Three Percent Podcast #198: Tom Comitta and "People's Choice Literature"

Update: 2025-07-01

Description

In this episode, Tom Comitta (The Nature Book, Patchwork) joins Chad to talk about their book(s) People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels, for which they used survey results, The Bestseller Code, various best-selling novels, and the OpenAI Playground to write two very entertaining novels: one using everything people want in a book, the other doing the exact opposite. The result is a wildly compelling reading experience that opens up ideas about aesthetics, readerly desires, the future of “collage literature,” and, naturally, a little bit of baseball talk.

You may want to watch this episode on YouTube, since there are graphs, charts, data, and other images that Comitta refers to in explaining their process.

The music on this episode is “The Most Wanted Song” and “The Most Unwanted Song.” (The latter of which is far far far more interesting!)

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit threepercentproblem.substack.com