The science behind what makes a bestselling book

This post has been cross-posted from the SpringerOpen blog. A team of researchers from Northeastern University, Boston, used a big data approach to investigate what makes a book successful. By evaluating data from the New York Times Bestseller Lists from 2008 to 2016, they developed a formula to predict if a book would be a bestseller. Creating the formula for success The authors evaluated sales numbers and patterns from 2,468 fiction titles and 2,025 non-fiction titles from the New York Times Bestseller Lists 2008-2016 to create their formula for predicting how well a book would sell and whether it would be a bestseller. Three key parameters were found to be important to the formula: the audience, sales numbers from the author to date and time after publication. Professor Albert-László Barabási, lead author of the study, explained: “The most surprising result was that we found a universal pattern to book sales: all hardcover bestsellers, regardless of genre, follow a sales trajectory governed by the same factors. This allowed us to create a statistical model to predict sales of a book based on its early sales numbers.” What makes the list and stays on the list? Although fiction books sold more copies than non-fiction books, non-fiction titles were more likely to retain their bestseller status once achieved. The authors found that general fiction and biographies were more likely to make the bestseller list more often than other genres and that those with a higher initi...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Publishing Books SpringerOpen Source Type: blogs