The Kindle and other eReaders, and the Kindle Store and other online stores, have meant that instead of Publishers deciding which books get published absolutely anyone can get published.
This creates something rather interesting - Readers like you and me decide which books were worth publishing.
It’s very, very different from what happened in the past i.e.,
- Publishers decided which books were worth publishing.
- Those books got published. Then readers decided which of those were actually worth publishing.
- You never knew what might have happened if the books that Publishers rejected got published.
In the New Publishing World we have two very strange things (strange when viewed from the lens of the past) -
- Absolutely anyone can publish. Which means that readers are the only people who have the power to decide whether or not a book is worth publishing.
- A lot of authors only care about getting their book out and getting it read. The profit motive is a distant thought.
There are, obviously, a lot of good things, and some bad things, about this. However, let’s focus on one very specific thing i.e.,
Whether it’s possible to predict which book is going to be a winner, and whether Publishers were keeping out losers or winners or both.
This post is 100% assumptions, so feel free to leave a comment if you disagree.
Can you weed out losers and pick winners?
At first glance, the answer will be – Yes.
However, if you look carefully at all the markets, where we supposedly pick winners successfully, cracks begin to appear -
- Take markets like music and movies and books and there are always a lot more losers than winners.
- Take markets like the stock market and there are a lot more losers than winners. It’s a very different sort of market – but it’s the same question i.e., Can people accurately predict winners?
- We have no way of knowing what would have happened if we picked the ones we kept out. We see this all the time with stories of best-selling authors being rejected dozens of times.
So, we don’t really have an answer for our question.
We know that we definitely can’t get a 100% success rate. In fact, we know that even the ‘experts’ at picking winners, like Movie Studios and Publishers and Music Labels, only pick winners 10% or so of the time.
Can you turn losers into winners?
This is a bit of a trick question.
Music Labels and Movie Studios certainly seem to believe they turn losers into winners. The financial contracts and the profit shares certainly reflect that attitude.
However, we really don’t know. At this point we just don’t have enough information. We might never have enough information.
It’s also something that can’t be proven. We’d need two identical parallel universes to accurately test this.
Can you turn winners into bigger winners?
This is probably a Yes.
One thing that Publishers and Movie Studios can definitely do is put a lot of money into promotion and marketing. So, if there’s a book that people pick as a winner, the added marketing and promotion gets it to a lot more people and makes it a bigger success.
This is a definite big win for Publishers. If you’re 100% sure your book is a winner it might make sense to go with a Publisher to make it even more of a hit.
Can you really predict success?
Don’t know how to answer this question. There isn’t really any place where we’ve seen anyone creating success with 100% certainty. We know of things that increase the probability of success – But is there really anything that guarantees success?
How quickly do user tastes change? How quickly do circumstances change?
One of the big challenges in creating or predicting success is that there’s a gap between the ‘prediction/screening’ and the product actually hitting the market.
If it takes you one year to get a book out, the world might have changed in the meantime. People’s tastes might have changed. There might have been events that shrink the market the book was aimed at, or other book markets might have taken over.
You could create the perfect product for March 2011, and by August 2011 it might be totally irrelevant.
How large is the element of luck? Or is it randomness?
While we can work on elements that increase our chances of success, there are also random factors, factors outside our control, that play a big part.
Perhaps it’s two sliding switches and you slide the switch you control as much as possible. Then the second switch either goes against you or for you, and slides a random amount. You total up everything and you get a result.
That distinction – elements you control, elements outside your control – is an important one. If you don’t control all the elements, you can’t really guarantee success.
Screening books for winners is at best an inaccurate filter
Since we have no idea how to accurately predict winners with 100% accuracy, it’s likely that we can’t identify losers with 100% accuracy either.
The minute you start preventing some books from being published, you are, quite possibly, screening out winners along with losers. Add in the fact that a lot more books were rejected than accepted, and it’s quite likely that Publishers were keeping out more winners than they were picking.
A simple guesstimate
Let’s assume Publishers could predict winners with 90% accuracy. And that there was a factor, the chaos randomness factor, that turned 80% of the winners into non-winners when they were actually published.
- Publishers get 100,000 manuscripts. They pick the 10,000 that they think are winners.
- 90% of the time they are right so it means that 9,000 of these 10,000 books are winners.
- The books are published and the chaos randomness factor strikes and turns 80% of these books into non-winners. That leaves 1,800 winners published.
