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Super-bestsellers, such as EL James’s, have ‘symmetrical pacing’.
Super-bestsellers, such as EL James’s, have ‘symmetrical pacing’. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
Super-bestsellers, such as EL James’s, have ‘symmetrical pacing’. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

The secret DNA behind bestsellers

This article is more than 7 years old

Is it possible to predict whether a book will sell well? Former publisher Jodie Archer and Matthew L Jockers, of Stanford University’s Literary Lab, built an algorithm to find out

Your program can identify, from scanning 20,000 books, ones which made the New York Times bestseller lists with 80% accuracy, and one of your key discoveries was that the topics covered in a novel – marriage, work, technology – are more important than its genre in terms of predicting its success. Why?

JA: If you look at a bestseller list, you might think it was very diverse in genre – a Stephen King alongside a Jojo Moyes. But certain topics were strong indicators of a bestseller, regardless of genre. “Human closeness” came out on top. This doesn’t mean romance – it could be talking with someone you are intimate with or shopping with a parent. It may be to do with pacing – when Dan Brown knows he has to slow his pace down a little bit and let the characters reflect before a big chase scene in the Vatican, his characters talk it out. John Grisham does it perfectly because in all the legal machinations and suspense and back stabbing, there are always scenes where a lawyer gets a bottle of red wine and a Chinese takeaway and sits on the couch with his female counterpart and they chew the cud for a bit. It is almost the opposite of a formulaic how-to; make a boy meet a girl, make them fall out.

MJ: You could have a book all about human closeness – but that is too much. What we found in bestsellers was that there was a sweet spot, of a couple of topics, each taking up 30% of the book.

JA: When I worked at Penguin UK, I found that manuscripts by new authors were too ambitious, like a painter who can’t settle on one colour and uses the whole paintbox. We found that having a couple of key topics, and then sprinkling a few smaller ones throughout the rest of the book was perfect. If you look at Danielle Steel or John Grisham, they use the same three topics as their signature then pepper it with other details. Jodi Picoult is an example of an author who has found her sweet spot. She writes “commercial fiction”, and she has her own niche, her own brand. You know what you’ll get with Picoult.

‘She has her own niche, her own brand. You know what you’ll get with Jodi Picoult.’ Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

A lot of the authors you identified are series writers, like Grisham: Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson, Lee Child. Should debut writers plan a series?

MJ: In our tests we ensured that when we were testing a particular book, there were no others by the same author available to the machine so it wouldn’t bias against someone who had lots, such as Patterson. But so many serialised books came through in our top 100 list, which signals that is what people like reading.

JA: Series are a very good way to establish your name.

You look at ‘The Girl’ trend in publishing – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl. Should writers avoid buying into that?

JA: No, the girl thing still has legs. When I was working in publishing and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hit, there were all these acquisitions meetings that focused on finding the secret that we could repeat. Publishers bought thrillers by Scandinavian men. Hundreds came on the market and only one of them got very big: Jo Nesbø. Scandinavian male crime writers were not the right focus – look at Larsson’s plot lines and themes instead.

MJ: I would warn against trying to be a copycat writer. Yes, there is a current fascination with feminine noir but if you don’t have a feminine noir book in you, I don’t think you’re going to manufacture one by piecing together a recipe from topic choices.

Is plot more important than style?

MJ: No. If your style is no good, no one will read it.

JA: Look at Fifty Shades of Grey – some readers complain about the style, but others only notice how effective it is as a page-turner. I don’t think it is EL James’s will to be a stylist, but she’s not making any mistakes either. We found that long sentences are rare in bestsellers – James Joyce might get away with it, but a newbie probably won’t. Same with superfluous adjectives. Exclamation marks don’t go down well. You don’t need all the punctuation on your keyboard. Let the language do the work.

‘long sentences are rare in bestsellers – James Joyce might get away with it, but a newbie probably won’t.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

You developed a graph of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey that shows that they are almost exactly matched in terms of fast and slow moments in their pacing.

MJ: Yes we noticed super-bestsellers have symmetrical pacing, and other books that are bestsellers didn’t always have this. It seems there is a marked correlation between this plotting and what we would call a page-turner.

JA: If you think of a plot like a musical beat, James and Brown were the two that had a very fast, consistently even beat, almost like techno – some readers really love this, but some find the fast pace off-putting.

Your program found that bestsellers usually had sex scenes around halfway through. Why?

JA: If you read a romance novel, you get the first kiss or sex scene at a third or halfway in, which drives the plot curve that follows: will they get together? And successful erotic writers know that. But when you know the rules, break them. You could have a sex scene on page one, like a modern crime writer will have a dead body in the first line.

You identified a perfect bestseller, which was The Circle by Dave Eggers, because it was brief, had no signs of superfluous punctuation and three popular topics – technology, jobs and “human closeness”. But other books sold a lot more...

MJ: We’re not claiming it should have been the biggest book ever, but our program found it was the perfect combination. It is the Goldilocks zone – it is just right. It is not a page-turner like The Da Vinci Code, but it is not deeply meditative like Brave New World. It has a plot, but it also has big ideas.

The Bestseller Code is published by Penguin. To order a copy for £16 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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