Our favorite stories have a well-crafted structure and contain common elements. We think of writing as an art, but does it have elements of math and science? Elaine Ash thinks so. Ash, author, editor, and book coach, shares her research on structure elements that create a bestseller. She says writers were presenting her with manuscripts that were overloaded with characters in the first quarter of the story. In response to this, she began to study bestselling stories and analyzed the number of characters introduced in the first quarter of those pages. She shares some of her results in this interview and the metrics she gives are surprising. Using this information, she created a resource for authors so they could save time and money they would otherwise spend on an editor. She uses her system and book, Bestseller Metrics, with her clients, and these manuscripts have been quite successful. She tells one story of a book she edited using Bestseller Metrics that only received a single page of edits after being turned over to a publisher. Listen to the clip below to find out more and get structure tips from Ash!