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Zusammenfassung von The Bestseller Code

Name: The Bestseller Code
Rating: 4.5 (40 reviews)
Author: Jodie Archer & Matthew L. Jockers

Jodie Archer & Matthew L. Jockers

Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel

4.5 (40 Bewertungen)

19 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

The Bestseller Code by Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers is a data-driven exploration of what makes a bestseller. It uncovers patterns and trends in successful books using predictive analytics, offering insights into the publishing industry.

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Erfolg Kompetenzen Mathematik

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The Bestseller Code
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What’s in it for me? Learn what really makes a bestseller.

Take a moment and think about the last really great book you read. Whether it was a riveting whodunit, a tragic love story or a 600-page fantasy saga, you probably didn’t stop to consider exactly why you liked it. You just enjoyed the ride.

For publishers, though, knowing which ingredients make a novel compelling is essential. The only way to keep a footing in the major league of publishing is to make sure your releases have that magic sauce that will send them spiraling up the best-seller lists.

And that’s no cakewalk. Historically, predicting a book’s success is no easier than predicting next year’s weather. Luckily, at least for publishers, we’re entering a new phase in which computers can help us determine which books will sell and which will not. These blinks take you behind the scenes of the best-seller code.

You’ll also learn

why sex doesn’t sell when it comes to novels;
why female authors trump their male counterparts when it comes to style; and
which novel achieved a perfect score according to the “bestseller-ometer.”

Publishers find it difficult to predict a bestseller, as literary quality doesn’t seem to be the defining factor.

These days, the internet is chock-full of lists that rank the best and worst of just about anything you can imagine. Most of these lists tend to be rather arbitrary, but there are still a few reliable popularity rankings that continue to be checked on a regular basis.

Among these more reliable lists are those that record the best-selling books in the United States. And, for as long as such lists have been around, they’ve made clear that what’s popular isn’t the same as what’s critically acclaimed.

The first list of best-selling books was published in 1891 by The Bookman, a London literary magazine.

It didn’t take long for critics to point out that popularity had nothing to do with quality. In fact, good sales and bad writing seemed to go hand in hand.

This hasn’t changed at all. Critics continue to scratch their heads over the success of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Stieg Larsson’s “girl trilogy,” which began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Remarkably, Larsson wasn’t even around to help publicize his books, as he’d passed away before their publication. But that hindered their ascent to best-sellerdom as little as the critical assaults which pointed out their jumbled plots, limp characters and boring endings.

So it’s easy to predict that the best-seller list will be filled with poorly-written books. But since so many books are published each year, it becomes difficult to predict which ones will end up on that list.

According to Bowker, the US company that issues the ISBN identification numbers for books, around 50 thousand books of fiction are published every year – and this doesn’t include e-books, which don’t receive an ISBN.

From that amount, around 200 novels will make the New York Times (NYT) best-seller list each year, which is less than half of one percent of all the published books. And the percentage that manages to stay on the list for more than a week is even more miniscule.

This tiny percentage makes the job of predicting bestsellers a bit like guessing which numbers will win the lottery.

But that doesn’t mean these books don’t share similarities, which is what we’ll take a look at in the blinks ahead.

An algorithm to determine a novel’s success could help the future of the publishing industry.

For a while, the best guarantee of success was having your book added to Oprah Winfrey’s influential book-club reading list.

But, in 2010, the authors began to uncover a fascinating scientific method for predicting bestsellers.

Topics are of utmost importance for a novel’s success.

So what is this algorithm taking into consideration? Well, at the top of the list is the book’s topic, which shouldn’t be confused with the genre it fits into.

While bookstores separate everything into categories – such as science fiction, mystery and young adult – it’s a novel’s topic, not its genre, that determines its success.

The use of emotion in a plot is key to a book’s success.

If you were to ask a group of people why they choose the books they do, most of them would make no mention of the quality of the prose; rather, what people seem to desire is an exciting emotional roller coaster.

This is why, despite the horrible reviews, Fifty Shades of Grey was a huge success – it delivered the big emotions that readers were looking for.

Most best-selling authors avoid fancy phrases and use a simple style.

Having a strong writing style is important for any writer, since this is the mechanism that is used to deliver the story’s plot, themes and characters. When this delivery is executed well, the author could very well have a bestseller on her hands.

Good authors often have such a strong style that their words are not unlike a linguistic fingerprint that can be analyzed and recognized.

Female authors, or authors the algorithm thinks are female, score higher when it comes to style.

When we take an even closer look at the kinds of style that determine a popular book, another interesting trend emerges: when programmed only to consider a book’s style, the algorithm ranked female authors far above their male peers.

This is particularly interesting in light of that fact that no such gender advantage emerged when other factors like plot and theme were isolated.

A title that references a strongly written character can make all the difference.

Here’s a trend that you might have picked up on: What do these best-selling titles all have in common? Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It would seem that the inclusion of the word “girl” in your book’s title increases its chances of success. But why?

Well, it actually has less to do with the word “girl,” and more to do with referring to the book’s main character, which one-fifth of all best-selling titles do.

The bestseller-ometer can recommend novels and gives new authors a chance to succeed.

Have you ever had a tough time convincing a friend to read a book you absolutely love?

Well, this is just one of the many ways the algorithm can make our lives easier.

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Worum geht es in The Bestseller Code?

The Bestseller Code (2016) reveals the remarkable story behind a newly developed computer algorithm with the power to unlock the secrets behind the most popular best-selling books. By analyzing over a thousand bestsellers, patterns have emerged that show us which themes, plots, styles and characters contribute to earning a book a spot at the top of the charts.

Wer The Bestseller Code lesen sollte

Readers wondering what makes a book popular
Writers and authors looking for widespread success
Computer geeks who love a good algorithm

Über den Autor

Jodie Archer is an author and former editor at Penguin Publishing in the United Kingdom. She has a PhD from Stanford University and has acted as a consultant for various writers and literary businesses.

Matthew L. Jockers is an English professor at the University of Nebraska as well as the director of the school’s Nebraska Literary Lab. His previous academic writing explores the field of text mining and the digital analysis of writing.

Kategorien mit The Bestseller Code

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