How ScoreIt!™ Solved One of the Great Mysteries of Modern Literary Espionage!

…and how it can help you market your book to the right readers!

Who is Robert Galbraith, the author of 2013’s bestselling book, The Cuckoo’s Calling?

No one seemed to know…

The science that answered that question (see The Science of Stylometry, below) can also answer many of the other questions that established and aspiring authors ask about their own writing:

• Who do I write like?
• How do I use this information to take my writing to the next level?
• How do I reach a bigger audience of engaged readers who are already tuned into my style of writing?
• How do I tag my content so that it can be easily “discovered” in a crowded publishing marketplace?

ScoreIt!™ from Inkubate is the first tool of its kind to address these all-important questions. ScoreIt!™ begins with an upload of an author’s full or partial manuscript to the cloud where, almost instantly, an easy to read, detailed analysis is provided that compares the author’s work to commercially published books pulled from across the literary best-selling spectrum.

What does a ScoreIt!™ analysis include?

Based on the analysis of a single manuscript, a ScoreIt!™ result:

• displays how an author’s style compares to each of three top-matched authors along four proprietary writing style “features,” enabling authors to see who they write like
• includes corresponding author bio links to help guide an author in identifying and marketing their work to the right reader audiences
• provides informative metadata on matching titles to help authors assess the best strategy for categorizing their work, so that it stands out to readers searching for their particular writing style

Below is a graphic illustration of the data ScoreIt!™ provides:

How can ScoreIt!™ help you as an author?

The three matched authors and titles returned in a ScoreIt!™ analysis help you understand how your writing style compares to a broad swath of commercially published fiction. You can use your ScoreIt!™ result in many ways; however, the most immediate applications involve audience identification and the building of effective marketing strategies.

• Specifically, ScoreIt™ provides you with:
• an assessment of how your writing compares to your top three author matches (see The Science of Stylometry, below
• insights on the audiences that other authors who write like you are reaching – read those authors (and about them) to understand how they are reaching their readers
• a view of the retail presence of your matched authors to see which keywords, tags and secondary genre classifications you may want to test to attract their readers to your platform
• the ability to share an objective assessment of your work with readers, reviewers, librarians and literary critics, who enjoy drawing comparisons between newly published books and the works of established authors

What are writers saying about their ScoreIt!™ results?

Bestselling author/speaker Dianna Hutts Aston, who put ScoreIt!™ to work as part of her recent book marketing efforts, likened our technology to a leading music app, writing, “Just as Pandora matches music to the preferences of its listeners, ScoreIt! results can be used by authors to promote their books to readers. Knowing who you write like is the key!”

Indie author Maquel A. Jacob ran her recent NaNoWriMo novel through ScoreIt!™ to learn as much as she could about how to pitch it to the right readers. What she discovered was that despite always having promoted her work to SciFi fans (thinking they were her top target audience), her writing is best matched to romance books. Knowing the genre of her matched manuscripts enabled Maquel to better understand the nuances of genre and reach out to entirely new spheres of readers.

Elin Barnes, is using her ScoreIt!™ results in her promotion efforts. After using the platform to analyze the third book in her Darcy Lynchseries, Elin added our ScoreIt!™ logo to her Goodreads and Amazon profiles, as well as a brief description of how the technology works. =

Thriller writer Seven Major is using ScoreIt!™ to gain insights on her writing style that she can share with publishers and agents. She’s also using it to target new readers by offering fans of her matched authors the eBook version of her story in exchange for their review. Since the writers she’s reaching out to like her style of writing, Seven reports that the trade is working well.

WA-based author T. Matt Ryan is using ScoreIt!™ to help him tap into a wider audience of readers, after learning that his writing style spans the romance, suspense/thriller and general fiction categories, based on his top three author results.

New York Times and USA TODAY Bestselling Author S.E. Smith, whose work was compared to Nicolas Sparks (The Best of Me) and Orion Scott Card (Earth Afire), put her ScoreIt!™ results to work to introduce herself to Sparks and Card’s readers. Smith reviewed the authors’ Amazon, iBook, Kobo and Barnes & Noble pages and chose the keywords that matched those for her own title, Command Decision: Project Gliese 581g Book 1. Smith then created Amazon Marketing Service (AMS) ads with comparisons to strong protagonists, heart-felt story lines involving love and tragedy, space adventure, and military, as these are the themes found in Smith’s own books and which also fit Sparks and Card’s audiences respectively. Focusing on key reader demographics, Smith also used filters to create Facebook ads aimed at Sparks and Card’s fans.

Whether you’re an established, successful author, or an aspiring author who is just embarking on your career, ScoreIt!™ provides a truly objective measure of writing style and the direction to build an effective book marketing campaign.

So, who is Robert Galbraith, the author of A Cuckoo’s Calling?

It turned out to be J.K. Rowling! Read here in Scientific American about how our science team quickly identified her and answered one of the great mysteries of modern literary espionage! Then put our science to work on your writing to discover who you write like and use the advice of our authors to build a marketing campaign that can get you and your story noticed!

The Science of Stylometry

Stylometry is, in broad terms, the scientific study and measurement of writing style. More specifically, it generally refers to the computational analysis of a document in order to determine something about the document’s author. It has a wide range of uses, including in history, law, medicine, and journalism.

ScoreIt!™, Inkubate’s groundbreaking writing style analysis technology that uses Stylometry to identify the “writing similarity” between books, objectively maps, tracks and compares those smallest parts of language that can only be identified using the sophisticated, high-powered computer technology that is at the heart of stylometric analysis.

For each title comprising our “corpus” of comparative published books (authors and books were chosen from the Nielsen bestseller™ lists), we evaluate and weight the four features that are integral to the science of Stylometry: 1) authorial vocabulary; 2) expressive complexity; 3) grammar and 4) tonal quality. Focusing on the statistically relevant patterns revealed, we then store each comparative author’s writing style as a unique “fingerprint.” Our Corpus includes thousands of these fingerprints, each one relating to a specific author who has enjoyed some margin of success in the retail trade book marketplace.

When an author interested in comparing their own writing style to our Corpus uploads and runs their manuscript through the ScoreIt!™ platform, it too is analyzed for the four features listed above and the statistically relevant uses of language are amalgamated to to create a unique writing style “fingerprint” for their writing. The author’s fingerprint is then compared against the writing styles of the thousands of titles in our Corpus and the top three closest matches are returned to the writer in a graphical summary, as shown above.

So…If You Haven’t Analyzed Your Writing Style, What Are You Waiting For?!?

Click here to buy your ScoreIt!™ today (and save with the limited summertime discount!)