Jodie Archer

I got this book for free from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.

It is probably hard to write a book about bestsellers, as obviously everyone reading it would think "Well, you know what sells. You have analyzed all the patterns, you know all the tricks; now do you follow your own advice? Does it help your own book at all?" And I have to say that the authors did a very good job here. With all the obvious caveats (they analyzed works of contemporary fiction, while their book is a non-fiction work with an academic tint) it is quite clear that they have as good grasp of what works, and how it works. They could not give their book a strong female lead, and they could not quite pick a setting for it (again, it being a non-fiction book), but they built chapters so cleverly, and found a language so clear and transparent that I read it in one day. It's the first book I ever read on a digital humanities topic, and still I read it in one gulp. I only wish other academics would follow this example, and took their popular writing as seriously.

In other words, the topic aside, just from the stylistic point of view, it is one of the best-written academic-ish books I've ever read.

But then also the topic is also extremely interesting. It is not the first book any aspiring writer should read, but it can be very useful and thought provoking. At one hand, it endorses some well-known pieces of advice (such as "show don't tell" and "don't ever replace the word 'said' in dialog with anything else), as it proves these maxims with hard data from sales analysis. Good style sells better. At another hand, it offers writers some good topics for contemplate, in terms of some potential trade-offs between sales (catering to a wider audience) and literary aspirations (writing for the audience of your choice). I would guess that about two thirds of advice in this book would just objectively make your writing better. The last one third however could require some sacrifices of accessibility over quality. And that's an interesting topic to think about.

Arguably the best part of the book, from the practical point of view, is the analysis of plot curves it offers. People analyzed plot curves for years (Kurt Vonnegut has this amazing lecture about this very topic, called "The Shapes of Stories"). Yet here the data comes not from somebody's intuitions (even if brilliant), but from a large scale data mining project. It is very illuminating, helpful, and useful.

All in all, the book is a must read for anyone interested in writing, and for anyone who (like me) never read much about digital humanities before.… (meer)