A few weeks ago I downloaded almost 500 books from Smashwords, a website where independent authors can self-publish their e-books. All books are labelled with categories, like Fantasy, Suspense and Women’s Fiction. It’s a perfect setup for a comparison of these different genres.
One quick way to do this is to compute the keywords for the genres. Keywords are words that appear more often than we would expect on the basis of their general frequency. So, I (or rather, my computer) counted all the words in all 500 books, and compared their frequencies in the three genres above with that in other genres. I then selected the most typical keywords on the basis of their log-likelihood ratio.
Yves Peirsman 