials (mostly women) between the ages of 18-30 and then between older users (mostly men) from ages 40-65+, which might indicate the different stages of life that people increase their reading habits

User Reviews

Users of the Android app left many critical reviews on the Google Play store. Some of the most common issues were repeated in many reviews and a sample of the more critical reviews are displayed in the gallery below: 

Separating out common issues into categories yields the following:

|| Community Features

• Users cannot participate in group discussions, book clubs, or reading challenges
• Users cannot add friends by username and can only add existing friends from linked Facebook accounts
• The main home/social feed shows updates from everyone and lacks the desktop functionality that allows users to filter by friends or people they follow

|| Usability

• Recommendations cannot be dismissed and keep harassing the user 
• Book pages lack genre tags and categories that would help users decide whether they are interested in a book and also would help with search filters 
• Book reviews cannot be filtered by rating, edition, or post date
• The ad placement on book pages is particularly egregious as it sits right above the Amazon and Kindle buy buttons and often gets misclicked by users 
• Users cannot add their reading start and end dates to books they’ve read
• User lists cannot be saved

| Pain Points

• Lack of Full Functionality: Many of the functions users expected or were critical about were present and functional in the desktop site or iPhone app. A portion of the users complained that the app doesn’t have enough features to justify using it over the desktop site
• Exposes the users to what other similar readers in their network are reading
• Allows the user to read reviews by users whose opinions they trust and helps them decide whether a certain book is worth reading or not
• Allows users to view their close friend’s activity, such as comments on reviews or posts in discussion groups and be inspired to participate 
• Limited Book Actions: Despite the app being for readers & reviewers, the app functions related to books is one of the most limited. Users cannot add a new book to any shelf other than the “Want to Read”, whereas the desktop site has a “Currently Reading” and “Read” option, along with custom user-created shelves. The function to add reading dates to a book a user has read or to add periodic status updates or notes on their progress is not available
• Non-Intuitive UI: The navigation system is confusing and certain buttons don’t do what users expect them to do. The FAB contains a pop-out of actions that not many users would use (Explore, Search Books, Scan Book Cover) because these same actions already exist in the top navigation bar. In addition, the FAB only appears on the “My Books” tab when it could be more efficient on the “Updates” tab. Other actions are hidden and hard to find, such as adding status updates or the ability to search books by genre (You would have to click on the “Explore” button on the FAB while you are in the “My Books” tab in order to have access to it instead of simply using the persistent search bar in the top navbar). Some of the most recent reviews complained about missing features that weren’t actually missing at all. However, bad UI decisions made them hard to find and/or frustrating to use effectively.

Requirements

• Improved Book Actions: Users are able to perform all the actions they do on the desktop site, which will greatly improve their app experience
• Improved Search: Users will be able filter their searches by tags, genres, or other relevant categories
• Focused Social Features: Users will only get the updates that matter to them. Discussion groups can greatly help users feel like they are able to participate and engage with other users
• Intuitive UI: Users can navigate and perform actions in the app quickly and intuitively. The interface effectively becomes “invisible” to the user as they engage with their reading community, find their favourite books, or do their favourite Goodreads activities.
• Improved Discoverability: Users are able to find new content and trending books without having to navigate through featured content they may not be interested in.

User Personas

Based on the previous critical reviews and analyzing the ways in which different users engage with the app, a few user personas were developed with different app objectives and priorities.

I started off the initial design process with a series of low-fidelity mockups. This helped take the focus away from colours and aesthetics and more on the navigation and content placement of the app. Many users complained about not being able to find certain functions or having specific functions that were difficult to use mainly because the navigation was non-intuitive. I kept this complain as a central focus for each screen. In addition, I knew the app would have to expand the functionality for social features. This became encapsulated in a “Community” section that users could navigate to.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

Based on the the identified pain points and selected requirements, low-fidelity mockups were made. The original Android app had a strange navigation system so the improved mockups kept the primary user destinations on a bottom navigation bar while the search function and notifications were kept to the top.

