With this week’s release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” there is little question what a blockbuster film looks like. Come Monday, after the popcorn has been vacuumed up from theater floors, total opening weekend ticket sales will be announced and, in all likelihood, records will be smashed. If you add up the money made from ticket sales from Friday through Sunday night, you get an undisputed number that shows how strong an opening weekend was. These days, any opening weekend that makes above $100 million is generally considered a huge hit – once the cost of making and marketing the film is factored in. Only two films have broken the $200 million mark: “Jurassic World” and “Marvel’s The Avengers”, according to Box Office Mojo.

Adele’s latest smash hit record “25,” released on Nov. 20, is measured similarly (though with units rather than dollars). To date, Adele has sold more than 5 million copies of “25,” in record time. Full-length records certified to have sold more than 1 million units receive the Recording Industry Association of America’s Platinum Award—an increasingly rare mark of a hit in the age of declining record sales.

But when it comes to other cultural works, defining a hit is not as easy. We set out to explore how success is measured—what factors matter in assessing a hit in various creative categories ranging from books to tweets:

Audience - How many people viewed the work?

Sales - How much money was made?

Longevity - How long has the work been available?

Critical acclaim - What praise did the work receive?

When it comes to books, the numbers get much smaller.