Book

The Bestseller Code

: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel

"When a story captures the imagination of millions, that's magic. Can you qualify magic? Archer and Jockers just may have done so."―Sylvia Day, New York Times bestselling authorAsk most people about massive success in the world of fiction

(11 total)

Characters

Jodie Archer (11)Matthew L. Jockers (11)

“So we threw out ‘New York’ and ‘Stockholm,’ and we threw out numbers like ‘1984’ and ‘1,000,000’, but we noted the usefulness of the topic Human Closeness (chapter 2), of the verbs ‘need’ and ‘want’ (chapter 5), and the contractions ‘I’m’ and ‘couldn’t’ (chapter 4). These significant features were b…”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

“Text mining can be defined rather narrowly as the process by which we discover and extract textual features from a book. It is, therefore, ‘step one.”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

“Telling us everything from the overarching plotline to the use of the word ‘the,’ the verbs that go with different characters, and the frequency of adjectives such as ‘little,’ ‘important,’ and ‘black.’ After reading several hundred of these reports and watching the performance of the published manu…”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

“The model showed that symmetry in a plotline, and a clear three-act structure, tend to indicate that readers will find a novel pleasing.”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

Tagged: Three Is The Number, Creative Writing, Storylines, Novels

“She can wear a business suit or a party dress to change the impression. She can change her style, if she wants, every season. But what she can’t alter all that much is what Nature has given her to work with. Her foundation— her bone structure— isn’t going to change. And one strand of her hair, blond…”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

Tagged: Communicative Algorithms, Stylometrics

“One of the enjoyments of reading is the feeling a reader has of being very close to the narrator at this moment of ellipsis. 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, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

Tagged: Ellipsis, How To Write Fiction, How To Create A Bond Between Reader and Writer

“What was the physical body doing in response to the words on the page? When does your heartbeat increase? When do you feel anxiety in your gut? When do you feel the contraction of fear, or the stirring of arousal? When does the back of your neck prickle? When do you smile? When do you shout aloud a…”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

Tagged: What Does Your Body Do?, Good Writing vs. Bad Writing

“Roughly a third of all the paragraphs Grisham has ever written deal directly with the legal system, and similarly Steel has given almost an exact mathematical third of her pages over the years to the theme of domestic life, or even more specifically ‘time spent inside the home.’ There are several si…”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

Tagged: Against Variation, The Same Story Over and Over

“There are no similarly important systems of organization for the other aspects of novels that matter to readers— happy endings, tearjerkers, books set in Tokyo, or novels that feature firefighters or princesses or nuns. There is no system to indicate whether the style is minimalist, like Hemingway,…”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

Tagged: Quote Catalog 2.0

“William P. Young’s The Shack, first published on credit-card loans with only the marketing of a $300 website, has now sold over ten million copies.”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

Tagged: Book Marketing, Cases of Books Succeeding Without Marketing

“Remember that the bestseller rate in the book industry as it stands is less than one-half of one percent. That’s a lot of gambling before a big win.”

— Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers, amazon.com

Tagged: Book Publishing, Bestselling Books