Predicting the Next Best Seller
Anuashka Sharma, Prateek Khare, Student, Oklahoma State University
Despite attrition in Number of Book Readers over the past few years, there are many books which managed to remain unaffected by it. The authors and publishers thus may find it helpful to analyze the factors that mainly affect the sale of any book. This kind of analysis would help them in strategizing their publishing and promotion of any book. We have used JMP ® to analyze the data and build predictive model to predict the sales of books. We have used the sales data of bestselling books of last three years along with the different attributes of the books which seemed to be affecting the sales. The dataset was prepared using the newspaper and magazines report of 100 bestselling books for each of last three years. Since the data had too many nominal variables, we had to create dummy variables so that they could be used in analysis. Using this data we have built predictive model that predict the sales of books. Our target variable is the total volume of books sold. The explanatory variables used are: Price of the Book , Audience, Series or Individual title, Binding Type, Month of Publication, Genre Related variable, Number of Pages.