When research came out at the end of last year claiming that a group of staticians had discovered the secret of producing bestselling novels, their results were widely derided. The problem was that they were analysing book titles and, under their methodology, The Da Vinci Code should have been a flop. Hmmm. Oh, and Harry Potter would only have been a so-so success.
Undeterred, Lulu.com, the self-publishing website that commissioned the Anglo-American research team, has now turned the model into an interactive toy, available for all wannabe authors to test their titles out on.
The "Lulu titlescorer" is fairly straightforward to use. Enter the title of your novel and then use dropdown menus to choose the variables which best describe its key attributes. Click enter and, hey presto, it delivers a score representing the percentage chance of your title becoming a number one bestseller. In the opinion of the crack team of staticians, of course. Who claimed that The Da Vinci Code, on the basis of its title, would be a flop.
To be fair, Lulu does concede that, while their study proved 40% better than random guesswork, "this is not an exact science" and that the titlescorer should "always be combined with use of your own low-tech judgement". Lulu adds that " for all the work that went it, the Lulu Titlescorer is capable of giving high scores to titles that most of us would rate as weird, if not terrible".
And this turns out to be one of the fun elements of the titlescorer: what's the weirdest title you can come up with that gets the highest score?
