Think Inc

What We Did

We created a widget/application/micro-site called The Lulu Titlescorer  (www.lulu.com/titlescorer), which let you enter the title of your novel and learn its chances of topping the New York Times Bestseller List.

Outcome

Bloggers hailed the Titlescorer as “a scream”, “nifty”, “fun – try it”, “amusing”, “cool”, “so hot”, “addictive” and “the good kind of silly”.

The global coverage drove huge traffic to Lulu.com, helping traffic rise by almost seven-fold in 18 months and Lulu as a business grow by over 10% PER MONTH.

Background: How We Did It

The Titlescorer micro-site explains the methodology as follows:

The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years’ worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.

We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.

The team, lead by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this “Lulu Titlescorer” a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

The fruit of this work is presented here, in the form of the Lulu Titlescorer: a program that you can use to gauge the chances that your own title will deliver you a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

Coverage

Huge global coverage, both mainstream and viral – from Newsweek to The Guardian (which named it “Site of the Week”) and The Observer; from The (London) Times to The Washington Times and The North Korea Times; from NPR (National Public Radio) in America to CBC in Canada and UPI plus umpteen newspapers, websites and blogs across the world.