PW currently has a story on a forthcoming St. Martin’s book called “The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of The Blockbuster Novel” in which authors Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers “claim they created an algorithm that identifies the literary elements that guarantee a book a spot on the bestseller lists.” As readers of The Shatzkin Files know, I consider my Logical Marketing partner Pete McCarthy the industry expert on all things books-and-digital. Since we are knee deep in a new as-yet-not-announced project to build a SaaS capability for digital marketing, I have a few others with expertise to tap as well.
My team’s view is unanimous. The idea that the odds a book will make the bestseller list can be calculated from the content of the book alone, without regard to consumer analysis, branding, or the marketing effort to promote the book, is ridiculous.
This idea has arisen before. BookLamp was bought by Apple and they had a similar “full text analysis” proposition. Before they pivoted to being primarily a pathway for publishers to China, a company called Trajectory offered to generate the book marketing metadata from a full text search. Neither BookLamp nor Trajectory was so bold as to claim they could identify bestsellers from textual analysis. But even their more modest claims, to drive discovery from what they learned that way, failed to pass muster with us.
Trajectory did their demo on a Mayo Clinic Cookbook. To see how our methodology worked compared to theirs, we did what we do (audience analysis for a book’s potential customers) for the same title. We found everything useful that they did, plus a lot more.
As Pete has explained to us, repeatedly, the customers you’re looking for have not read the book. You capture them by appealing to their interests and their searches in ways that they find appealing and in language they understand. He reminds us from time to time that the words “civil rights” “don’t appear in To Kill a Mockingbird”.
According to its Amazon page, “the Bestseller Code boldly claims that the New York Times bestsellers in fiction are predictable and that it’s possible to know with 97% certainty if a manuscript is likely to hit number one on the list as opposed to numbers two through fifteen.”
Our verdict on this: absolutely impossible.
And our hunch is that their publisher feels the same way. After all, if you had access to a capability like this, and you believed it, wouldn’t you do a few bestsellers on your own before you revealed any of it to the world?
And as a reality check and a basis for comparison, take this on board. Google now predicts the opening weekend’s box office for new movies. They look at all sorts of data: number of screens, box office results from previous movies by the headline actors, search volume for the movie itself, YouTube views of the trailer, genre, seasonality, franchise status, star power, competition, critic and audience ratings of any preview. They don’t try to read the script. They could semantically analyze the dialogue in the movie. (And Google has the most sophisticated capabilities in the world to analyze moving images or text!) But they don’t, because it wouldn’t be predictive.
Or, in book terms, it is much more predictive of bestsellers to look at the number of copies shipped and how many stores the book goes into. The Nora Roberts or James Patterson title that ships tens of thousands of copies with some going to every Barnes & Noble store will become a bestseller, regardless of the plot structure. And the greatest book in the world that ships 5,000 copies and only goes to a handful of B&N’s almost certainly won’t.
It isn’t just “books in stores”. Amazon orders printed books too. And there are ebook pre-orders (although damn few for any unknown author). From a publisher’s perspective, the book for which they can get an advance commitment from the supply chain (which today means “get it out in quantity”) will always have a better chance than the greatest book in the world for which they can’t.
The message for publishers is that audience research, with some of it specific to each title you publish, is the key to success in the digital age.