Publishing is risky: the success of a book depends on many factors. The start-up Lit-X wants to change this with data analysis.
Publishing is a risky business: the success of a book depends on so many factors that it is difficult to predict whether a publication will be successful or not. The start-up Lit-X wants to change this with the help of data.
How does a book become a success? This question is not only asked by numerous authors, but also by pretty much every publisher. Creative factors have a significant influence on the success of a book - genre, style and plot can all affect how a book performs on the market - but the publisher's marketing strategies also play a major role: how do I set the right price and strike a balance between maximizing profit and minimizing risk? The factors are so intricate and varied that it is almost impossible to decide which book should be published and which should not, let alone how.
In other industries, risk minimization with the help of detailed data sets is already common practice - but not yet in the publishing business. The start-up Lit-X, which we are supporting in the fifth batch of our Media Lift incubator, wants to change this: Lars Leipson's team has created a software solution for publishers that uses AI to identify success factors and predict chances of success for individual use cases. "We help publishers as well as booksellers, agents and authors to analyze and predict literary success," says Lars Leipson, co-founder of Lit-X, about his team's software solution. "We do this with two products: Success Analytics and Success Prediction. With our Success Analytics, we serve very business-related use cases such as trend scouting and pricing.Success Prediction, on the other hand, enables the identification of success drivers and an assessment of their impact."
Trend scouting enables publishers to analyze international literature data to identify titles that have achieved a large increase in sales in recent months at a low level of success - which could indicate emerging trends. Based on this, publishers can acquire national licenses for these titles or try to serve the same content trend with other titles.
The pricing tool, on the other hand, allows publishers to create comparison groups of publishers, authors and titles, which can then be differentiated by genre, product variants such as hardcover or softcover and country of origin. The comparison group then offers a price range within which publishers can strategically position themselves.
Success Prediciton, on the other hand, offers a detailed analysis of content-related success drivers, such as how the characteristics of the characters or the location of the plot affect the success of a book. Conversely, the expected success of an as yet unpublished title can be simulated - is an as yet unpublished book more successful if it is set in Hawaii or Sylt?
We help publishers, but also the book trade, agents and authors to analyze and predict literary success
The foundation for the success of Lit-X is laid during data collection. "We create a wealth of data from various sources," says Lars Leipson. "Online stores, review platforms, social media, search engines and many more. This data is then processed, quality assured and completed."
Lit-X's data science tech stack, in which the collected data is processed, is state of the art: the start-up uses Python as a coding base, Github and GitHub Co-Pilot for documentation and support, AWS as a cloud platform, Docker for containerization and PostgreSQL as a database system. Lit-X relies on LLaMA and Falcon for the large language models that generate the output.
For customers, the Lit-X business model initially offers two classic solutions: a traditional subscription model and the option to purchase individual access to tools via a Shopify platform. "In the future, we hope to have strong integration partners such as ERP systems specializing in publishers or distributors through which we can distribute our solution in a scalable manner," says Lars Leipson from Lit-X about the future of the start-up.
Aside from the funding, participation in Media Lift is particularly valuable for Lit-X's partners from the literary industry: "Media Lift gives us access to a very committed network in a very network-driven industry," says Lars Leipson. "This gives us various contacts to publishers with whom we can validate and improve our product - or to service providers who can support us with the start-up."
But it's not just the contacts from the incubator that are valuable for Lit-X, the know-how also helps them to understand an industry they are just starting out in from the inside: "Media Lift also offers content expertise from industry insiders," Leipson continues. "How does the industry actually work? What is common practice? Who are the key players? What are the current trends? All of this is very, very valuable information for us, who are rather new to the industry."
