Abstract
Previous studies have indicated that primary and secondary process content, two processes theorized to play an important role in the creation of an artistic work and of which some residue is thought to reside within the creative product itself, are related to an audience's reception of the creative work. This study examined the relationship between primary and secondary process content and aesthetic success in bestselling and non-bestselling fiction literature. Bestselling and non-bestselling novels written by the same author were selected and analyzed. It was hypothesized that primary process content would be positively correlated with bestseller status, however this relationship was not found. A post hoc analysis did reveal that an interactive relationship between primary and secondary process was significantly related to a novel's popular reception. It is believed cognitive processing of information and memory retrieval during reading of the text may affect a reader's reception of the content of a novel. It has been theorized that primary and secondary process content may differ in their rate of processing, as well as being processed by different information processing/retrieval systems and that these differences account for the relationship between aesthetic success and primary/secondary process content levels.
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