The Wall Street Journal adds to the fall previews with their picks of 32 books to fill the fall with reading. The list mixes fiction and nonfiction and highlights new books tracing the legacy of the Holocaust [subscription may be required].

One of the titles certain to interest librarians, that has not yet appeared on any other preview, is The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press). It asks if an algorithm can identify the elements of a blockbuster novel and provides answers based on a five-year study.

This approach is not new. FiveThirtyEight data mined blockbuster films to see what they could find as defining features and found 11 commonalities and for years researchers have been looking into what makes a hit song.

WSJ profiles the authors, who studied over 5,000 novels and claim their method can “pick out a future New York Times-list best seller with 80% accuracy.”

Their process focuses on “2,800 features including points of theme, style, vocabulary and punctuation … [and has found] subject, not genre, has a much greater impact on driving a best seller.”

Archer and Jockers have also found less is more, “Bestselling novels tend to have one or two topics which often feed off each other such as ‘children and guns’ or ‘love and vampires’ that together make up nearly a third of the novel whereas novels that fail to hit often try to cram too many topics in.” John Grisham and Danielle Steel have proven that fact, they say, staying on point within their individual niches.

The book has touched a nerve with some acquisitions editors, making them wonder if their jobs are on the line. We suspect plenty of readers and authors will also read the book with a wary, if interested, eye.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2016 at 11:00 am and is filed under Bestsellers, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.