What Makes a Book Successful? A Study on Portuguese-language Literature

Analyzing the success of books is a matter of interest among publishers, professional book reviewers, expert writers, and even curious readers. Such a task has many influencing factors concerning the intrinsic content and quality of the book (e.g., interest, novelty, writing style, and engaging plot) and others regarding external factors such as social context, author relationships, and luck for publication. Faced with so many variables, recognizing a successful literary work is a challenging endeavor even for specialists in the publishing market. Our objective is: to explore a dataset of books in the Portuguese language created to obtain more knowledge about the different variables of success in the literary context; to understand and evaluate the metrics collected that indicate new perceptions about books using graphical views.