If Shakespeare had hired a data analyst!

I already see some fellow writers frowning at the title. Writing, if you consider that as your profession by choice, is always seen as the natural extension to a person's linguistic orientation. After all the years of hard work, nurturing and fine-tuning your skills if someone comes and tells you “ Hey, albeit you're a writer, you have been sitting in a silo of your own making” would you agree to it? What would you make of it?

Well folks, if you are a writer ala William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy or any literary giant for that matter, this blog post is definitely not for you. But if you are a good writer of your niche and still want to get better at it, this post might help you connect the dots between your literary side and the statistics for a better writing insight.

Consider a scenario, just for the sake of consideration, that you are the Shakespeare - the wordsmith par excellence and world's best dramatist. Now what does this sentence mean - 'you are Shakespeare'. Lets dissect this piece of information, it may mean all or some of the following bullets to name a 

• You are a great wordsmith
• Your dramas get translated in to all possible written languages
• Your writing impact is long lasting..even centuries long
• Your dramas fetch troves of audiences even to the translated versions
• People relate and remember your dialogues
• People identify with your characters in their real life
• Your dialogues becomes legends
• Your dramas capture all of the life shades
• People make money on your dramas and on your life, even centuries later   

The list goes on and on. But lets assume what would it mean in terms of data points if you had hired an analyst. Lets start with word statistics:

• If we were able to count total words written by Shakespeare: 884674
• The plays contain 34,895 total speeches spoken by 1,223 characters.
• There are 884,421 total words in Shakespeare's 43 works.
• There are 28,829 unique word forms, and 12,493 occur only once.
• Those unique words account for 43.3% of total word forms.
• The top 10 most frequently occurring words make up 21.4% of all words.
• The top 100 most frequently occurring words make up 53.9% of all words.
• The top 1% most frequently occurring words make up 66.7% of all words.

(Source: www.opensourceshakespeare.org/stats/

NOTE: I am not sure of the authenticity of the data on the site mentioned above. But it makes a lot of sense if you want to gauge the order of magnitude.)

Now lets talk about engagement:

• Your content is engaging
• Your content is translated in about 80 languages of the world and thereby a favorite of 80-fold market of readers, play wrights, audiences and drama lovers
• Your words have a high-engagement quotient with readers and very very likely to be remembered by audiences
• The probability that the reader who had already read your book will again read the book or will have a wish to read the same book again to re-live the experience is closer to 100%
• The chance that a reader who has read the first page of your book will carry along the same interest rate and intensity all through the book is closer to 100%
• Your content has a high loyalty rate, very very high for that matter
• Your content has a lot of words that people use in day to day life, hence the content is search-friendly and SEO manager's ultimate delight  
• Your content, now that it is proven over centuries that connects so well with the audience, has a great entertainment value, and therefore a worthy fit for a big-budget movie with a very low risk probability..in short the probability that a movie made on your drama will be a box-office hit is close to 100%
• Your content has an appeal for all audience age groups and therefore a good mix from marketing perspective
• Your content has a high appeal for men and women, therefore the probability that your content will engage with both men and women is close to 100%

By now we almost know that what we are talking about is quantifying the greatness of the best ever master of the craft of writing and no amount of such statistics might have meant anything to the genius himself. But in the modern era of multifaceted modes of entertainment such book text, audio, pod cast, web cast, web page, videos of all possible file extensions, imagine the number of his words that are floating around us in various formats, available on demand. If he could have set the goal of 1$ per word written as royalty be it a normal page or the web page or any other format such as audio and video and he would have been able to garner all of the royalty through out the world, imagine the Shakespearean size of multi-billion literary empire cum publishing conglomerate cum entertainment house cum broadcast channel cum digital site, rolled into one. I am not even talking about the advertisement revenues that such a website would garner if all of Shakespeare's content would have been available even in digital format since the time he would actually written it. It is really hard to imagine and quantify all aspects of his content for small men and women like us.  

Where does it lead us? Well, it means that for all modern age writers of the digital world be it a technical, business, entertainment, fashion, movies, finance, technical, educational, science, sport or any content genre for that mater, the great Shakespeare has set up really high benchmarks for readership numbers, loyalty, retention, recall value, repeated visits, session duration and all such parameters that bring out various contours of your reader's response to your content through tools such google analytics and the like. Albeit Shakespeare did not need such devices for tapping more audience, we have all those tools available when we need them. It is left to us to choose whether we want to keep sitting in our silos or leverage the analytics that gives a numerical visualisation of what your user base does with your content.

Well lastly, I am not sure how Britishers would react to such ideas in this Brexit era, Shakespeare being their most popular citizen all times, but for writers of every type, such analytics can clearly help them define winning content strategies and help in writing the engaging content. If Shakespeare was .999999 on the scale of literary greatness spanning from 0 to 1, we can find where we stand on the scale and decide where we should be channelising our efforts. Let your literary genius or craftsmanship make it an  interesting experience for the audience and your analytics bent help you in keeping one ear always to the ground. To quote Shakespeare again to conclude

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool"