The world would be much less interesting without groups of statisticians engaging in curious research:

A group of statisticians in Britain has concluded that a book’s bestseller potential can be predicted by its title.

The study was commissioned by British literary website Lulu.com, which covers the world of self-publishing. It analyzes the titles of every book to have topped the hardcover fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List from 1955 to 2004. The winning titles were compared with the titles of less successful novels by the same authors.

“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,” says Winkler.

According to the study, these are the common attributes of high-selling novels:

• The first word in the title was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting.
• They had metaphorical titles instead of literal ones.
• The title involved either a possessive case with a noun showing ownership (e.g. “John’s watch”) or contained an adjective and a noun (e.g. “pretty horses”).

— CBC

Hmm…

So basically, a title such as I Screwed Your Pretty Daughter is more likely to sell books than a minimalist one such as Lolita?