Becoming Bestsellers: John Grisham and Danielle Steel (Sample from Chapter 2 of THE BESTSELLER CODE)

Becoming Bestsellers: John Grisham and Danielle Steel (Sample from Chapter 2 of THE BESTSELLER CODE)

Becoming Bestsellers: John Grisham and Danielle Steel (Sample from Chapter 2 of THE BESTSELLER CODE)

Becoming Bestsellers: John Grisham and Danielle Steel (Sample from Chapter 2 of THE BESTSELLER CODE)

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Overview

This sneak peek teaser - featuring literary giants John Grisham and Danielle Steele - from Chapter 2 of The Bestseller Code, a groundbreaking book about what a computer algorithm can teach us about blockbuster books, stories, and reading, reveals the importance of topic and theme in bestselling fiction according to percentages assigned by what the authors refer to as the “bestseller-ometer.”

Although 55,000 novels are published every year, only about 200 hit the lists, a commercial success rate of less than half a percent. When the computer was asked to “blindly” select the most likely bestsellers out of 5,000 books published over the past thirty years based only on theme, it discovered two possible candidates: The Accident by Danielle Steel and The Associate by John Grisham.

The computer recognized quantifiable patterns in their seemingly opposite, but undeniably successful writing careers with legal thrillers and romance. In Chapter 2, Archer and Jockers analyze this data and divulge the most and least likely to best sell topics and themes in fiction with a human discussion of the “why” behind these results.

The Bestseller Code is a big-idea book about the relationship between creativity and technology. At heart it is a celebration of books for readers and writers—a compelling investigation into how successful writing works.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781250137951
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/16/2016
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 351,128
File size: 997 KB

About the Author

JODIE ARCHER bought and edited books for Penguin UK before her doctoral program in English at Stanford University. After her PhD, she worked at Apple as their research lead on literature. She is now a full time writer.

MATTHEW L. JOCKERS is Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he teaches and directs the Nebraska Literary Lab. His text mining research has been profiled in the New York Times, LA Review of Books, The Sunday Times of London, and more.


Jodie Archer bought and edited books for Penguin UK before she decamped for the doctoral program in English at Stanford University. After her PhD, she worked at Apple as their research lead on literature. She is now a full time writer.
Matthew L. Jockers was the co-founder of Stanford University’s Literary Lab in Silicon Valley. His digital humanities work has been profiled in the New York Times, LA Review of Books, and more. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and co-author of The Bestseller Code.

Read an Excerpt

Becoming Bestsellers

John Grisham and Danielle Steel (Sample from Chapter 2 of the Bestseller Code)


By Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2016 Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-13795-1



CHAPTER 1

THE GODPARENTS, OR, WHY YOU MUST TAKE TIME TO DATE


When you walk into a bookstore, the first thing you'll see are several tables of recent books on display. As you now know, it is often the case that someone has paid for most, if not all, of those books to be the first ones you see. For that reason they might be a mix of all sorts of writing — literary novels, autobiographies, cookbooks, page-turners. The rest of the store, though, is arranged by category. If you're a novel reader, you know that there is typically a general fiction section that houses classic and contemporary authors alphabetically, and then the genre writers have their own shelves under headings like Romance and Science Fiction. We are so used to this organization of stores and libraries that finding books has become second nature.

The arrangement of books in Barnes & Noble or any online book retailer reflects the belief that the most important aspect of a book to a reader is what it is about. The whole industry is organized around this assumption. Every book that is traditionally published is assigned one or more BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communication) subject codes. These codes are determined by the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association that is responsible for maintaining industry standards. There are thousands of codes to choose from: in fiction alone there are 152 BISAC codes that determine how a book will be categorized, displayed, and sold, and they get as specific as "historical romance novels with vikings."

There are no similarly important systems of organization for the other aspects of novels that matter to readers — happy endings, tearjerkers, books set in Tokyo, or novels that feature firefighters or princesses or nuns. There is no system to indicate whether the style is minimalist, like Hemingway, or more complex like David Foster Wallace. There's no way of knowing based on how bookstores are arranged if the protagonist is male or female, old or young, or if a story is set in London or Hong Kong.

It should be fair to say, then, that the "what" of a book is considered paramount. If you recommend a book to a friend or if you are a writer yourself and you mention your work, the first question you'll be asked is likely going to be, "What is it about?" It is rarely — unless you are a biographer — who is it about, or where is it about, or when is it about. An interest in subject is what comes first. Which begs the question, what is the killer topic?

Well, our computer thinks there are a few, and so do blockbuster authors. In On Writing — one of the most popular recent books by a genre author about the craft of writing — Stephen King suggests that aspiring novelists take a subject they know and then blend in "personal knowledge of life, friends, relationships, sex and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why but they do." It's a curious observation about work, telling about our culture, and it turns out that our computer model more or less agrees with King on this one. King is also on fairly safe ground in recommending relationships. When it comes to sex in fiction, though, our machines tell us that King is surprisingly wrong (we will get back to this sex business soon), and neither is he best serving those readers who will take him literally when he suggests that "plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story." Don't do it.

