The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
we wondered whether there were winning patterns associated with the actions and agency granted to male and female characters. What we found is that there were both.
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
Amy and Nick’s use of the word need captures their marriage perfectly, and to read a spreadsheet of these extracted sentences is to quickly experience the mounting tension between them. Nick says, “I need a drink.” Amy says, “I needed to be ambushed, caught unawares, like some feral love-jackal.” Nick says, “I don’t feel the need to explain my acti
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I loved this book and did not consciously recognize this important indicator. The characters are saying straight-up what they need, no matter how childish, at almost all times. They are all impulse and action, even when having domestic conversations in the home.
In bestselling fiction, the ellipsis is common because it is one way of creating an unspoken understanding between character and reader. Readers like it.
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
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.1
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
This foreshadows the postscript, which was my absolute favorite part of the book. Getting a sense of the topic models and how they are converted into things that can be counted and weighed was super interesting.
The bold claim of this book is that the novels that hit the New York Times bestseller lists are not random, and the market is not in fact as unknowable as others suggest.
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
This sounds an awful lot like Apple calling themselves "courageous." I don't know if this as "bold" as they say, but I was surprised by the consistency with which these books could be identified.
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
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Part of Mae’s first job at the Circle is to keep improving a formulaic written document—a sort of customer response slip—in order to improve customer satisfaction. Her success at work is measured by surveys that give her a percentage score. A score of 98 is passable but not ideal. A score of 93 is terrible. The perfect 100 is the holy grail. To ach
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Machines love books too.
our notion of character, among the many to choose from, is that a character must do things, and that doing is their agency.
Jodie Archer • The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel
Characters without agency are wallpaper and detract from the story.
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
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Lack of weasel words. Driving action with little hedging.