Explore the world through language and math with a linguist/budding mathematician! In season one of Letters and Numbers, we focus on books - delving into the world of publishers and platforms, who writes (and why!), and what makes some books more successful than others.
https://sarahneofield.com
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 18 hours 19 minutes
episode 42: What can indie authors learn from the biggest movies?
Have you ever wondered what Paris Hilton's The Hottie & The Nottie and Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas have in common? Well, if loglines are so crucial in convincing film studios to finance a film, then surely the films which attract the most funding (regardless of how poorly received the resulting film is) must have stellar loglines... right?
And the movies which attract the least funding (regardless of how profitable the final movie is) must have poor loglines.....
episode 41: What's the difference between a tagline and a logline?
Loglines were originally designed more for the busy Hollywood executive than for the final audience of a movie - or the readers of a book...
episode 40: What's a tagline - and how can I write one?
A strong tagline was the one thing all of the New York Times bestsellers examined in the previous episode had in common. Yet, just one third of less successful novels include a tagline in their descriptions.
Of all of the ingredients of a book description, the tagline has to be one of the most accessible. Your book doesn’t need to have won a major prize or sold a million copies or had a celebrity endorsement or a write-up in a well-respected journal to have a snazzy tagline...
episode 39: What's the secret recipe of a best-selling book description?
Now that more books are purchased online, including print books, it’s vital that we understand how the best book descriptions work, and what role blurbs play.
Each book has its own distinct flavour, but the professionalism with which it is presented, and the quality of its ingredients – cover, spine, blurb, formatting – do not differ wildly from book to book...
episode 38: What kind of a blurb makes you start reading?
Summarising all of the lessons we've learned about blurbs over the past few episodes, here are nine rules it's worth keeping in mind when writing your own - or wanting to understand why a blurb you're reading doesn't quite work!
What kind of blurb makes you start reading? Let me know!
Join author, linguist, and mathematician-in-the-making Sarah on an exploration of the world through the lens of letters and numbers!
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episode 37: What effect does the blurb have?
Over the last two episodes, we've explored what makes a successful - and an unsuccessful - blurb...
episode 36: What makes a blurb unsuccessful?
The previous episode of Letters and Numbers focused on the patterns in successful blurbs, so it’s only fitting that this time, we take a look at unsuccessful blurbs.
After all, sometimes we learn more from examining (our and others’) mistakes than we do by only looking at examples of best practice...
episode 35: What makes a blurb successful?
We all know that we’re not supposed to to judge a book by its cover. But can blurbs give us readers a clue as to whether a book is worth reading… or give us writers a hint as to whether it will sell?
In this episode, we’ll take a look at what features the blurbs of successful books have in common...
episode 34: What about non-fiction titles?
Over the previous two episodes, we've looked at the features that the titles of best-selling - and least-selling - novels have in common...
episode 33: What do the titles of least-selling novels have in common?
If the most important ingredient of any book's cover is the title, what effect does a bad title have?
In the previous episode, we looked at what factors the titles of best-selling books have in common. In this episode, we crunch the numbers to find out whether the titles of least-selling books follow a similar pattern - or whether they have their own 'trash title' DNA...