The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel

by Jodie Archer

We care about bringing people who don’t have the right contacts in New York to a readership. Given that the model does not care if you have published before, if you have an MFA, if you are male or female, Hispanic or Asian, if you are beautiful and twenty-five or less so and seventy, then our work is also about widening access, potentially, to the career of writing.

This is their most compelling point so far. Moneyball for books.

could correctly guess, 82 percent of the time, whether an author was male or female just by having it examine uses of simple words like “the” and “of.”

This is dangerous. I could see someone using this to defend their choice to never read a female novelist.

Second is an old Philip K. Dick novel, sort of a Second World War novel, only in this one we see what may have happened if the Allies had lost.

Why not mention that this is because of a TV show?

The topical data reveal that each of the godparents has one topic that is overwhelmingly important to their brand, and there is much computational evidence to support that this kind of focus is a wise approach.

novel is not a soapbox,

Um…strongly disagree.

How could we have predicted, just from the first sentence, that this was not a million-copy novel?

Take your shade for The Information elsewhere, thanks.

The model’s favorite manuscript of the past thirty years was The Circle by Dave Eggers.

Um

He is commonly thought of as a handsome man.

I mean he's no Franzen, but ok.