Use Your ScoreIt!™ Writing Style Match to Attract New Readers!

It’s been anything but a lazy summer here at Inkubate. We’ve been busy cataloging the experiences of writers using ScoreIt!™. It’s been gratifying to learn that the writing style analysis and marketing insights that ScoreIt!™ provides are proving to be valuable resources for both aspiring and established writers, including bestselling author, Dana Marton.

Below are answers to some of the questions that Marton and other writers have sent to us and we hope that you’ll find them instructive. If you happen to be a writer who has already run your book through ScoreIt!™, we’d love to hear from you too.

Do All Writers Use ScoreIt!™ the Same Way?

Since ScoreIt!™ provides both technical writing style analysis and insights on the retail performance of matching titles, writers will discover what they need, depending on their priorities and interests. For writers who are primarily focused on boosting their sales, as most genre writers admittedly are, the retail insights may be the most relevant results. For craft writers—those who would define themselves as literary fiction writers—my guess is that they’ll be more interested in how their manuscript’s construction stacks up to the works of commercially published authors.

What Exactly is the Percentile Ranking on my ScoreIt!™ Result?

When running a ScoreIt!™ analysis on your manuscript, the ranking of the three titles matched to yours is a percentile ranking (not a percentage ranking) against all the books in our corpus (or database) of commercially published authors. As such, the percentiles for the three top matches you receive will naturally be high, as they represent the three closest writing style matches to your own work, out of all the commercial titles in our system. Naturally, the three writing style matches furthest from yours would correspondingly reveal the lowest percentile rankings.

Below is a screenshot of the ScoreIt!™ results page for one of Marton’s titles, “Reluctant Concubine.” As you can see, titles by Dean Koontz, Sue Monk Kidd and Nicholas Sparks were identified as the closest writing style matches. As expected, the percentiles are high because these are the three closest writing style matches to Marton’s title out of all of the books in our database.

Why are the Genre and Author Bios of the Matching Titles Included in the Results?

ScoreIt!™, first and foremost, analyzes how your manuscript’s writing style stacks up to the titles of bestselling, contemporary authors and selected classical writers comprising our corpus. But the results also provide the retail genre classification for each matched book and links to the professional bios of the matching authors. Review of your ScoreIt!™ results may reveal content or genre similarities between one, two or three of the titles, but it’s equally likely that the matches will vary. We provide this information so that you can evaluate how to best position your work in the marketplace. For example, Marton, whose top writing style match for Relunctant Concubine was Koontz’s Innocence, plans to reference her ScoreIt!™ result in her marketing outreach for Reluctant Concubine. Her goal is to attract the new audience of readers who discover her title when searching for books similar to Innocence.

As we continue to build our database of commercially published authors, re-running a title through ScoreIt!™ in the future may reveal new matches with even higher percentile rankings. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to know when our next corpus expansion is complete.

What Exactly Does the Unit Sales Data for My Top Match Reveal?

One more benefit of ScoreIt!™ is that it also returns the retail unit sales data for your top match. So, lets say that it’s Innocence by Deen Koontz and that the unit sales figure listed is 150-160K copies. Understand that this number is the average unit sales of all of Koontz’s books sold over the course of his career. We tally his total sales and divide them by the number of titles he has published to come up with this data point. Since so much goes into a book’s success, including its writing style and its allocated marketing budget, this number helps you gauge how to budget your own book launch and how to evaluate where to apply your resources most effectively.

Key Takeaway from ScoreIt!™

Whether you’re a self-described literary writer or a sales-oriented genre writer, Inkubate’s writing style analytics platform is designed to guide you toward success.

Anyone interested in reading more about the science supporting our ScoreIt!™ technology is welcome to email me at stacy@inkubate.com. I’ll be delighted to send you a simple, two-page overview. A more detailed Whitepaper on our technology is available on our homepage.

Many thanks to Dana Marton for allowing us to share her result. Learn more about Marton on her Goodreads page.