Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels

Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1753–1764, Seattle, Washington, USA, 18-21 October 2013. c⃝2013 Association for Computational Linguistics Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels Vikas Ganjigunte Ashok Song Feng Department of Computer ScienceYejin Choi Stony Brook University Stony Brook, NY 11794-4400 vganjiguntea, songfeng, ychoi@cs.stonybrook.edu Abstract Predicting the success of literary works is a curious question among publishers and aspir- ing writers alike. We examine the quantitative connection, if any, between writing style and successful literature. Based on novels over several different genres, we probe the predic- tive power of statistical stylometry in discrim- inating successful literary works, and identify characteristic stylistic elements that are more prominent in successful writings. Our study reports for the first time that statistical stylom- etry can be surprisingly effective in discrim- inating highly successful literature from less successful counterpart, achieving accuracy up to 84%. Closer analyses lead to several new insights into characteristics of the writing style in successful literature, including findings that are contrary to the conventional wisdom with respect to good writing style and readability. 1 Introduction Predicting the success of novels is a curious ques- tion among publishers, professional book reviewers, aspiring and even expert writers alike. There are po- tentially many influencing factors, some of which concern the intrinsic content and quality of the book, such as interestingness, novelty, style of writing, and engaging storyline, but external factors such as so- cial context and even luck can play a role. As a re- sult, recognizing successful literary work is a hard task even for experts working in the publication in- dustries. Indeed, even some of the best sellers and award winners can go through several rejections be- fore they are picked up by a publisher.1 Perhaps due to its obvious complexity of the prob- lem, there has been little previous work that attempts to build statistical models that predict the success of literary works based on their intrinsic content and quality. Some previous studies do touch on the no- tion of stylistic aspects in successful literature, e.g., extensive studies in Literature discuss literary styles of significant authors (e.g., Elleg˚ard (1962), Mc- Gann (1998)), while others consider content char- acteristics such as plots, characteristics of charac- ters, action, emotion, genre, cast, of the best-selling novels and blockbuster movies (e.g., Harvey (1953), Hall (2012), Yun (2011)). All these studies however, are qualitative in na- ture, as they rely on the knowledge and insights of human experts on literature. To our knowledge, no prior work has undertaken a systematic quantitative investigation on the overarching characterization of the writing style in successful literature. In consid- eration of widely different styles of authorship (e.g., Escalante et al. (2011), Peng et al. (2003), Argamon et al. (2003)), it is not even readily clear whether there might be common stylistic elements that help discriminating highly successful ones from less suc- cessful counterpart. In this work, we present the first study that in- vestigates this unstudied …

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