Soon, they will write all the books, too

From the BBC:

“I loved New York with the kind of mad passion I reserved for only one other thing in my life.”  For millions of readers the world over, that opening sentence has proven irresistible. Maybe you’re among them, in which case you might even recall where it comes from: Reflected in You, part of Sylvia Day’s steamy Crossfire series, sales of which have topped 13 million since it was released in 2012. 

As countless writing tutorials preach, an arresting opening line is crucial to ensnaring an audience, and the authors of a new book, seductively titled The Bestseller Code, concur. They are Jodie Archer and Matthew L Jockers, and along with Day’s, they single out opening sentences by the likes of Toni Morrison, Jeffrey Eugenides and Virginia Woolf. All, they say, encapsulate the conflict of a 300-page story in some 20 words or less. 

The authors of The Bestseller Code used a computer to mine the texts of 20,000 novels published over the past 30 years. 

But while Archer and Jockers both boast appropriately bookish credentials – she is a former Penguin editor, he is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska – their advice has a highly unconventional derivation. It’s based on the gleanings of an algorithm. 

Archer also happens to have worked at Apple and Jockers, a self-styled “literary quant”, and was the co-founder of Stanford University’s Literary Lab in Silicon Valley. By harnessing machine learning they’ve been able to mine the texts of 20,000 novels published over the past 30 years, analysing theme, plot, and character, along with other variables such as style and setting. 

Pulling together all these data points, they say their algorithm can predict whether a manuscript will become a New York Times bestseller. They may have given it a comical name, but their “bestseller-o-meter” is astoundingly accurate. It gave Chad Harbach’s literary debut, The Art of Fielding, a 93.3% chance of becoming a bestseller. Mitch Albom’s spiritual tale, The First Phone Call from Heaven, was 99.2% – the same as Michael Connolly’s The Lincoln Lawyer. 

“These figures – their existence, their decimal places, their accuracy – have made some people excited, others angry, and more than a few suspicious”, Archer and Jockers admit...