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Tech Desk
From the Tech Desk
Startup Brings Artificial Intelligence into the Publishing World
No editor or publisher wants to bet big on a book and have it fail. Unfortunately, no publishing company is immune to that kind of outcome. Even if an editor has a great gut feeling about a book, even if the rest of the people at the publishing company feel the same way, and even if the book gets a decent marketing push, it can still underperform. There is always a big question mark hanging in the air when it comes to predicting whether or not the marketplace will embrace a book. StoryFit, a startup based in Austin, Texas and targeting both the publishing and film industries, is seeking to replace that question mark with answers.
StoryFit uses what it calls an “incredibly well-read” artificial intelligence platform to analyze books or scripts. Based on this analysis, StoryFit can offer numerous insights intended to help publishers (or film studios) make smarter decisions about their projects. It’s not just about acquisitions, either—though the acquisitions stage certainly represents a piece of the puzzle. On the contrary, StoryFit has features meant to help with everything from cover design to audience identification to marketing. It is a data-driven product intended to deliver solutions for the entire book development pipeline.
StoryFit has multiple products or services that clients can use, depending on their needs. For publishers, the top product is called “StoryFit Analytics.” The platform is already familiar with “thousands of books and scripts,” so it can compare new titles against what it already knows. From there, the system can spit out insights about a book’s emotional tone, plot arc, pacing, grammatical strengths and weaknesses, readability, and more. StoryFit Analytics can tell if a book is a tear-jerking tragedy or a light-hearted comedy. It can sketch out visualizations of a book’s story arc, including rising action, falling action, and everything in between. It can predict the target audience for a book and tell you more about the purchasing habits and overall personality traits of that demographic. It can calculate how likely the book is to become a bestseller in a crowded marketplace. It can even give you a list of comp titles you can use to assess a book’s market viability or start planning a publishing strategy.
Clearly, StoryFit has a lot of potential. As mentioned above, acquisitions editors could use the platform to assess titles and see if they might be viable on the marketplace. Publishers could use it to learn about comp titles and strategize factors like book title and cover design. Sales and marketing teams could use it to gain a better understanding of a book’s anatomy, structure, and target audience. Ultimately, StoryFit could help take some of the guesswork out of the publishing equation. And that’s all just the StoryFit Analytics platform. StoryFit also offers “StoryFit Metadata,” which publishers can activate to generate keywords for book marketing campaigns.
StoryFit calls the StoryFit Analytics product “a superhero sidekick” for publishers and editors, which is a heartening description for a tool that might otherwise cause pause among some readers or publishing experts. One of the obvious worries about a platform like this one is that it might take some of the human factor out of the publishing process. While there are drawbacks to the way that editorial and acquisitions are structured at most publishing companies—the biggest being that a single person’s opinions or whims can decide the destiny of a book or author—there is still no better system out there. The idea of having a computer program in charge of acquiring or rejecting manuscripts is not any more comforting. Used as a “sidekick,” though, or as just one tool in an acquiring editor’s arsenal, StoryFit seems harmless at worst and extremely helpful at best.
The other concern about the platform is not so easy to dismiss. StoryFit Analytics is able to recognize high-potential manuscripts or film scripts because of the content it has seen in the past. The technology “has read thousands of high-performing scripts and manuscripts and identified factors that lead to sales,” according to an except from the StoryFit website. The problem with this model is that what was successful yesterday isn’t always what will be successful tomorrow. A problem with the current publishing industry structure is that most editors are playing a guessing game based on trends. They’re not willing enough to take big swings and bet on books they love even if those books might not be super marketable based on past data. As a result, most people in the industry are following rather than leading—a trend that makes it very difficult for anyone to find the next big thing. A platform like StoryFit, by quantifying value and market viability based on past successes, might only lock the industry further into this particular feedback loop.
Regardless of these reservations, there is no doubt that StoryFit is an intriguing technology with a lot of potential for widescale implementation and adoption. Going forward, it will be interesting to see if publishers start leaning more on artificial intelligence to drive decision-making and strategy. The technology is there; now we have to wait and see what happens next.
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Craig Manning is currently studying English and Music at Western Michigan University. In addition to writing for IndependentPublisher.com, he maintains a pair of entertainment blogs, interns at the Traverse City Business News, and writes for Rockfreaks.net and his college newspaper. He welcomes comments or questions concerning his articles via email, at manningcr953 (at) gmail.com.
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Craig Manning is currently studying English and Music at Western Michigan University. In addition to writing for IndependentPublisher.com, he maintains a pair of entertainment blogs, interns at the Traverse City Business News, and writes for Rockfreaks.net and his college newspaper. He welcomes comments or questions concerning his articles via email, at manningcr953 (at) gmail.com.