Development

As the project progressed, changes were made from the low-fidelity wireframes to the high-fidelity version.

The app now contains a more easily accessible “explore” section that can be accessed by the bottom toolbar. This area allows users to discover newly released books they might be interested in, includes a genre explorer, and featured content such as lists and interviews that makes it easier for them to engage with the wider Goodreads community.

A common user complaint was difficulty finding (and searching) books by category. Users often mentioned there wasn’t an intuitive way to discover or stumble upon new content like the desktop version unless this content somehow popped up on their news dashboard. However, as we will address in a later section, the app’s news dashboard had its own issues and was often clogged with irrelevant items. An “explore” feature does exist on the current Android app, however, some users never even realized it existed because of the confusing navigation.

To resolve the issues of a clogged home dashboard feed, users can now set their preferences to who they would like to follow and what sorts of content they want to see. This allows for a more curated user experience where readers can engage more fully only to the content they want to subscribe to. Lily (our reviewer persona) can adjust her feed to show her content from other reviewers and keep herself updated on what books her community is discussing. Meanwhile, Steven (our picky genre reader) can instead set his preferences so he’s only seeing content from the select reviewers and readers he follows and trusts, allowing him to discover books he’d be interested in reading instead of slogging through an endless feed of irrelevant updates.

On the desktop version of Goodreads, user-generated lists, book discussion threads, and common interest groups form the backbone of much of the social aspects of the user experience. While it is possible to use the site without ever engaging with the greater Goodreads userbase, more social-oriented users lamented the loss of these social features in the Android app.

As different user personas are attracted to different social aspects (i.e. Lily the reviewer may be partial to discussion groups whereas Cathy the cataloger prefers to peruse endless lists to inspire ideas for her own), most of the social features were group together under the Community section where users can quickly scan an overview of activity that’s trending in their social spheres.

Users who have joined groups can quickly access them from this community dashboard instead of searching them up. The featured discussions are pulled from books the user has recently marked as “Read” or discussion boards they have already posted and frequented. This keeps the discussion topics unique to the user’s interests instead of bombarding them with endless irrelevant content. As the main Explore tab contains all the featured content (including featured lists curated by Goodreads admins), the community tab provides a space for discovering new and recent lists.

The users also needed a central page to act as a library of all their shelves and reading updates. The current Android app put the “My Books” section as a secondary tab on the home page. There was also a FAB that contained additional functions that weren’t necessarily related (Scanning book covers, a link to the “Explore” section, and links to “Recommended” books that seemed like non-intuitive placement. ​

Usually, readers navigated to the “My Books” section simply to update their progress on their currently reading books or to peruse their “Want to Read” shelf for more reading ideas. Therefore, these were given more prominence in the new design. New tags for shelves could be added more intuitively instead of taking a circuitous path through an FAB. This page also proved to be an ideal placement of the user’s reading challenge, should they choose to participate.

User Profile

The main user profile is a place to access all sorts of content such as user bios, friend lists, favourite quotes, or the most recent user activity. Since this is a central hub for a wide variety of content, the new profile page has tabs organizing and separating relevant items. Since Goodreads has a lot of content users can “favourite” or “like”, the “Favourites” tab provides a comprehensive view of all the lists, books, genres, or quotes that the user has collected over the life of their account. This content was usually spread sporadically over the app (and desktop version) so this system centralizes it and makes it more intuitive to manage.

The “Friends” tab now allows users to search for friends by username, email, or by linking their social media accounts. This was an oft-repeated complaint as users were only able to add friends if they knew them on Facebook instead of searching them up by username if they didn’t want to link accounts.

The desktop options of filtering and narrowing search categories was added to the search function. Users are able to select their search categories between books, authors, and groups in order to focus their queries. Each book also has genre tags so users can differentiate between similar titles, or exclude certain genres in their query. ​

Groups can also be searched for based on their main category and can be sorted by location if the user wants to join a local group.

