From the Guardian UK
A group of statisticians has laboured for months to crack the secret of producing best selling novels - only to find that under their formula The Da Vinci Code should have been a flop.
This year’s runaway bestseller should have had only a 36% chance of reaching the charts, according to Atai Winkler and his team. Their model fits work by some topselling authors but gives only middling marks to the Harry Potter titles and rules out almost everything by Charles Dickens except for his lesser-known Christmas story The Battle of Life.It was developed to help customers of the UK wing of the self-publishing website Lulu.com hone their books for the market. It assumes that much of success lies in the title. The team of three statisticians, helped by programmers, studied 54 years of fiction number ones in the New York Times and the 100 favourite novels in the BBC’s Big Read poll.
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