Sherry Chandler

LuLu Titlescorer

Here’s a link I picked up from Meredith Sue Willis’s Books for Readers newsletter.

It’s the LuLu Titlescorer that lets you pit the title of your novel against those of best-sellers and gives you a score.

I tried my Dance the Black-Eyed Girl – admittedly not a novel but I’ve always thought it was a pretty neat title. Not so, says LuLu. Only a 44.2% chance of becoming a best-seller. The goal is a score over 83%.

Here’s (sort of) how it works:

The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years’ worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.

We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.

The team, lead by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this “Lulu Titlescorer” a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

The fruit of this work is presented here, in the form of the Lulu Titlescorer: a program that you can use to gauge the chances that your own title will deliver you a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

So now I know why all those copies are still sitting in the warehouse (metaphorically speaking).

On the other hand, Cujo only had a score of 45.6%.

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