Book Details

The main book details page was given a massive overhaul. The community reviews can be filtered by rating or date posted. The e-book purchasing options have been moved so they wouldn’t interact with ad placement. The layout has been updated to make it easier for the reader to parse different sections of content. Discussion threads related to the book have also been added.

A clickable prototype can be viewed here . 

Constraints

As this was simply a case study, there were a few constraints that stopped this project from being explored in other directions. Many of the complaints surrounded functional issues that would require an Android developer’s attention (app crashes, broken buttons, long load times, etc). Fixing those kinds of issues is beyond the scope of this study, however they would greatly impact the user experience and app satisfaction.

 As I did not have access to any regular Goodreads app users of a reasonable size to sample from, testing and validation was minimal. A larger testing process would be needed before validating any of these designs. ​

When implementing the design, I had the reviewer persona in my forefront more than any other user persona. Therefore, most of the design revolves around the discussion boards and review sections of the app even though other personas may spend more time on things such as list creation. ​

Goodreads also has different sorts of accounts for readers, authors, and “librarians” (user accounts upgraded with certain admin privileges). These accounts would likely different kinds of functionality like adding new books to the Goodreads database, editing details, or moderating discussion boards. However, exploring these alternate user experiences was also beyond the scope of this study.

Retrospective

Looking back over the states of this case study, there are certainly areas of improvement and unexplored avenues. For example, avid ebook readers will often sync thier Kindle updates, notes, progress, and highlights to their Goodreads account. This functionality has not been explored in this study, but it would provide a seamless way for readers to switch between reading and immediately engaging with the wider community of other users reading the same book, or even are on the same page. ​

More user feedback would be also required before attempting further iterations or refinements. Over the course of reading through user reviews and poking around the current Android app myself, I learned just how important an intuitive UI is. It helped me gain a greater appreciation for how good apps gently guide users instead of trapping them in a frustrating maze of bizarre options. This is something I hope to carry in mind with future implementations.

Advertisement

Supported by

O.J. Simpson, Football Star Whose Trial Riveted the Nation, Dies at 76

He ran to football fame and made fortunes in movies. His trial for the murder of his former wife and her friend became an inflection point on race in America.

• Share full article

By Robert D. McFadden

O.J. Simpson, who ran to fame on the football field, made fortunes as an all-American in movies, television and advertising, and was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in a 1995 trial in Los Angeles that mesmerized the nation, died on Wednesday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 76.

The cause was cancer, his family announced on social media.

The jury in the murder trial cleared him, but the case, which had held up a cracked mirror to Black and white America, changed the trajectory of his life. In 1997, a civil suit by the victims’ families found him liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages. He paid little of the debt, moved to Florida and struggled to remake his life, raise his children and stay out of trouble.

In 2006, he sold a book manuscript, titled “If I Did It,” and a prospective TV interview, giving a “hypothetical” account of murders he had always denied committing. A public outcry ended both projects, but Mr. Goldman’s family secured the book rights, added material imputing guilt to Mr. Simpson and had it published.

In 2007, he was arrested after he and other men invaded a Las Vegas hotel room of some sports memorabilia dealers and took a trove of collectibles. He claimed that the items had been stolen from him, but a jury in 2008 found him guilty of 12 charges, including armed robbery and kidnapping, after a trial that drew only a smattering of reporters and spectators. He was sentenced to nine to 33 years in a Nevada state prison. He served the minimum term and was released in 2017.

Over the years, the story of O.J. Simpson generated a tide of tell-all books, movies, studies and debate over questions of justice, race relations and celebrity in a nation that adores its heroes, especially those cast in rags-to-riches stereotypes, but that has never been comfortable with its deeper contradictions.

There were many in the Simpson saga. Yellowing old newspaper clippings yield the earliest portraits of a postwar child of poverty afflicted with rickets and forced to wear steel braces on his spindly legs, of a hardscrabble life in a bleak housing project and of hanging with teenage gangs in the tough back streets of San Francisco, where he learned to run.

