What makes a novel hit The New York Times Best Sellers list? Jodie Archer and Matthew L Jockers, authors of The Bestseller Code, built an algorithm to find out. Successful novelists, they claim, write about taxes (but not sex), deal with marriage (but not drugs) - and create characters that "demand".
"We began by thinking about all the possible things we could extract," explains Jockers, 49. "Then we filtered down those possible features to ones that actually have some predictive values." This process starts with a text file. Using thousands of computers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, around 25,000 texts were "read" using dependency-parsing techniques such as word segmentation, sentence identification and speech tagging. Next, Jockers wrote code to detect patterns and deduced which features made a bestseller. Books are then mined for those features, plotted and measured. After eight years of testing, Archer and Jockers say their model has an 80 per cent success rate. Of all the books analysed, from Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, it was David Eggers' The Circle that gained a perfect score. How? Its themes (type and ratio), three-act plotline (much like Fifty Shades of Grey) and driven female protagonist meant that the program awarded it 100 per cent. Bad news for aspiring authors: the pair isn't looking to share the 2,799 features that feed the model - and stress the process cannot be reverse-engineered to make easy cash. (Quality of writing, among numerous other factors, has a big impact.)
"There are certain things a good author does instinctively that would be very hard to do mechanically," says Jockers. "We're believers in the creative power of the author."
Read WIRED's pick of best books and summer reads
- 1. Create a female protagonistStart with a strong female - think Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium trilogy
- 2. Put her in the titleUse "girl" or "wife" - although "wife" needs to be qualified with an adjective
- 3. Keep it realRealism works better than fantasy: write about people, not goblins or unicorns
- 4. Let her inner evil shineGive her a dark side (murderous intentions, faking her own death, etc)
- 5. Set an urban sceneHave her live in a town or city - but precisely which doesn't matter
- 6. Give it a fast paceUse active words: she should "grab" and "do", not "seem" or "wait"
- 7. Weave in plot essentialsWrite about: funerals, kids, marriages, vaguely threatening new tech
- 8. Edit out banned topicsDon't write about: sex (unless you're EL James), drugs, dinner parties, card games
- 9. Add suspenseKill off a prominent supporting character (or have someone survive an attempt)
The Bestseller Code (Allen Lane) is out on September 20
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
