Writing about Philip Roth in 1984, Martin Amis made this aside: “Though they all want it…writers tend to be distrustful of the ridiculous accident of bestsellerdom.” True, we do all want this ridiculous accident, for all the reasons anyone wants what money can bring. And yes, we should be distrustful of it, since writers can’t pretend they don’t know what bestsellerdom usually means—populist and puerile fare. Still, although we all want it, we all aren’t going to get it. We aren’t even going to get close.

Who does get close to the ridiculous accident? And just how accidental is the ridiculousness? Less accidental than you would think, argue Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers in their new book The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel. Here’s their thesis, worth quoting at length:

The bold claim of this book is that New York Times bestsellers are not random but predictable. They are predictable not due to the commonly repeated “truth” that it is all about an established name, marketing dollars, or expensive publicity campaigns…Forget worries about covers. Forget obsessional Facebook posts and endless tweeting…What really matters in predicting whether a novel will make it or not is nothing more or less than the author’s manuscript…and a computer model than can read, recognize, and sift through thousands of features in thousands of books in order to predict which books are most likely to succeed in the market.

The authors devised a computer program, an algorithm “fine-tuned on over 20,000 contemporary novels,” and set it loose inspecting the elements that go into building a novel: theme, plot, character, setting, etc. Bestsellers, they tell us, “have a distinct set of subtle signals, a latent bestseller code.” Their program analyzed 2,800 features of bestselling novels and boasted an 80 percent accuracy rate in determining which novels would break big. The bestseller code has other talents, too. With the counting of only articles or prepositions, the program can guess with 82 percent accuracy whether a writer is a woman or a man. In this effusive jamboree of facts you’ll learn that “heroines are so often twenty-eight years old,” that love scenes appear “exactly at page 200 if it’s a 400-page novel,” and that bestsellers have “three-part plot shapes.” You’ll learn that “the stylistics” of Jackie Collins and Jane Austen “are much the same”—that hurts. You’ll learn that in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown averages seven instances of the word ‘the’ for every hundred words,” and that “the word ‘thing’ occurs six times more often in bestsellers than in non-bestsellers.”

In other words, you’ll learn about formula. But surely you already know that the preponderance of bestsellers is yawningly formulaic—that’s partly how they became bestsellers. If you’ve ever tried to read a novel by Nicholas Sparks or Mary Higgins Clark, you know there’s nothing there beneath the page—no connotative complexity, no aesthetical commitment, no turbulence of intellect, and no reaching for wisdom. “The kind of book that sells by the million,” said Anthony Burgess, “rarely imparts to its readers the sense of epiphany.”

THE BESTSELLER CODE: ANATOMY OF THE BLOCKBUSTER NOVEL, by Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers St. Martin’s Press, pp. 256, $25.99

The authors of The Bestseller Code refer to themselves as “literary scholars,” and while both have their PhDs in English, their passion is clearly for word-crunching technology—Jockers is the director of the Nebraska Literary Lab and Archer is a former researcher at Apple. Awed by the market, the two are downright breathless over their “bestseller-ometer” and its talent for “machine-learning” and “text-mining.” They ably show that verisimilitude rules the bestseller list and always has: Readers savor the sentimental preciousness of seeing familiar human predicaments dramatized. Bestsellers usually have plenty of feeling to impart, which fits in well with our current autocracy of emotion. (A Nicholas Sparks novel is so chronically saccharine you can feel yourself getting diabetes as you read.)