“Running, man, that’s what I do,” he said in 1975, when he was one of America’s best-known and highest-paid football players, the Buffalo Bills’ electrifying, swivel-hipped ball carrier, known universally as the Juice. “All my life I’ve been a runner.”

And so he had — running to daylight on the gridiron of the University of Southern California and in the roaring stadiums of the National Football League for 11 years; running for Hollywood movie moguls, for Madison Avenue image-makers and for television networks; running to pinnacles of success in sports and entertainment.

Along the way, he broke college and professional records, won the Heisman Trophy and was enshrined in pro football’s Hall of Fame. He appeared in dozens of movies and memorable commercials for Hertz and other clients; was a sports analyst for ABC and NBC; acquired homes, cars and a radiant family; and became an American idol — a handsome warrior with the gentle eyes and soft voice of a nice guy. And he played golf.

It was the good life, on the surface. But there was a deeper, more troubled reality — about an infant daughter drowning in the family pool and a divorce from his high school sweetheart; about his stormy marriage to a stunning young waitress and her frequent calls to the police when he beat her; about the jealous rages of a frustrated man.

Calls to the Police

The abuse left Nicole Simpson bruised and terrified on scores of occasions, but the police rarely took substantive action. After one call to the police on New Year’s Day, 1989, officers found her badly beaten and half-naked, hiding in the bushes outside their home. “He’s going to kill me!” she sobbed. Mr. Simpson was arrested and convicted of spousal abuse, but was let off with a fine and probation.

The couple divorced in 1992, but confrontations continued. On Oct. 25, 1993, Ms. Simpson called the police again. “He’s back,” she told a 911 operator, and officers once more intervened.

Then it happened. On June 12, 1994, Ms. Simpson, 35, and Mr. Goldman, 25, were attacked outside her condominium in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, not far from Mr. Simpson’s estate. She was nearly decapitated, and Mr. Goldman was slashed to death.

The knife was never found, but the police discovered a bloody glove at the scene and abundant hair, blood and fiber clues. Aware of Mr. Simpson’s earlier abuse and her calls for help, investigators believed from the start that Mr. Simpson, 46, was the killer. They found blood on his car and, in his home, a bloody glove that matched the one picked up near the bodies. There was never any other suspect.

Five days later, after Mr. Simpson had attended Nicole’s funeral with their two children, he was charged with the murders, but fled in his white Ford Bronco. With his old friend and teammate Al Cowlings at the wheel and the fugitive in the back holding a gun to his head and threatening suicide, the Bronco led a fleet of patrol cars and news helicopters on a slow 60-mile televised chase over the Southern California freeways.

Networks pre-empted prime-time programming for the spectacle, some of it captured by news cameras in helicopters, and a nationwide audience of 95 million people watched for hours. Overpasses and roadsides were crowded with spectators. The police closed highways and motorists pulled over to watch, some waving and cheering at the passing Bronco, which was not stopped. Mr. Simpson finally returned home and was taken into custody.

The ensuing trial lasted nine months, from January to early October 1995, and captivated the nation with its lurid accounts of the murders and the tactics and strategy of prosecutors and of a defense that included the “dream team” of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. , F. Lee Bailey , Alan M. Dershowitz, Barry Scheck and Robert L. Shapiro.

The prosecution, led by Marcia Clark and Christopher A. Darden, had what seemed to be overwhelming evidence: tests showing that blood, shoe prints, hair strands, shirt fibers, carpet threads and other items found at the murder scene had come from Mr. Simpson or his home, and DNA tests showing that the bloody glove found at Mr. Simpson’s home matched the one left at the crime scene. Prosecutors also had a list of 62 incidents of abusive behavior by Mr. Simpson against his wife.

But as the trial unfolded before Judge Lance Ito and a 12-member jury that included 10 Black people, it became apparent that the police inquiry had been flawed. Photo evidence had been lost or mislabeled; DNA had been collected and stored improperly, raising a possibility that it was tainted. And Detective Mark Fuhrman, a key witness, admitted that he had entered the Simpson home and found the matching glove and other crucial evidence — all without a search warrant.

