They found several trends that were often found in successful books, including
heavy use of conjunctions such as “and” and “but” and large numbers of nouns
and adjectives.
Less successful work tended to include more verbs and adverbs and relied on
words that explicitly describe actions and emotions such as “wanted”, “took”
or “promised”, while more successful books favoured verbs that describe
thought processes such as “recognised” or “remembered”.