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Over the past 6 weeks, our staff has written over 20,000 words of writing suggestions and advice, bringing us to about 45,000 (not including rewrites or deleted words). At this rate, we might actually have a manuscript-length compilation by the end of summer, but a manuscript for a nonfiction writing guide rather than the superhero comedy we had sought to write. I feel like I’m running out of time on this project.

CADET DAVIS: non-fiction’s a tougher market and both readers and publishers have higher standards. Also, not having been published will be a major liability. Right now, I can envision that you would pitch the writing guide to publishers as a freakishly prolific reviewer’s take on what makes sci-fi and fantasy books work, particularly in the superhero literature submarket.

JACOB: Oh, come on. We can do better than that. For example, you could slot me 10,000 words for a quantitative analysis of which titles are most effective…

CADET DAVIS: How would you quantify that? What data would you use?

JACOB: Good question. Critters Writing Workshop does a running tally of the number of reviews submitted for each of the ~30 submissions the workshop reads each week. My operational hypothesis is that the ones with better titles attract more readers and more reviews. By gathering trends of which types of titles perform the most strongly (generally ones with prominent nouns), we can describe which kinds of title are most effective.

CADET DAVIS: I don’t think the hypothesis is that strong. The stories that get more reviews are better written to begin with, which is independent of title quality. I imagine there’s a pretty high drop-out rate for bad stories, regardless of title.

JACOB: Yeah. I’m sure that the website keeps a tally of how many hits each story gets, but it’s not publically available. The correlation between hits and title quality would be much stronger than the correlation between reviews and title quality.

CADET DAVIS: I agree. If you could get the hit numbers, I’d feel pretty comfortable selling that.

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