Are you writing a book and you don't know how to make it rise among so many books and be known? So stay and discover the formula that has been discovered to make an ordinary novel a bestseller or best seller. However, I warn you in advance that this formula will not do all the work, it will not make you write an entire book, however it will help you follow the right path to make a book a success by following a few simple steps.
To get to the claim that you can get a bestseller by following a few steps, former acquisitions editor at Penguin Publishing in the UK, Jodie Archer, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor of English literature, Matthew Jockers, they have been collecting data from the last five years to try to discover what makes a book a bestseller.
After analyzing nearly 20000 arbitrarily chosen novel books from the past three decades, this pair worked to make a book hit - that is, a book that has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.
What is the formula and what is its name?
The result of this hard work is an algorithm that they have called "bestseller-ometer" due to its discoverers. With this algorithm certain aspects of the books are measured, such as theme, plot, style, characters and vocabulary and, based on these data, he is able to tell you if the book will be a best seller. Archer and Jockers, the discoverers, claim that this algorithm is able to tell whether a book will be a future bestseller with 80% accuracy.
Speaking to the New York Times about this study, the details of which have been published in his book "The Bestseller Code," Archer commented as follows:
“We have found that using a hatch line is very important… The perfect curve of fiction, the use of generally emotional and stylistic language to make these curves very symmetrical ”.
"The novels that contain high or low emotions tend to be more likely to hit the best-selling books and stay among them. "
Some keys to the formula
A couple of important points that were found are the following: readers are often more attracted to real characters than towards fictional characters, so these researchers consider it convenient that, if you want to reach a bestseller quickly, the best thing is stay away from using dwarves, unicorns, goblins and elves as main protagonists. In this research they discovered that the characters that most attract the majority of the public are prone to "grab", "think" and "ask".
More specifically, the words "need", "want" and "do" are twice as likely to appear among the best-selling books while the word "good" appears three more times. On the other hand, words like "Love" and "miss" appear more frequently in bestselling books, apparently appearing three times out of two in best-selling books.
Examples of books that follow the formula
Following an example of a very common bestseller that you will all know, for the followers of the Gray trilogy, 50 Shades of Gray, the fact that the characters are in sex scenes in each chapter does not make a book become a bestseller , readers in this case are more interested in those "fictional curves" mentioned above.
According to the results, the sales success of “The circle”, The novel that Dave Eggers published in 2013, is considered the perfect book that follows the algorithm, presenting an internet brand like hell, being compared to Google.
Despite this formula, it seems that it can quite limit those fantasy authors who want to stand up with their own works. As always, these are studies that have been done and are real. Although it is true that real characters tend to make the reader feel more identified with him and, therefore, turn them into books that more people like, I from here I encourage you to try to stand up with your own works. Although it is never bad to take these tips into account.
The information provided is very interesting. I had never read anything about that bestseller-ometer.
Excellent selection of information, very valuable, thank you for this interesting post