Subjective concepts and phenomena, such as judgment processes, opinions, social attitudes and appreciation of literary works, have been difficult to measure accurately. Many of them, in literary criticism, being subjective in nature, face problems in obtaining precise measurements in government evaluations of the acquisition of literary works for school institutions, in juries of national and international literary competitions and in publishers in the selection of works to be included in the renewal of your catalogue. Using psychophysical methods of magnitude estimation and intermodal pairing, developed in sensory psychophysics, and currently used in the social sciences, which have shown promise as instruments for scaling subjective phenomena, this work addresses their application in the study of selected works and not selected from literature, to verify whether, applied to them, without prejudice to traditional criteria, these two psychophysical techniques can be considered a complementary model to the traditional categories of appreciation of literary works, which allows reasoning the author's creative tools in circumstances that need to go beyond assessments and intuitive value judgments. The results achieved by psychophysical methods showed equivalence with the results achieved by traditional criteria of literary analysis. It was concluded that magnitude estimation and intermodal matching are practical and quick ways to select originals in contexts that require time optimization for selecting works, without loss of quality.