The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel

In bestselling fiction, the ellipsis is common because it is one way of creating an unspoken understanding between character and reader. Readers like it.

One thing that is immediately clear about all three of these classic writers is that their first sentences create voice. Note everything about them—the length, the punctuation, the relative simplicity. Someone is talking to us, and that someone sounds authentic, in command of some sort of authority. There is no wavering, or cautiousness, or lack of

The nouns in this word group suggest a family at home, engaged in everyday activities: dinner, conversation, rest, love, weekends. So far it is all quite low drama. Her third most used topic, though, deals with hospitals and medical care. This topic is made up of words like “nurses,” “doctors,” “ambulance,” “emergency,” and “accident.” It suggests

What the godparents are teaching us about bestselling is that there must be a dominant topic to give the glue to a novel, and that topics in the next highest proportions should suggest a direct conflict that might be quite threatening.

Four of the top verbs to describe the mental and emotional expression of bestselling characters are need, want, miss, and love. The possible journeys between just those four verbs have led to many classic and mega-bestsellers on the lists. On average, bestselling characters “need” and “want” twice as often as non-bestsellers, and bestselling charac

our notion of character, among the many to choose from, is that a character must do things, and that doing is their agency.

The less successful character, whether male or female, too often shouts, flings, whirls, and thrusts. Exhausting! These less successful characters tend to murmur, protest, and hesitate. Readers roll their eyes—these are the verbs of a flailing child not a starring lead. The adage he who hesitates is lost applies to fiction too, both to him and her.

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

James writes emotional turns with such a regularity of beat that the reader feels the thrum of her words in their bodies like the effect of club music. Only twenty-five other bestselling novels share James’s rhythm, and only one other novel we could find has mastered the same measured beat. That other novel just happens to be the other highest-sell

We begin with a collection of bestselling and non-bestselling books. With these two training sets of books—bestsellers and non-bestsellers, we were able to study our model’s performance. We did that by first training a model using a randomly selected subset of the total books. The computer used this sample to learn which features differentiated the