Computers and best-selling novels

[deborahjross]

You've probably seen the news that a computer analysis has "discovered" the parameters that correlate with a books popularity. Some of this is old news, but other findings seem counter-intuitive, or at least counter to conventional wisdom writing advice.

By downloading classic books from the Project Gutenberg archive they were able to analyse texts with their algorithm and compare its predictions to historical information on the success of the work. Everything from science fiction to classic literature and poetry was included.

It was found that the predictions matched the actual popularity of the book 84 per cent of the time.

They found several trends that were often found in successful books, including heavy use of conjunctions such as “and” and “but” and large numbers of nouns and adjectives.

Less successful work tended to include more verbs and adverbs and relied on words that explicitly describe actions and emotions such as “wanted”, “took” or “promised”, while more successful books favoured verbs that describe thought processes such as “recognised” or “remembered”.

Large numbers of adjectives? Favoring words that describe thought processes over those that convey actions? What's going on here? Is this a reflection of writing styles from the past, books that have stayed in print for a long time but do not necessarily reflect what competes in today's market? Or is there something to this observation?

What do you think?