A new book uses data to explore why Fifty Shades Of Grey, The Goldfinch, The Girl On The Train and other successful novels have made it onto so many bookshelves.

Hundreds of thousands of books are published each year, but only a select few make it onto the bestseller lists. Sometimes, it’s easy to see why – when a title like Ms Jennifer Egan’s excellent A Visit From The Goon Squad wins the Pulitzer Prize, for example. Or when a previously bestselling author with an established readership, such as Mr Stephen King, releases a new novel. But then again, there are surprises, titles that soar to the top of the charts, selling millions of copies, that seemingly come out of nowhere. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The Da Vinci Code. And, yes, Fifty Shades Of Grey. On the surface, such titles have little in common – it’s easy to assume that it’s all down to luck, or marketing, or some other ghostly, behind-the-scenes factor.

But, according to new book The Bestseller Code, this is a false assumption, at least, if you are to believe the data. The result of four years of research by its authors Ms Jodie Archer – a former commissioning editor at Penguin – and Mr Matthew L Jockers – an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln – the book explains how Mr Jockers’ innovative, automated text-mining techniques (in which computers read books and collect relevant data about how they are composed) can reveal intriguing patterns within the bestseller lists. Among the interesting topics discussed are sex (surprisingly, not a bestselling theme), the current ubiquity of bestsellers with “girl” in the title (such as Ms Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Ms Paula Hawkins’ The Girl On The Train) and the impact of literary style upon a book’s prospects in the market (reassuringly, it does matter). What it is not, say the authors, is a guide to writing a bestseller oneself. Having said that, the book identifies several elements that most bestsellers have in common. Scroll down to discover just a few:

In their analysis of the most common topics in bestsellers, Ms Archer and Mr Jockers highlight one that is the most important. And strangely, it’s not sex, drugs, or rock ’n’ roll, but a rather more quiet feeling of closeness based on low-key human interaction. “It’s not as heady as romantic love, or passions, and neither is it the typical relationship between teacher and class or employer and boss,” write the authors. “It is more specifically about human closeness and human connection. Scenes that display this most important indicator of bestselling are all about people communicating in moments of shared intimacy, shared chemistry, and shared bonds.”

Fifty Shades Of Grey is a book that causes a lot of head scratching. Critics were disdainful of its literary style, plot and subject matter, yet it had readers enthralled, hungry for more. Ostensibly its central topic – BDSM and sex – should have precluded it from the bestseller lists, say Ms Archer and Mr Jockers. So why was it so popular? Its addictively up-and-down plot. In analysing the storylines of different bestsellers, Ms Archer and Mr Jockers note that Fifty Shades has a particularly regular rhythm of emotional peaks and troughs, which are introduced at regular intervals throughout the course of the book. The only book that shares anything like the same beat of emotional twists and turns is another critically panned bestseller – Mr Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

“They have totally different authors, different genres, themes, different styles,” write the authors. “But both authors have mastered a way of tapping into a reader’s heart and gut like few others have. Across our entire corpus there are a handful of books that exhibit this regularity of emotional beat, but Fifty Shades and The Da Vinci Code are two of the most regular in our entire collection.”

If people are savvy enough to not judge a book by its cover, they still, it seems, are heavily influenced by its title. And when it comes to book titles, according to Ms Archer and Mr Jocker’s data, it’s better if you use the definite article. On Ms Donna Tartt’s popular novel The Goldfinch, they write: “The specificity of the word ‘the’ asks us to trust that _this _goldfinch has more relevance – enough to hold an entire story symbolically, emotionally, or structurally – for more than three hundred pages. So, The Gift, The Christmas Sweater, The Notebook. The only time ‘A’ works better than ‘The’ is when the noun is so unusual and specific that the generality of the word ‘A’ lends it some grander, more universal, or metaphorical sense. The use of ‘A’ widens the potential: A Spool of Blue Thread; A Thousand Splendid Suns; A Dog’s Purpose; A Game Of Thrones.”

The Bestseller Code (Allen Lane) by Ms Jodie Archer and Mr Matthew L Jockers is out now