The Da Vinci Code should have been a flop

A group of statisticians have been laboring for months to figure out what makes a top selling novel and according to their formula, surprisingly, The Da Vinci Code should have been a flop. According to this article in the Guardian Unlimited the formula showed all Charles Dickens novels mediocre accept for a lesser known Christmas story The Battle of Life.

The formula says it mostly depends on the title how the book fares. The statisticians, along with a few programmers, studied 54 years of the top sellers in the New York Times and the BBC’s Big Read poll. The researchers say:

Comparing these with a control group of less successful novels by the same authors, they found that the winning books had three common features; they had 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 …

The research was conducted to help customers of the UK wing of the self-publishing website, Lulu.com.