Of course King's tone is as entertaining as ever, and somewhat glib, and very consistent with other writers on the subject of theme. Ultimately, though, he is not all that helpful. The brevity of commentary on literary topics from one of the most commercially successful writers of the past hundred years is perhaps to do with one or the other of two stated beliefs. First, he writes that "fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do — not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad." This is likely more humble than it is true, but why should an imaginative writer be expected to explicate analytically what might come naturally — in this case the right topics in the right proportions that will appeal to a mass readership all over the world? Second, King writes that to select a theme in a premeditated way with commercial success in mind is "morally wonky." This claim is also likely more humble than it is true. It is hard to believe that the multimillion-dollar authors out there don't think with some savvy about themes that readers will buy, especially when they know just how many copies will be involved in meeting their publishers' expectations. It might also be unfair for King to imply that a deeper understanding of topics that sell, and any attraction to working with them, is morally grey.

Our job here is not to say whether a writer's choices are morally right or wrong. Neither will it be to say that one novel is good and another bad, or one subject is more appropriate or worthy for the pen than any other. We will leave the ethics of creativity to the creatives and the job of judgment to the critics. Our job as literary scholars is simply to bring new explanations, or uncover hidden truths, in the hope of making something once obscure more evident. To do this for the role of theme in literature, we have to become clear about the difference between a topic and a theme, and how both work together to create the unique art that is fiction.


Why Read?

If you think back to your time in high school, where one of the first novels you were asked to read with literary critical eyes was likely To Kill a Mockingbird or Lord of the Flies, you'll remember that you were meant to notice a difference between topic and theme. Your teacher may have asked some brave person in the classroom to posit an answer to the question of what William Golding's Lord of the Flies is about. Ours did — we both have that memory — and it feels like a trick question. Well, we might have ventured, it is about a group of schoolboys who are stranded on an uninhabited tropical island; it is about boys who find ways to organize themselves, survive, and then disband into different factions, one of which is eventually murderous. The topics in the story are English boys, desert islands, hunting, hut-building, and so on. But our teachers wanted something more. What they wanted, having taught us to read more deeply, was that we would observe that the "big" themes of the novel were more latent, more about the human condition, and, possibly, more about what Golding was really trying to communicate with his readership. Along these lines, we might conclude from a study of the assembled topics that Lord of the Flies is actually about the nature versus nurture debate, or about good and evil, or friendship, or whether humanity is more inclined, when left alone, to civilization or savagery. If you understood that in English class, then you likely got an A. You might have got an A+ if you explained how Golding's particular choice of topics, mostly made up of common nouns in patterns of repetition, ultimately leads us to see these human truths that he is presenting.

Think some more about why you read the novels you read. The conventional wisdom of the book industry is that you read for theme, and that might seem pretty obvious. That is, until you really start thinking about it. If we ask you what you like to read about, you might say crime or war or sex or fishing. In nonfiction especially, people are driven to books on specific topics: food and business are two perennial favorites. But many fiction readers don't really claim to read like that. When we ask people why they chose the last novel they read, they might answer:

"I chose it because it was about the Holocaust."

"I chose it because I was told it was a feel-good read."

"I heard this was a great new literary writer."

"Don't I read every Stephen King novel?"


People might also claim they read because of prizes — "I want to read that new Pulitzer from Adam Johnson" — or because they are about to go on vacation to Paris and the novel is set there, or because they have just gone through a breakup and want a weepy love story, or, of course, "because it is a New York Times bestseller." We understand that topic is not the only driver of interest in a novel. However, topic is central to the industry and central to the possibilities of a specific story. Therefore, in this chapter we will isolate it and show what a computer is able to do to clarify how it works in bestselling fiction.

The experience of a novel is prompted only by words in different orders, or by certain building blocks of language. Many of these building blocks are nouns, and nouns in different proportions are the vehicle through which authors deliver topic and in turn deliver theme. It is the author's innate sense of proportion and delicate balance of delivery that computers and text mining can help us see, explore, and understand as a part of the overall experience of reading.