- Now, let’s consider the 90,000 manuscripts that were rejected. 10% of the time Publishers were wrong so 9,000 of these are winners. That’s the first interesting takeaway – Publishers are rejecting just as many winners as they are taking, even if they are 90% accurate.
- Out of those 9,000 winners, only 1,800 would have survived the chaos randomness factor. So, just as many eventual winners are rejected as are accepted.
Note that this is assuming that Publishers have 90% accuracy. What if we attribute a 75% success factor to them (which is still quite unrealistic).
What if Publishers are right only 75% of the time?
- They pick 10,000 out of 100,000 manuscripts and 7,500 of those are actual winners.
- Thanks to the chaos randomness factor only 1,500 of those 7,500 become winners in the market.
- Publishers reject 90,000 manuscripts and 25% of the time they were wrong. That means we have 22,500 books that were rejected but are winners.
- Again, the chaos factor plays its part, and only 4,500 of those books would have been winners in the market.
However, it’s a huge difference. Publishers are picking 1,500 books that become winners in the market and reject 4,500 books that would have become winners.
And this is assuming Publishers get things right 75% of the time.
Note: There’s a big flaw in this assumption i.e. Each of the 100,000 manuscripts submitted has a shot at being a winner. In reality, perhaps only top 25% to 40% are good enough.
Why hold back any book from being Published?
The Publishing model is based on a premise rooted in the past – that there’s a very high cost of failure.
However, with ebooks, we now have a very different situation – Failure costs next to nothing. It is now more costly to keep out winners than it is to let in losers.
From the author’s perspective it is a stark contrast – An author can release and then she has a non-zero chance of success, or she can not release and have a zero chance of success. There are lots of things she can do to improve her odds of success. However, fundamentally, the most critical step is to publish her book.
We know a lot less than we think we do
The biggest takeaway for me is that the entire Publishing model is based on a lot of assumptions. Perhaps the biggest of which is that Publishers can predict success and that retailers can create success.
In the end it’s only readers, and perhaps the chaos randomness factor, that dictate success.
Everything else is only increasing the probability of success. And it’s based on assumptions.
We’re dealing with people who are saying -
- X is going to make your book a winner.
When they really should be saying -
- My assumption is that X is going to increase the probability of your book having a shot at being a success. It’s one out of 100 different factors – some of which are constantly changing.
It’s understandable why they would take that approach. However, it’s an inaccurate approach. No one knows what book is going to succeed, and no one can identify the exact reasons why it succeeded if it does succeed.
Filed under: publishing Tagged: | delusions of success, survivorship bias
We evil publishers often get it wrong, yes. Such a shame that we try so hard to pick books we like, and invest our money and time in, and absorb losses on, but we’re evil and that’s that, right? But we’re not stopping anyone from getting published. Self-publish your book, great! Do the promotion, spend the money, work the system. We don’t mind the competition, even though we are evil, of course. While it’s true that lots of dreck gets picked up by publishers, it’s also true that probably 95 percent of self-published work is self-published because it’s badly written, badly constructed, poor storytelling and not professional enough to compete with higher quality work. But never mind our opinion, money, investment, expertise, devotion to books, etc. We’re evil. We’re publishers. Ohhhh kay. right.
The only occurrences of the word “evil” appear in your reply. And now in mine, of course. I think you’re being overly sensitive to constructive criticism here. If any of of us here are accusing publishers of anything, it’s failure to recognize that the barriers to publishing — some good for book quality, some not so good to authors — are crumbling.
I’m curious as to what promotion is being done, that doesn’t directly involve the author. That’s also meant to be constructive — maybe there’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes what we don’t see. I don’t see or hear many advertisements for books beyond the occasional A-list’er, for example. Maybe you tell us what promotion is being done?
There may be a lot of misconceptions here, I’m willing to admit. I’d really like to hear, as a prospective author, what publishers offer in return for the hassle of jumping the hoops and climbing the barriers. But if all I’m going to get is “don’t bother, remember we’re evil,” I’ll assume you mean it.
The cost of failure is still pretty darn high. A book (according to Making Light) will generally cost a publisher some tenthousand just for copy editing etc., to get the manuscript to a publishable form, even before printing costs, let alone marketing.
Printing and distribution costs may fall away, but they aren’t nearly as big as most people think.
Also, one thing you don’t seem to grasp is that one of the costs for publishers is paying author’s salaries. Authors *don’t* get paid only when their book is a success, with reputable publishing houses. They get paid an advance against royalties, and in the majority of cases (that eighty percent sounds optimistic) the royalties will never remotely reach the level of that advance.