‘If the Glove Don’t Fit’

The defense argued, but never proved, that Mr. Fuhrman planted the second glove. More damaging, however, was its attack on his history of racist remarks. Mr. Fuhrman swore that he had not used racist language for a decade. But four witnesses and a taped radio interview played for the jury contradicted him and undermined his credibility. (After the trial, Mr. Fuhrman pleaded no contest to a perjury charge. He was the only person convicted in the case.)

In what was seen as the crucial blunder of the trial, the prosecution asked Mr. Simpson, who was not called to testify, to try on the gloves. He struggled to do so. They were apparently too small.

“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,” Mr. Cochran told the jury later.

In the end, it was the defense that had the overwhelming case, with many grounds for reasonable doubt, the standard for acquittal. But it wanted more. It portrayed the Los Angeles police as racist, charged that a Black man was being railroaded, and urged the jury to think beyond guilt or innocence and send a message to a racist society.

On the day of the verdict, autograph hounds, T-shirt vendors, street preachers and paparazzi engulfed the courthouse steps. After what some news media outlets had called “The Trial of the Century,” producing 126 witnesses, 1,105 items of evidence and 45,000 pages of transcripts, the jury — sequestered for 266 days, longer than any in California history — deliberated for only three hours.

Much of America came to a standstill. In homes, offices, airports and malls, people paused to watch. Even President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office to join his secretaries. In court, cries of “Yes!” and “Oh, no!” were echoed across the nation as the verdict left many Black people jubilant and many white people aghast.

In the aftermath, Mr. Simpson and the case became the grist for television specials, films and more than 30 books, many by participants who made millions. Mr. Simpson, with Lawrence Schiller, produced “I Want to Tell You,” a thin mosaic volume of letters, photographs and self-justifying commentary that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and earned Mr. Simpson more than $1 million.

He was released after 474 days in custody, but his ordeal was hardly over. Much of the case was resurrected for the civil suit by the Goldman and Brown families. A predominantly white jury with a looser standard of proof held Mr. Simpson culpable and awarded the families $33.5 million in damages. The civil case, which excluded racial issues as inflammatory and speculative, was a vindication of sorts for the families and a blow to Mr. Simpson, who insisted that he had no chance of ever paying the damages.

Mr. Simpson had spent large sums for his criminal defense. Records submitted in the murder trial showed his net worth at about $11 million, and people with knowledge of the case said he had only $3.5 million afterward. A 1999 auction of his Heisman Trophy and other memorabilia netted about $500,000, which went to the plaintiffs. But court records show he paid little of the balance that was owed.

He regained custody of the children he had with Ms. Simpson, and in 2000 he moved to Florida, bought a home south of Miami and settled into a quiet life, playing golf and living on pensions from the N.F.L., the Screen Actors Guild and other sources, about $400,000 a year. Florida laws protect a home and pension income from seizure to satisfy court judgments.

The glamour and lucrative contracts were gone, but Mr. Simpson sent his two children to prep school and college. He was seen in restaurants and malls, where he readily obliged requests for autographs. He was fined once for powerboat speeding in a manatee zone, and once for pirating cable television signals.

In 2006, as the debt to the murder victims’ families grew with interest to $38 million, he was sued by Fred Goldman, the father of Ronald Goldman, who contended that his book and television deal for “If I Did It” had advanced him $1 million and that it had been structured to cheat the family of the damages owed.

The projects were scrapped by News Corporation, parent of the publisher HarperCollins and the Fox Television Network, and a corporation spokesman said Mr. Simpson was not expected to repay an $800,000 advance. The Goldman family secured the book rights from a trustee after a bankruptcy court proceeding and had it published in 2007 under the title “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.” On the book’s cover, the “If” appeared in tiny type, and the “I Did It” in large red letters.

Another Trial, and Prison

After years in which it seemed he had been convicted in the court of public opinion, Mr. Simpson in 2008 again faced a jury. This time he was accused of raiding a Las Vegas hotel room in 2007 with five other men, most of them convicted criminals and two armed with guns, to steal a trove of sports memorabilia from a pair of collectible dealers.

