Rumple Foreskin
The AH Patriarch
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2002
- Posts
- 11,109
Lulu.com, a POD outfit, has a new feature that evaluates your title for potential success. It's validity is very questionable, The Da Vinci Code got a 33% chance of success rating, but it's fun.
This is part of the blurb at Lulu.com
The Lulu Titlescorer is a useful tool, which, in Lulu's 50-year study of some 700 novels, proved 40% better than random guess-work in guessing whether a particular title had produced a bestseller or not. "It guessed right in nearly 70% of cases," says Dr Atai Winkler. "Given the nature of the data and the way tastes change, this is very good — better than we might have expected."
Even so, this is not an exact science. Far from it. In fact, Dr. Winkler advises that the Lulu Titlescorer should, in practice, always be combined with use of your own low-tech judgement.
This is because, 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. Meanwhile, of course, it also gives low scores to the titles of novels (e.g. The Da Vinci Code) which, in fact, topped the New York Times bestseller list for long periods.
So, as well as using the Titlescorer to test the merits of your own title, you can also play around with it to see what is the worst or downright weirdest title you can come up with that still earns a high score.
What have you got to lose? Check it out.
Lulu Titlescorer
Rumple Foreskin
This is part of the blurb at Lulu.com
The Lulu Titlescorer is a useful tool, which, in Lulu's 50-year study of some 700 novels, proved 40% better than random guess-work in guessing whether a particular title had produced a bestseller or not. "It guessed right in nearly 70% of cases," says Dr Atai Winkler. "Given the nature of the data and the way tastes change, this is very good — better than we might have expected."
Even so, this is not an exact science. Far from it. In fact, Dr. Winkler advises that the Lulu Titlescorer should, in practice, always be combined with use of your own low-tech judgement.
This is because, 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. Meanwhile, of course, it also gives low scores to the titles of novels (e.g. The Da Vinci Code) which, in fact, topped the New York Times bestseller list for long periods.
So, as well as using the Titlescorer to test the merits of your own title, you can also play around with it to see what is the worst or downright weirdest title you can come up with that still earns a high score.
What have you got to lose? Check it out.
Lulu Titlescorer
Rumple Foreskin
