FAQs

Correctly promoting and positioning your title within the retail marketplace is critical to its commercial success. ScoreIt!™ by Inkubate analyzes your manuscript's unique writing style against thousands of commercially published authors' titles that have appeared on the Nielsen BookScan™ top 100 list within the last 10 years. Beyond writing style measurement, ScoreIt!™ provides unique retail data points about your title, including; comparable title unit sales volume, top matching author names, top matching publishers of record, and genre classifications of your manuscript's top 3 matching titles.

A web-based tool which uses stylometry (pronounced "sty–LOM–metry") to compare patterns of writing style within an unpublished manuscript against the writing styles of thousands of best-selling titles listed within the last 10 years on the Nielsen BookScan™ top 100 list.

Based on a comparative analysis of the writing styles of published authors within our database, your ScoreIt!™ result presents the three top commercially published titles that most closely align with your manuscript. For each title presented, ScoreIt!™ defines how closely your manuscript aligns with these titles based upon 4 key features that have been empirically proven to be diagnostic of an author's writing style. These determinative features are described below:

Authorial Vocabulary: This feature assesses both the vocabulary used by an author to express ideas and the unique word combinations that collectively define a writer's literary "voice."

Expressive Complexity: This feature assesses the choice and distribution of word lengths made by authors. The use of a large and complex vocabulary, for example, naturally includes a variety of short and long words. Together, these word choices produce a distinctive feature of an author's expressive style.

Grammar: Describing complex human relationships typically requires more intricate grammar than describing a simple, action-based narrative. This feature tracks the grammatical "parts-of-speech" a writer chooses, including the number and arrangement of prepositional phrases used.

Tonal Quality: This feature assesses an author's use of "function words" such as "the," "a/an" and "of." Though these words do not carry meaning of their own, their use describes the functions of other words in a sentence and their frequency is a key feature of an author's tonal style.

Sales and Marketing Data: Your ScoreIt!™ Analysis additionally measures the commercial sales data (print and e-book unit sales) for the authors and their three matched titles to provide you with a sense of how well content similar to your manuscript has performed in the past. When reviewing this information, assume that your manuscript were to receive the appropriate amount of promotion by you and marketing dollars for book promotion by a publisher and placement within the similar genres of the retail channel. While these comparative sales data points are one indicator of the market potential of your book, there are no industry measurements available today in the marketplace that evaluate the effectiveness of a book marketing campaign and/or the platform of a particular author.

Genre and Metadata: Your ScoreIt!™ Analysis also identifies the genre and associated metadata assigned to each of the three title matches to inform your thinking concerning how to effectively position your manuscript within Inkubate and the marketplace. Since genre classification has become so important to the discovery of a book by retailers and readers, we encourage you to think carefully about the genre that best represents your creative content so publishers and agents can discover it within Inkubate. It may be that a genre not represented in your ScoreIt!™ result is, in fact, the best choice.

Editorial Recommendations: As you are no doubt aware, successful writing can falter in the absence of a solid editorial team and marketing campaign, just as mediocre writing can flourish commercially when the right resources are available. With that said, we encourage you to carefully study your ScoreIt!™ results to identify where you may want to be investing your time and energy moving forward.

This feature within a ScoreIt!™ Analysis assesses both the vocabulary used by an author to express ideas and the unique word combinations that collectively define a writer's literary "voice."

This feature within a ScoreIt!™ Analysis assesses the choice and distribution of word lengths made by authors. The use of a large and complex vocabulary, for example, naturally includes a variety of short and long words. Together, these word choices produce a distinctive feature of an author's expressive style.

Describing complex human relationships typically requires more intricate grammar than describing a simple, action-based narrative. This feature tracks the grammatical "parts-of-speech" a writer chooses, including the number and arrangement of prepositional phrases used.

This feature assesses an author's use of "function words" such as "the," "a/an" and "of." Though these words do not carry meaning of their own, their use describes the functions of other words in a sentence and their frequency is a key feature of an author's tonal style.

The science underlying our ScoreIt!™ Analysis platform is known as stylometry (pronounced sty-LOM-etry). Stylometry looks for those statistically significant patterns or "features" in writing that can be identified again and again. Many are quite esoteric and unidentifiable to the human eye and, as such, can only be recognized consistently and efficiently through the application of computer science. Stylometry looks at literally tens of thousands of writing "patterns" and important writing "features" to determine a writer's unique "authorial fingerprint" and then compares that fingerprint to a database of commercially published titles by a wide variety of authors, across many genres and with varying degrees of print and e-book unit sales success in the marketplace.

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