Mr. Simpson claimed that he was only trying to retrieve items stolen from him, including eight footballs, two plaques and a photo of him with the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, and that he had not known about any guns. But four men, who had been arrested with him and pleaded guilty, testified against him, two saying they had carried guns at his request. Prosecutors also played hours of tapes secretly recorded by a co-conspirator detailing the planning and execution of the crime.

On Oct. 3 — 13 years to the day after his acquittal in Los Angeles — a jury of nine women and three men found him guilty of armed robbery, kidnapping, assault, conspiracy, coercion and other charges. After Mr. Simpson was sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison, his lawyer vowed to appeal, noting that none of the jurors were Black and questioning whether they could be fair to Mr. Simpson after what had happened years earlier. But jurors said the double-murder case was never mentioned in deliberations.

In 2013, the Nevada Parole Board, citing his positive conduct in prison and participation in inmate programs, granted Mr. Simpson parole on several charges related to his robbery conviction. But the board left other verdicts in place. His bid for a new trial was rejected by a Nevada judge, and legal experts said that appeals were unlikely to succeed. He remained in custody until Oct. 1, 2017, when the parole board unanimously granted him parole when he became eligible.

Certain conditions of Mr. Simpson’s parole — travel restrictions, no contacts with co-defendants in the robbery case and no drinking to excess — remained until 2021, when they were lifted, making him a completely free man.

Questions about his guilt or innocence in the murders of his former wife and Mr. Goldman never went away. In May 2008, Mike Gilbert, a memorabilia dealer and former crony, said in a book that Mr. Simpson, high on marijuana, had admitted the killings to him after the trial. Mr. Gilbert quoted Mr. Simpson as saying that he had carried no knife but that he had used one that Ms. Simpson had in her hand when she opened the door. He also said that Mr. Simpson had stopped taking arthritis medicine to let his hands swell so that they would not fit the gloves in court. Mr. Simpson’s lawyer Yale L. Galanter denied Mr. Gilbert’s claims, calling him delusional.

In 2016, more than 20 years after his murder trial, the story of O.J. Simpson was told twice more for endlessly fascinated mass audiences on television. “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” Ryan Murphy’s installment in the “American Crime Story” anthology on FX, focused on the trial itself and on the constellation of characters brought together by the defendant (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.). “O.J.: Made in America,” a five-part, nearly eight-hour installment in ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary series (it was also released in theaters), detailed the trial but extended the narrative to include a biography of Mr. Simpson and an examination of race, fame, sports and Los Angeles over the previous half-century.

A.O. Scott, in a commentary in The New York Times, called “The People v. O.J. Simpson” a “tightly packed, almost indecently entertaining piece of pop realism, a Dreiser novel infused with the spirit of Tom Wolfe” and said “O.J.: Made in America” had “the grandeur and authority of the best long-form fiction.”

In Leg Braces as a Child

Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947, one of four children of James and Eunice (Durden) Simpson. As an infant afflicted with the calcium deficiency rickets, he wore leg braces for several years but outgrew his disability. His father, a janitor and cook, left the family when the child was 4, and his mother, a hospital nurse’s aide, raised the children in a housing project in the tough Potrero Hill district.

As a teenager, Mr. Simpson, who hated the name Orenthal and called himself O.J., ran with street gangs. But at 15 he was introduced by a friend to Willie Mays, the renowned San Francisco Giants outfielder. The encounter was inspirational and turned his life around, Mr. Simpson recalled. He joined the Galileo High School football team and won All-City honors in his senior year.

In 1967, Mr. Simpson married his high school sweetheart, Marguerite Whitley. The couple had three children, Arnelle, Jason and Aaren. Shortly after their divorce in 1979, Aaren, 23 months old, fell into a swimming pool at home and died a week later.

