Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Rate your book's title...

This is topic Rate your book's title... in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by JamieFord (Member # 3112) on :

Have you seen this yet? Rather silly, but fun, especially if you type in a bestselling title like "The Davinci Code" which rates poorly. So much for science.

Enjoy.

http://www.lulu.com/titlescorer/

Posted by LegendSeeker (Member # 3137) on :

The title Ender's Game has a 76.9% chance of being a bestselling title!

The title Xenocide has a 79.6% chance of being a bestselling title!

Ha!!

[This message has been edited by LegendSeeker (edited January 12, 2006).]

Posted by rcorporon (Member # 2879) on :

My novel WIP, "Rebellion's Seeds" has a 59.9% chance. Yahoo.

Posted by wbriggs (Member # 2267) on :

Wow! My WIP went from 48% to 69% when I noted that it was figurative.

Which beats out the 10.2% chance that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had.

Posted by wetwilly (Member # 1818) on :

The Bible only has a 35.9% chance, as does the Qur'an. Try again, God.

The Poisonwood Bible has a 63.7% chance. Good job, Barbara Kingsolver.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

Well, to be fair, there are a couple of firm constraints on this tool.

First, the data-set it looked at was best-selling works of the last fifty years (more or less) and a control group of works written by the same authors. So it only predicts how attractive the title will be on a work by a bestselling author of the last half century.

Therefore, titles like "The Bible" and "The Quran" are evaluated as if some new book were published under those names. The Davinci Code is an understandable exception, the book made it entirely on hype and contraversy, it had nothing else going for it (other than the side-splitting but sadly unintentional hilarity, of course).

More importantly, it only takes the works of known best-selling authors into consideration. So if you aren't already a best selling author, then this tool is of little use to you.

Also, the titlescorer has only been tested (indeed, can only be tested) against the exact same data set used to generate it in the first place. You need to plug the title of a best selling book into it to check the validity. Even at that, it only claims 70% accuracy.

I think that it would be more fun to find out what the rules are by which it scores a title, but I don't see a link to that information. Perhaps google....

Posted by franc li (Member # 3850) on :

Dude, did you actually read The Davinci Code? (Saying this with the awe in good vs. Awesome as opposed to injured shock).

Posted by rickfisher (Member # 1214) on :

Well, I just typed in "Plag", claimed it was a figurative adjective, and got a 69.9% chance. Maybe I should change the title of my book. . . .

Posted by Monolith (Member # 2034) on :

After re-doing the adjusting bars, my WIP "Olympus Uprising" went from a 14% to 72.5%. That's crazy.

Posted by rcorporon (Member # 2879) on :

quote:
Dude, did you actually read The Davinci Code? (Saying this with the awe in good vs. Awesome as opposed to injured shock).

I did . It was a poorly written novel with a neat idea, I thought.

Back to the title analyzer, I find it amazing that the above posters title jumped so much! Methinks the page is broken and / or flawed.