What makes readers love a fiction book? [BMF CP Special]

Viet-Phuong La & Minh-Hoang Nguyen

December 16, 2024

[COLLABORATIVE PROJECT]

1. Project description

Books have long been a source of entertainment, education, and emotional connection, with fiction holding a special place in the human imagination. Fictional stories transcend cultural and temporal boundaries, inviting readers into worlds where they can explore emotions, ideas, and experiences beyond their own. Understanding what drives people to love a fiction book is a crucial question with significant implications for literature, psychology, and cultural studies. In addition, this understanding is especially important for authors, and publishers, because a love for a book is the great, if not greatest, predictor of its purchase.

With the advancement of information technology and publishing systems, the number of authors writing books and the abundance of advice for them have proliferated across the writing community and various forums. However, advice is mostly subjective and based primarily on personal experience. To the best of our knowledge, data-driven, quantitative analyses offering actionable insights remain scarce. Therefore, this study can be considered one of the first attempts to address this question using a quantitative approach.

The Amazon book reviews of Wild Wise Weird were used as the data source for our analysis. Wild Wise Weird is a collection of 42 fables that blends traditional storytelling with modern sensibilities, weaving together life lessons, humor, and social commentary [1]. There are several reasons why the book was chosen.

First and foremost, it is a book that we personally love, and we are interested in understanding what makes others love it as well. Second, while love is inherently subjective and shaped by individual backgrounds and experiences, it is necessary to ensure that the book receives a broadly positive rating across readers from diverse socio-cultural contexts, warranting the applicability of findings in different socio-cultural contexts. According to the Amazon rating system, Wild Wise Weird is generally well-loved, with an impressive 4.9/5.0 score from readers in Australia, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Third, the book was selected for its relevance to contemporary issues to ensure that the content is aligned with modern readers’ sentiments and concerns. Set in a whimsical bird village, Wild Wise Weird offers a satirical perspective on society, encouraging readers to reflect on humanistic values such as justice, honesty, responsibility, freedom, and community while also addressing pressing contemporary issues like environmental sustainability and the complex relationship between humans and nature.

1.2. Materials

Data:

Amazon readers’s reviews, which are published online, serve to be the main source of data for this analysis. One such example follows.



Illustration 1. Two reader reviews on the Amazon page of the book.

The granular interaction thinking of mindsponge theory will be used for the conceptual development of this study, while Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics will be used for statistical analysis [2-5]. The preliminary dataset was generated from 96 Amazon reviews in Australia, India, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The generation process consists of three main steps.

• First, variables proxying a love and reflecting the factors that make people love the book were identified by reading the reviews. The variable identification process was stopped as we reached the theoretical saturation point. Love is a complex concept that has multiple characteristics, and even scientific, philosophical, and folk traditions have not reached a consensus on its definition [6-9]. Consequently, this study employed a proxy of love: words that reflect emotional attachment and commitment. While the emotional attachment can be detected through keywords like “love,” “gem,” “masterpiece,” “treasure,” “heartwarming,” “mesmerizing,” “resonate,” “inspire,” and “captivating,” the commitment can be detected through description of book-sharing and re-reading behaviors.
• Second, a questionnaire was created by Google Forms, comprising identified variables and other meta-information about the review (e.g., review’s date, location, title, text, and reviewer name). The Amazon reviews were evaluated based on the questionnaire.
• Third, the data were curated and validated. During this process, reviews that were too short or not informative were excluded to warrant the data’s quality. Six unqualified observations were omitted, resulting in a total of 90 data points for subsequent analysis.

The validated dataset was evaluated using the bayesvl R package, which utilizes the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimation [10]. Figure 1 presents the logical network of the constructed model.



Figure 1: Constructed model’s logical network

For the sake of research transparency and reducing research and reproducibility costs, we have stored all data and computer code on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/14498846.

1.3. Main findings:

Among 90 Amazon reviews of Wild Wise Weird, around 68% of them express love for the book. The preliminary analysis indicates some factors contribute to the readers’ love for the book. First, readers describing the book as unique, whimsical, quirky, or innovative are more likely to express love with the look. Readers who are appealed by the paintings and the characters in the book are also more likely to express love with the book. The cultural richness/representativeness of the book is also a significant factor that contributes to readers’ love for the book (see Figure 2). Interestingly, readers who describe the book as satire or social commentary are less likely to express love for the book.



Figure 2: The estimated posterior distributions

The distributions of factors contributing significantly to readers’ love for the book are illustrated in Figure 3.



Figure 3: The estimated posterior distributions of significant factors contributing to readers’ love for the book

2. Collaboration procedure:

Portal users should follow these steps for registering to participate in this research project:

1. Create an account on the website (preferably using an institution email).
2. Comment your name, affiliation, and your desired role in the project below this post.
3. Patiently wait for the formal agreement on the project from the AISDL mentor.
   

If you have further inquiries, please contact us at aisdl_team@mindsponge.info

If you have been invited to join the project by an AISDL member, you are still encouraged to follow the above formal steps.

All the resources for conducting and writing the research manuscript will be distributed upon project participation.

AISDL coordinators for this project: Minh-Hoang Nguyen, Viet-Phuong La.

Invited project members include: Ni Putu Wulan Purnama Sari, Minh-Phuong Thi Duong, Thi Mai Anh Tran, Manh-Tung Ho, Dan Li, Phuong-Tri Nguyen, and Hong-Hoa Thi Nguyen.

The research project strictly adheres to scientific integrity standards, including authorship rights and obligations, without incurring an economic burden at participants’ expenses.

References

[1] Vuong QH. (2024). Wild Wise Weird. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BG2NNHY6

[2] Vuong QH. (2023). Mindsponge theory. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3WHZ2B3

[3] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH, La VP. (2022). The mindsponge and BMF analytics for innovative thinking in social sciences and humanities. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. https://www.amazon.com/dp/8367405102/

[4] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2024). Better economics for the Earth: A lesson from quantum and information theories. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D98L5K44

[5] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2024). Further on informational quanta, interactions, and entropy under the granular view of value formation. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4922461

[6] Reis HT, Aron A. (2008). Love: What is it, why does it matter, and how does it operate?. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(1), 80–86. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2008.00065

[7] Fehr B, Russell JA. (1991). The concept of love viewed from a prototype perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(3), 425–438. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.3.425

[8] Olave MAT. (2022). Reading matters: Toward a cultural sociology of reading. In: MAT Olave. (Ed.). The Cultural Sociology of Reading (pp. 19-61). Palgrave Macmillan Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_2

[9] Olave MAT. (2020). Book love. A cultural sociological interpretation of the attachment to books. Poetics, 81, 101440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2020.101440

[10] La VP, Vuong QH. (2019). bayesvl: Visually Learning the Graphical Structure of Bayesian Networks and Performing MCMC with ‘Stan’. The Comprehensive R Archive Network. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bayesvl/index.html