Mr. Simpson married Nicole Brown in 1985; the couple had a daughter, Sydney, and a son, Justin. He is survived by Arnelle, Jason, Sydney and Justin Simpson and three grandchildren, his lawyer Malcolm P. LaVergne said.

After being released from prison in Nevada in 2017, Mr. Simpson moved into the Las Vegas country club home of a wealthy friend, James Barnett, for what he assumed would be a temporary stay. But he found himself enjoying the local golf scene and making friends, sometimes with people who introduced themselves to him at restaurants, Mr. LaVergne said. Mr. Simpson decided to remain in Las Vegas full time. At his death, he lived right on the course of the Rhodes Ranch Golf Club.

From his youth, Mr. Simpson was a natural on the gridiron. He had dazzling speed, power and finesse in a broken field that made him hard to catch, let alone tackle. He began his collegiate career at San Francisco City College, scoring 54 touchdowns in two years. In his third year he transferred to Southern Cal, where he shattered records — rushing for 3,423 yards and 36 touchdowns in 22 games — and led the Trojans into the Rose Bowl in successive years. He won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s best college football player of 1968. Some magazines called him the greatest running back in the history of the college game.

His professional career was even more illustrious, though it took time to get going. The No. 1 draft pick in 1969, Mr. Simpson went to the Buffalo Bills — the league’s worst team had the first pick — and was used sparingly in his rookie season; in his second, he was sidelined with a knee injury. But by 1971, behind a line known as the Electric Company because they “turned on the Juice,” he began breaking games open.

In 1973, Mr. Simpson became the first to rush for over 2,000 yards, breaking a record held by Jim Brown, and was named the N.F.L.’s most valuable player. In 1975, he led the American Football Conference in rushing and scoring. After nine seasons, he was traded to the San Francisco 49ers, his hometown team, and played his last two years with them. He retired in 1979 as the highest-paid player in the league, with a salary over $800,000, having scored 61 touchdowns and rushed for more than 11,000 yards in his career. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985.

Mr. Simpson’s work as a network sports analyst overlapped with his football years. He was a color commentator for ABC from 1969 to 1977, and for NBC from 1978 to 1982. He rejoined ABC on “Monday Night Football” from 1983 to 1986.

Actor and Pitchman

And he had a parallel acting career. He appeared in some 30 films as well as television productions, including the mini-series “Roots” (1977) and the movies “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Killer Force” (1976), “Cassandra Crossing” (1976), “Capricorn One” (1977), “Firepower” (1979) and others, including the comedy “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad” (1988) and its two sequels.

He did not pretend to be a serious actor. “I’m a realist,” he said. “No matter how many acting lessons I took, the public just wouldn’t buy me as Othello.”

Mr. Simpson was a congenial celebrity. He talked freely to reporters and fans, signed autographs, posed for pictures with children and was self-effacing in interviews, crediting his teammates and coaches, who clearly liked him. In an era of Black power displays, his only militancy was to crack heads on the gridiron.

His smiling, racially neutral image, easygoing manner and almost universal acceptance made him a perfect candidate for endorsements. Even before joining the N.F.L., he signed deals, including a three-year, $250,000 contract with Chevrolet. He later endorsed sporting goods, soft drinks, razor blades and other products.

In 1975, Hertz made him the first Black star of a national television advertising campaign. Memorable long-running commercials depicted him sprinting through airports and leaping over counters to get to a Hertz rental car. He earned millions, Hertz rentals shot up and the ads made O.J.’s face one of the most recognizable in America.

Mr. Simpson, in a way, wrote his own farewell on the day of his arrest. As he rode in the Bronco with a gun to his head, a friend, Robert Kardashian, released a handwritten letter to the public that he had left at home, expressing love for Ms. Simpson and denying that he killed her. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he wrote. “I’ve had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the glove that was an important piece of evidence in Mr. Simpson’s murder trial. It was not a golf glove. The error was repeated in a picture caption.

How we handle corrections

Robert D. McFadden is a Times reporter who writes advance obituaries of notable people. More about Robert D. McFadden