Formula identifies title as main factor in a book's success |
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Published
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Sat, 31 Dec 2005 02:20
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LONDON: A formula painstakingly developed by a group of statisticians to determine the secret of producing best selling novels has baffled its own creators. If it were to be applied universally, then this year's bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, would have been a flop with a 36 per cent chance of reaching the charts.
The formula worked out by Alvai Winkler, a former academic at Middlesex University, and his team for the U.K. wing of the self-publishing website Lulu.com to help its customers to better target their books to the market tastes, can be applied to works by some top selling authors but surprisingly gives only moderate marks to the Harry Potter titles and rules out almost everything by Charles Dickens except his little known The Battle of Life.
However, Winkler, quoted by the Guardian newspaper, says he does not think the method is a failure. The team had three statisticians and several programmers, who studied 54 years of fiction No 1s in the New York Times and 100 favourite novels in the BBC's Big Read poll. Its first assumption is that title holds much of the key to the success.
When they compared the recommended titles with a control group of less successful novels by the same authors, they found that the winning books had three common features -- they had metaphorical, or figurative titles instead of literal ones; the first word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting; and their grammar patterns took the form either of a possessive case with a noun, or of an adjective and noun or of the words The ... of ...
Applying this criterion, the most successful titles would be Agatha Christies' Sleeping Murder and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, with 83 per cent scores. The poorest will be Patricia Cornwell's Cause of Death, with 9 per cent.
Winkler maintained that when the team tested the formula on 700 titles published over 50 years, it correctly predicted whether a book was a bestseller or not in nearly 70 per cent of the cases. "This is 40 per cent better than random guesswork. It is far from perfect but given the nature of the data and the way tastes change 70% accuracy is surprisingly good."
Surprisingly, applying the formula, the Harry Potter books get a score only 51 per cent because their titles are literal, but with correct grammar patterns. The Da Vinci Code is considered as literal, so are Catch-22 and Dickens' Bleak House.
One intriguing aspect of the formula comes out when it considers the title, The Solomon Key, for Dan Brown's forthcoming book as indicative of a best seller. The words are considered as figurative, though strictly speaking, it is not much different from the Da Vinci Code. It is figurative, says the group, because of its "reference to the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon, medieval books about black magic".
Lulu.com's chief executive officer Bob Young says the formula cannot be used as a rule by authors. If a book is written well and there is a bad title, it will still sell more copies than a badly written book with a good title.
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