Reaching Wuthering Heights with Brave New Words: The Influence of Originality of Words on the Success of Outstanding Best‐Sellers

Abstract

The judgment and ultimately the success of creative products should be determined by their properties. However, it has not been considered so far whether the same applies to books. Earlier research has found an inverted‐U relationship between originality of stimuli and their success. Linguistic originality as a text feature could influence the success of books as creative products in a natural experiment. The present historiometric study investigated whether originality predicts the popularity in a significant sample, the most best‐selling English books from 200 years. Originality was calculated based on word frequency using a commercial service. Popularity was assessed with a composite measure including indicators like number of sold copies. Regression analysis indicated originality had a direct linear effect on popularity, partially moderated by the time of first publishing. That is, while originality was generally beneficial for the success of a best‐seller, the same originality was more appreciated at a later point in time. This is the first quantitative study supporting the long‐held assumption that the evaluation of creative narratives is influenced by temporal context. The fact that some works like The Great Gatsby got more appreciation when they were rediscovered may reflect a general principle rather than mere exceptions.

Originality in online dating profile texts: How does perceived originality affect impression formation and what makes a text original?

“…Texts with high average TF-IDF scores thus included relatively many words not found in other texts, and were expected to score higher on perceived profile text originality, whereas the opposite was expected for texts with a lower average TF-IDF score. Looking at the (un)usualness of word use is a commonly used approach to indicate a text’s originality (e.g., [ 9 , 47 ]), and TF-IDF seemed a suitable initial proxy of text originality. The profiles in Fig 1 illustrate the difference between texts with a high TF-IDF score (original Dutch version that was part of the experimental material in (a), and the version translated in English in (b)) and those with a lower TF-IDF score (c, translated in d).…”

“…Texts with high average TF-IDF scores thus included relatively many words not found in other texts, and were expected to score higher on perceived profile text originality, whereas the opposite was expected for texts with a lower average TF-IDF score. Looking at the (un)usualness of word use is a commonly used approach to indicate a text's originality (e.g., [9,47]), and TF-IDF seemed a suitable initial proxy of text originality. The profiles in The TF-IDF score distribution corroborated the initial impression that only few texts were original in their word use, which is illustrated in Fig 2 . All 31,163 texts were therefore divided into seven bins, based on the percentiles of the TF-IDF score.…”

“…A range of methods has been used to measure originality in texts, with for example studies on prose, poetry, and song lyrics using objective measurements such as the number of unique words (e.g., [8][9][10]). While most of these studies found that originality can predict a product's popularity and success, less is known about what texts people deem original, and how perceptions about a text's originality affect impressions that are formed about writers of these texts.…”

Judging Popular Novels as Creative Products: Which Creative Attributes Contribute to their Success?

“…While the authors of these works would take this matter for granted and many creativity researchers may agree, other fields have failed to recognise this assumption. The attributes of the novels themselves have often been ig-More recently, a study found that the popularity of paramount bestsellers is influenced by their linguistic originality (Form, 2018). Despite objectively measuring this property, the study had two limitations.…”