A hundred and one years ago, the British intellectual, Francis Galton, published a strange discovery that has only recently come into fashion. Galton, Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, had seen a competition at a county fair where 800 people guessed the weight of an ox. The average of the crowd’s guesses, Galton calculated, was 1,197lbs. The animal’s actual weight was 1,198. No individual expert had got half as close. Galton had discovered the wisdom of crowds.

Now the London publisher HarperCollins hopes to apply that wisdom to the market in first novels. HarperCollins estimates that it receives at least 50 unsolicited manuscripts each week. Most publishers know the feeling. Typically, the Jiffy-bags get dumped on to the traditional “slush pile”, where they may get skimmed by a 21-year-old intern before being returned to the wannabe J.K. Rowling with a rejection slip.