The relationship between theme and experience is easy to describe. You might take the example of those tens of thousands of women out there who are devoted to romances, who read constantly, and almost exclusively in that genre. That would be no exaggeration because these readers really do exist in great numbers. When we attended the Romantic Times conference last year — a several-day event that is almost enough to convince you that love really does rule the world — we met several huge fans of the genre, fans who swore they personally read three to five hundred romance novels per year. How do they do that? We don't know. The superhuman consumption of romance is not the point here. What is the point is that popping romance novels like candy kisses, while ostensibly a choice or mild addiction to do with the same topics over and over again, isn't necessarily about picking books by subject. Yes, we expect romance novels to feature some aspect of relationships and love — that's part of the unwritten contract that the romance author is committed to. But romance novels are about all sorts of diverse topics. BISAC has codes for romances about vampires, romances about Scottish people, about Tudors, about sports, about medieval times, and about sex, to name just a few. Perhaps there are some readers out there who are purists, readers who will only select romance novels that are also about paranormal shape-shifters (yes, paranormal shifters are a real BISAC category). But isn't it just as likely that some romance readers are in fact reading for a specific kind of experience, achieved by the dominance of an abstract theme such as love rather than a more niche topic such as "Western cowboys"? Who cares if the hero is a vampire or a veterinarian so long as he is gorgeous and good?

The bridge between topic and a reader's experience likely can't be stressed enough in a book that is trying to bring to readers some understanding of commercial success. Consider romance alongside thrillers. These are two centrally important categories for any researcher of the contemporary book world because they are the two most lucrative genres. They rule the market, albeit different areas of the market. Thrillers still seem to have more power when it comes to the New York Times list. This is especially true in hardback. On the other hand, the rapidly expanding world of self-published ebooks thrives primarily on romance readers and writers. There is lots that could be made of that, enough for a whole other book: train commuters reading spicy novels on iPhones but crime stories in paperback; men and women reading crime in equal proportion, a romance market that is predominantly female. The observation for this book, though, is that romances and thrillers both include topics that create a certain type of mental, imaginative, and emotional experience. A thriller reader, for example, likely buys books whose covers promise themes of torture and spies and alibis because these readers enjoy the emotional experiences of imagined worlds where people are threatened, chased, and murdered. Certainly, thrillers that rouse no sense of fearful suspense are rarely cited as leading examples of the genre. A thriller full of fishing and T-shirt printing is less likely from the outset to drive a book that really works. Just as the romance reader wants love, the thriller novel should show us a dominance of the crime theme. The point is clear: if we want to understand a successful topic in literature, we have to think about what it might do to us and what we want done to us. It must get more specific than the idea of something like King's call, to paraphrase, "to write what you know plus love, sex, work and relationship."

We designed a computer model around the hypothesis that a more granular understanding of topic than the typical human eye might manage would give us deeper insight into the topics seen most frequently on the bestseller list. And it did. You'd think, given all the topics in the world to choose from, that bestselling would turn out to be all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But it's not. Far, far from it.

Those miniscule percentages reflect the measured presence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, on average, in the contemporary novels of our research collection. Those tiny percentages are likely so shocking that we will explain them and then shock you again. If we take a cross section of almost five thousand novels — five hundred of which are bestsellers and the rest are not — and measure the presence of five hundred different themes across all of them, then the proportion of the whole taken up by sex is just about a thousandth of a percent. If you then measure the content of bestselling novels (and we will explain how this is done in just a moment), this fraction for sex goes down to 0.0009 percent.

It's hard to believe. Who would have thought that sex does not sell? We tell people and still they do not believe us. But the truth is this: sex, or perhaps more precisely erotica, sells, and it sells in notable quantities, but only within a niche market. Titles within that genre rarely break out enough to win the attention of the mainstream reading market that creates bestsellers. We know what you are thinking: "What about Fifty Shades of Grey?" Well, that novel (or those novels if you count the whole series) is one quite rare example of an erotic story that hit the lists. In the next chapter we will offer our explanation for that success, and it has little to do with sex.

Contrary to what you might expect given the prominence of sex in TV, movies, and the media, the U.S. reading public of the past thirty years has demonstrated a preference for other topics. The mix of topics that tend to dominate contemporary bestsellers suggests a reader who wants books to be something different from the lowest common denominator.

But how do we know this?

* * *

The linguist John Rupert Firth noted in 1957 that the way to understand a word is by looking at the company it keeps. Put simply, the meaning of a word is found in the context in which it appears. The words "sex," "drugs," and "rock and roll" that appear as the subheading for this section could have been read as synonyms for "gender," "aspirin," and "fun at the beach," but you knew they weren't those things because of the context — each of the nouns in the phrase qualifies the others. Take another example: the word "bar." This simple word will lead us to two important observations about contemporary literature, but taken alone this one word is no use at all. The word bar might refer to the exam a trainee lawyer needs to pass, or it may refer to the place he goes to celebrate when the exam has been passed. It might even become a verb: if he goes to the bar having passed his bar exam and drinks too heavily he may end up being barred and even put behind bars. The computer has to be trained to understand all this, and this training is all about understanding what Firth said seventy years ago. The machine must learn to look at every word within the context of words that occur in close-by sentences. The algorithmic method for operationalizing this kind of word contextualization on a grand scale is called topic modeling.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Becoming Bestsellers by Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers. Copyright © 2016 Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
2 The Godparents, or, Why You Must Take Time to Date,
The Lists: Theme,
Also by Matthew L. Jockers,
About the Authors,
Copyright,

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