Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Eeney Meeney Miney Moe

Found this over at Reb's THE LULU TITLESCORER

  • The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years' worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.
  • We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.
  • The team, lead by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this "Lulu Titlescorer" a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.
  • The fruit of this work is presented here, in the form of the Lulu Titlescorer: a program that you can use to gauge the chances that your own title will deliver you a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

So of course, you guessed it, I had to run the working title of my Chapbook Manuscript - "The Fear of Open Faces". It scored 35.9%. Meaning that the title has a 35.9% chance of being a bestselling title! (Gee, I wonder if prospective publishers are gonna be impressed by this!) Here are some results for other titles:

Catch 22 - 22.9% - (It figures!)

Gone With the Wind - 20.1%

To Kill a Mocking Bird - 35.9% - (Not bad - batting over .300!)

The Bible - 10.2% - (No kidding!)

War and Peace - 8.6% - (Bummer Leo!)

The DaVinci Code - 10.2% - (I guess the NY Times got it all wrong!)

They Shoot Poets - Don't They? - 26.3% - (That they do!)

4 comments:

Collin Kelley said...

This is cool. My novel, Conquering Venus, had a score of 79.3 percent chance of being a bestseller! Better get it back out there quick!

My chapbook, Slow To Burn, had a 63 percent chance.

Now if I could only get an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey....

Nick said...

If you get a hold of Oprah put in a good word for me. ;-)

Unknown said...

hah! Me too!

I'll have to run a few titles and see.

Nick said...

Shann, go for it! ;-)