It is all in the title. (Good thing to know.)

A team of statisticians has come up with a secret for producing bestselling novels, reports The Guardian. In a study of a half-century’s worth of titles, they found 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 a noun or of the words “The . . . of . . .” Dr. Alvai Winkler said: “When we tested our model on 700 titles published over 50 years, it correctly predicted whether a book was a bestseller or not for nearly 70 per cent of cases.”

from The Globe and Mail
via Mirabilis