If you want to write for a living, not as a hobby, that’s why Self-publishing is death, quite apart from the resulting almost always lower quality (remember, no editor, no copyeditor, no proofreader…) and attendant lack of success.
Publishers have to find ways to become more efficient. They’re competing against indie authors who are bearing all the costs.
There isn’t really a way to do away with any of those costs, with the possible exception of advances. Which would kill the market for professional writers pretty much completely, which would be a bad thing. It’s not like publishers have vast stacks of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs. This isn’t the music business.
And no, indie authors aren’t bearing all the costs — they simply do away with editors and proofreaders altogether. And it shows.That, or some of them are investing up front in paying someone to do it for them — ie the Vanity Press market. There’s quite often a reason those guys don’t get accepted by any publisher.
I think the concept of ‘advances’ is going to go away for 99% of authors now. Including 90% of those that get it now.
Is it unfortunate? Yes. Because authors will have to support themselves from sales of existing books or from another job.
But there just isn’t going to be that much money left.
Jasper, “to write for a living” means different things to different people. Working in a senior-level position in a high-tech industry, I would likely need a breakthrough novel or best-seller to make enough to quit my day job. The probability of that happening is as likely as becoming a rock star in the music industry.
Yes, that advance check is nice. Editing would be nice — given the typos I’ve seen in nearly every traditionally published work as of late, there’s not much of it happening. But the most onerous part of all, promotion, is left to the author whether indie or traditional. If I have to hold down a dayjob, promote my novel, and take care of family needs, when the heck am I supposed to write more? I’ve gotten the impression that publishers have cut corners lately, putting more of the burden on the authors without compensating them (aka unfunded mandate), just when authors don’t need publishers nearly as much as they used to. Authors are now expected to polish more, find and manage beta readers, and do promotion… but yeah, the check up front.
Yes, publishers have the burden of picking winners, and they miss some. For example, how many houses rejected J.K. Rowling? (count the number of submissions folks who look in the mirror each morning and scream “F**K!!!!” and that should give a pretty close estimate) It seems like publishers would do better by giving the “winners” they’ve picked a fighting chance, by promoting the heck out of them and taking the grunt work off the authors so they can focus on providing a better MSS next time around.
One way for indie authors to do away with editing expenses (but still getting that edit) is to pool resources, be it financial or time. If I like X’s writing, and she likes mine, why not edit each other’s MSS? Sure, one of us might be a better editor than the other (I’ve done a couple technical editing jobs in the past), but it wouldn’t be that hard to match the typo count of a typical paperback these days. Doing editing right isn’t trivial — for example, as I was reading my draft I found I used “startup” and “start-up” in the same context, and not everyone will catch that kind of thing — but practice makes improvement.
that’s a really good idea.
Up Front – E-Book Best Sellers – NYTimes.com (NYT introduces E-book best sellers lists)
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/saveThisApp?clickMap=link&webPadID=B840774012
This week we introduce our revamped best-seller lists, the result of many months of planning, research and design. Enlarge This Image Illustration by Christoph Niemann There are two entirely new lists in our print edition. One consists of rankings (fiction and nonfiction) that combine print and e-book sales; the other is limited exclusively to e-book sales (fiction and nonfiction)
Best Sellers, NYT, Feb 13
http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html
COMBINED PRINT & E-BOOK FICTION
TICK TOCK, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen
E-Book Fiction
TICK TOCK, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen
thanks for the update. Not sure how Tick Tock got to #1. However, the rest of the list seems right.
One small problem with the hypothetical numbers games: you’re assuming every MS which is going to be self-published would have been subbed to a publisher. Or, in other words, the sets of MSS that would have been subbed to a publisher, before Kindle ebook self-publishing, and MSS which are now self-published plus those subbed to publishers, are not identical.
I’ll agree your qualifier about having assumed every MS of the 100,000 has a shot at being a winner does deal with that, qualitatively. It would be nice to see both (and they’re related) issues worked into the model. Perhaps some math whiz could come along and help with that!
You make a good point when you highlight the formerly high cost of failure, and compare it to th low-entry-barrier market in self-publishing now.
It does need a better model. Not sure how to approach it though. Perhaps assign a probability of success for each where it keeps going down. So the #1 book has 1.0 probability and the 100,000th book has 0.0001 probability. Then figure out whether Publishers are picking the correct top 10% or so, and what that translates into.
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