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Formula for book success may be flawed


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A team of statisticians led by Dr Alvai Winkler, a former academic at Middlesex University, has developed a formula for Lulu.com, a self publishing website, to help the site's customers refine their work.

However the formula produced by Dr Winkler only gives average marks to the Harry Potter series of books by JK Rowling and reveals that the Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code only had a 36% chance of reaching the book charts.

According to The Guardian, Dr Winkler's team, 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 to develop their formula.

Dr Winkler's research revealed that successful books all contained metaphorical, or figurative titles instead of literal ones; the first word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting; and their grammar patterns took the form either of a possessive case with a noun, or of an adjective and noun or of the words The ... of ..., reported The Guardian.

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