DEFINITION OF ALGORITHM: A logical step-by-step computer program —a flow chart— a system—a set of rules…

What if, in the near future, a computer program can predict your book’s success or failure?

An article written by Joel Shurkin awakened me to such a possibility.  Scientists at Stony Brook University, in New York, think a computer program might predict successful books and recently, using the computer Algorithm, found that the program had about 84 per cent accuracy when applied to published books.

In a paper published by the Association of Computational Linguistics, “the writing style of books was correlated with the success of the book”. They used a process called statistical stylometry, a statistical analysis of the literary styles of several genres of books and identified characteristic stylistic elements common in successful books.

Some of the early finds by the scientists amaze me because they found journalists tend to use more nouns, pronouns and prepositions than other writers and in doing so, are more successful. ——– Both Hemingway and Charles Dickens began their careers as Journalists. To further excite me, a computer scientist at Israel’s University developed a program that tells whether the author is male or female 80 percent of the time.

Is it possible, Editors will now use an algorithm program to determine a books success or failure before they print?  Wow!

There are  more  findings and observations in Mr. Shurkin’s article—too much to elaborate here, so give it a read. I think you will find it as interesting as I did.

For reading, go to “American Institute of Physics”

Happy Algorithms,

Paula