It concluded that there were 500 topics (such as “love” or “lawyers and the law”) that were important for a book to be classed a bestseller, and different combinations of those topics gave readers a sense of the book’s theme.Īrcher and Jockers then found that successful authors devoted 30% of their books to just one or two topics. The algorithm also detected the topics discussed in a book by mining the text for groups of words frequently connected with each other. “They were the only two out of the thousands of novels we studied that had this up and down plot at the right pace.”
What amazed Archer was how, when she used the algorithm to plot the emotional beat of Fifty Shades of Grey and The Da Vinci Code on a graph, the two plotlines were almost identical. “If you get that pattern symmetrical you will keep readers turning the pages.” “In certain bestsellers there is an emotional high followed by a low, then another high, then another low,” Archer says.
In terms of plot, a bestseller has to have an “emotional beat”. “That kind of training helps you write for a popular market and means your style is often accessible and colloquial,” Archer says. It also predicted authors who had worked in journalism had the greatest chance of writing a debut bestseller. For example, the algorithm found that readers of bestsellers liked shorter sentences, voice-driven narratives and less erudite vocabulary than readers of literary fiction. Of course, most successful authors know this – and other findings seem equally obvious.
“You have to hit the sweet spot on character, plot, style and theme.” If you want to write a bestseller it will help to get the combination of these features right, says Archer. It found 2,800 of these data points were notable features that together could identify a potential bestseller. To figure out what the bestsellers had in common, the algorithm assessed 280,000 data points in every novel Archer and Jockers fed into the computer. It can detect this in their use of nouns, the proximity of adjectives to nouns and how many commas they use. The computer also revealed how much an author’s fingerprints were in everything they wrote, she says. “It shows how literary style, as read by a computer, has a huge influence on how people are going to react,” Archer says. Luckily for would-be authors, she and Jockers decided to share what they gleaned from their algorithm in their 2016 book The Bestseller Code. “When we ran it for the first time I was stunned,” says Archer. With some authors, such as Rowling, Patterson or EL James of Fifty Shades fame, the algorithm was more than 90% certain their manuscripts would be bestsellers. Together with Matthew Jockers, an expert on text mining, she has written an algorithm that can tell whether a manuscript will hit the New York Times bestseller list with 80% accuracy. “It doesn’t matter whether a book is published as literary fiction, romance, sci-fi, crime or any other genre, there are some latent features of bestseller-dom in manuscripts and these patterns are detectable by a computer algorithm,” she says. What is mass readership saying about the books readers want to read? And how are authors writing that commercial success, unbeknown to them, into their novels?” Instead of asking writers and readers, Archer decided to ask a computer. “I wanted to know why the whole world seemed to be reading the same book at the same time. She spent her career trying to spot bestsellers as a commissioning editor, then went to Stanford University in the US to do a PhD on the subject. “Everyone in publishing is always looking for the next bestseller,” says Jodie Archer – and she should know. If you want to write a bestseller you have to hit the sweet spot on character, plot, style and theme Even bestselling authors such as James Patterson, Danielle Steel and Stieg Larsson had manuscripts rejected multiple times, while self-publishing sensations like Fifty Shades of Grey took the book industry by surprise. Spotting a book that will make money isn’t easy. That’s more than 19 every hour over a year, and the highest number of new titles per million inhabitants in the world. And marketing budgets matter: according to the International Publishers Association, UK publishers released 173,000 titles in 2015.
The promotional budget for a book is usually related to the advance, with celebrity authors attracting more than their fair share of publishers’ marketing spends, regardless of the quality of their work.