Last week, to great fanfare, a new book analyzing bestselling books hit the market. In my opinion, The Bestseller Code: The Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel by Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers is intriguing and provocative, but ultimately an exercise in futility.

Every author wants a short cut to achieve bestseller success. What if there is an algorithm that, if followed, will produce a bestseller? Sign me up!

Before we offhandedly dismiss the findings of the book, let’s look at what they uncovered. Originally, author Jodie Archer studied 20,000 contemporary novels. Her findings formed the basis for a PhD dissertation titled Reading the Bestseller: An Analysis of 20,000 Novels published by Stanford University in 2014. Her system analyzed common themes, plot, character, setting, and also the frequencies of punctuation as a reflection of a bestseller’s style.

For the newly released book The Bestseller Code, Archer teamed up with Matthew Jockers, whose text-mining research has been profiled in the media and who has written a book called Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature. The two refined and focused the system to study about 5,000 books, and included a variety of both non-bestselling and modestly successful novels, plus a little more than five hundred New York Times bestsellers. They assert in the beginning pages that “the bold claim of this book is that the novels that hit the New York Times bestseller lists are not random, and the market is not in fact as unknowable as others suggest.”

They claim that their algorithm can predict with an 80-90% accuracy which novels will hit the bestseller list. Their computer model predicted success for Dan Brown’s Inferno (95.7 percent) and Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer (99.2 percent). Realize that the computer doing the analysis had no previous idea of either of those author’s ongoing success. It was merely “reading” and “comparing” the text of the books to other novels in the sample.

They claim “the kind of reading that computers can do gets us closer to the details of a novel than even some of the most practiced literary critics.”

One Secret Revealed

They, of course, won’t tell us what the algorithm is, but they do take a hard look at common traits in theme, plot, style, and character. In fact, one thing jumped out at me. In analyzing John Grisham and Danielle Steel they claim successful authors spend 30 percent or more on just one or two themes or topics in the novel while others spread widely. Grisham deals with legal themes. Steel with domestic life themes.

That is what we in the industry call branding. If you are a thriller writer you shouldn’t spend 30% of the book discussing the scientific properties of rust and how it has effected the city’s infrastructure. No, instead the story should be fast paced with suspense and danger.

Titles are a Key

Titles pointing “to things, to objects, typically common nouns,” appear often on best-seller lists. Complex titles don’t work.  The authors point to The Goldfinch and The Firm as good “one word” titles. Note the title change from Archer’s original dissertation to the title of this popular version. By using an emotionally descriptive word like “bestseller” and an evocative word like “code” the project went from an academic exercise to a popular work.

Note also the key words in the subtitle. “Anatomy” and “Blockbuster” are both excellent descriptors of the contents of this book.

Watch Your Punctuation

Apparently there are very few exclamation points in bestselling books! Phooey! But there are lots of contractions, especially in dialogue. I ‘spose that’ll make the characters sound like y’all.

Another Secret

Bestselling books have more dogs than cats.

Yes. They needed a computer to tell us that dogs are more popular than cats. [True confession, we have a cat in our house. No dogs. So I guess I’ll never be able to write a bestselling novel.]

A Fascinating Read

All kidding aside, there are some truly remarkable findings in their analysis. They discovered a wonderful list of themes that are found in the most popular books: marriage, death, doctors, work, schools, and presidents to name a few. But they also reveal the ones that don’t work as well: desperate grief, seduction, cigarettes and alcohol, and philosophical discussions. I’ll let you read the book and discover the rest of the results for yourself.

There is a hint that the authors have more to offer to the writing community on their web site. Sign up for their mailing list here (http://www.archerjockers.com/home/) and see for yourself what they will eventually share.

It Has Been Tried Before

In 2012 James W. Hall wrote The Hit List: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers. It is an interesting read. Hall identifies 12 features that are shared by every blockbuster book. Everything from “an offer you can’t refuse” to “God” to “Juicy Parts” to the “American Dream/Nightmare.”

In 2014 Yejin Choi, Vikas Ashok, and Song Feng did a computer-based analysis and posted a PDF called “Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels” (PDF).

Earlier this year there was a lot of buzz about JellyBooks a new venture called “Moneyball for Publishers” by the New York Times. To quote an article from NPR “Jellybooks recruits readers by offering free e-books in exchange for allowing the company to collect reading data. It tracks whether or not the reader finishes the book — most don’t get half way through. Jellybooks also measures how long it takes to read a book and asks those who do finish it if they would recommend it.”

Publishers continue to pursue and invest in the science behind the bestseller in various ways. Last October Simon & Schuster announced that it had hired its first data scientist, whose job it is to collect all their sales information, identify trends, and attempt to draw useful conclusions. In May, Macmillan Publishers acquired Pronoun, formerly known as Vook, a digital book self-publishing platform, partly to own and have access to its data and analytics software.

Where From Here?

We love to analyze our industry. It causes us to think deeply about the various issues we face as agents, writers, and publishers. Any tidbit we can glean might help us sell the next book better than the last. But as with all analysis it must be read with discernment. Read past the hype and glitz and find that one thing that improves your understanding today.

At least they haven’t suggested that a computer replace you as the writer…yet.