“According to popular belief, any bestseller is an anomaly. Successful fluctuation in the market. Interesting mutant. Black Swan. But if this is true, then, once you find a writer who can produce bestsellers, should you invest all your money in him? Why risk millions betting on an unknown twenty-year-old instead of Stephen King? Using a computer system that reads books, recognizes certain characteristics in them, and sifts through thousands of such characteristics in thousands of texts, we discovered that there are surprising combinations of parameters inherent in books, which are most likely to be successful in the market. Our system treated each book as if it were a new, unknown manuscript, and then not only rendered one of two verdicts—“probably a bestseller” or “probably not”—but also calculated an index indicating what the book’s chances were gain popularity. These indexes themselves are extremely interesting, and we will not only tell you how they work, but also explain what holds the reader like a magnet, forcing you to turn the pages one after another. "Jodie Archer, Matthew L. Jockers