The "cumulative advantage" study mentioned in the article is very interesting, and relevant to HN. Basically they built a music sharing site where people could download and rate music, and they'd see which songs became popular. The cool part is they randomly split the users into 8 subgroups, each with independent song voting and ranking. The top hits in one subgroup were very different from the top hits in a different subgroup, showing there's a huge random factor due to the feedback loop of people liking what's popular.<p>The obvious connection to HN is that people read and upvote the popular articles, so there's (probably) a lot more randomness and a lot less meritocracy in what makes it to the front page than people suspect. This matches my experience, where one of my blog posts will sink without a trace on HN, and then be hugely popular after someone resubmits it later.<p>It would be very interesting to do a "cumulative advantage" study on HN: split the users into sub-groups, and see if there's any correlation between the popular articles across sites.<p>I suspect there's also a "cumulative advantage" effect on comments, with popular members getting way more upvotes. Some high-karma member could quantify this by posting half their comments from a new account and A/B testing.<p>link to more on the music experiment: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.h...</a>
What this reiterated was mostly what I've been telling other self-publishers: marketing marketing marketing. Here's a book that gets good reviews and is supposedly (since I haven't read it) written well, yet only sells 1500 copies. Of course, 1500 copies in a very very short while is triple what most books sell in their lifetime, but it's still a very small number when it's by an author whose sold millions and has at times been credited with getting America's youth reading again - even if it was only for a while.<p>If J.K. Rowling can't sell more than a couple thousand copies of a new book based on it's quality alone, what makes you think you're going to sell any more by going the traditional publisher route under an also-unknown name.<p>It all comes down to marketing your book. You'll have to do your own marketing with traditional publishing as well, except now you also are in a contract. If your book does badly, your advance will make up for it. If it does well, then you're limited by paying back the advance prior to royalties, and you lose a touch of control.<p>Anyways, it gives me faith in our self-publishing business and our answers to clients who wonder why they haven't sold 3,000 copies yet. Although our last one is over 10k sales, mostly because they had been marketing the book months in advance of even writing it, and it was the written form of the advice they had been giving for years and building a platform with.<p>That's what we can learn from this. Build a platform based on you, market the book before it's even been written, build anticipation, and then market even more. I've really enjoyed this "revelation" about J.K., even if I'm not a reader. True, it does have a slightly sour taste due to it being a somewhat PR move, but then again... even Issac Asimov was Paul French when he wanted to write something my 8-year old sister would (and has!) read.
<p><pre><code> But there’s a catch: Until the news leaked about the author’s real identity,
this critically acclaimed book had sold somewhere between 500 and 1,500 copies,
depending on which report you read.
</code></pre>
This is where they lost me in Rowling's case (not that I disagree with the overall point of the article).<p>Let's say, I decide to write a book and a publisher buys it. It sells 1K copies. What are the chances this book will be reviewed by influential critics? Intuitively, I'd say close to zero. Doesn't this suggest she was throwing <i>some</i> weight behind the publication, albeit maybe anonymously and through her publisher or agent?
Financial wealth and intelligence are also uncorrelated, probably because of wealth's dependence on butterfly effect like initial conditions (race/sex/parents/country/economy), inertia, path dependence, network effects and random environmental variables (being the lucky one out of a group of 1000s).<p>It is a liberating experience when one finally realises that the world truly is a random place, and that a great many things that occur in one's life are not in fact a product of one's own actions, but rather those of extraneous conditions that are forced upon us.<p>It's also incredibly depressing.<p>To randomness.
The publish date for the book was April 30, 2013, according to amazon. 1500 books in a few months doesn't sound terrible for an unknown author in a niche genre. I would be surprised if Harry Potter had sold much more in the first few months of publication of the first book.
Stephen King did this for a few of his books as 'Richard Bachman' [1], although they did better than Rowling's by an order of magnitude, they also sold an order of magnitude worse than a real Stephen King book. Thinner selling 25,000 copies sounds pretty impressive for an 'unknown' author, suggesting King at least has some sort of repeatable mass-market appeal.<p>1. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman</a>
While I agree with the central premise of the cumulative advantage, I think comparing literary success to commercial success is kind of tricky, especially given the niche position of modern crime novels. The audience for crime novels is much smaller than the audience for young adult fantasy novels; I'm relatively sure <i>A Cuckoo's Calling</i> was selling very well for its genre before Rowlinggate.
This isn't particularly relevant to the article here, but does anyone else feel like the "outing" of J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith just stinks of clever PR and misdirection?<p>If she <i>really</i> wanted to stay anonymous, she would have chosen a different publisher, publicist, agent, etc.
There <i>is</i> a correlation between quality and success, it's just not very strong. And when you get to phenomenal success, the only correlation is that it just has to be good enough, to pass some minimal threshold of quality. i.e. to have fantastic success, it doesn't need to be a fantastic book - it just needs to be good book.<p>You can experience this here on HN or on reddit. My experience is that a good quality insight of mine will almost always get a few upvotes. But when there's wild success (like 1500 votes), it's entirely because of the circumstance. That is, there's a fantastic <i>need</i> for that comment, but almost any good comment could fulfil it.<p>Harry Potter is a good story, and good stories are good. That's about it. Oh, it's kinda nice to have common ground to relate to others with, and to use as a framework or reference point for discussion - like Moby Dick, Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. Are they <i>great</i> stories? They are good stories, that everyone knows. (though I <i>really</i> like the cinematography in Star Wars).
The piece I find most interesting here is not JK Rowling or book publishing, but the effects of 'intrinsic talent' and 'cumulative advantage' upon success.<p>The suggestion that the quality of my work might not contribute to my own success as much as I'd hope is disheartening.<p>I also wonder: how can I build up my own cumulative advantage?
> <i>Whenever someone is phenomenally successful, whether it’s Rowling as an author, Bob Dylan as a musician or Steve Jobs as an innovator, we can’t help but conclude that there is something uniquely qualifying about them, something akin to “genius,” that makes their successes all but inevitable.</i><p>More people should read "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman; it really breaks down how this and many similar biases work and gives suggestions on how to overcome them (althought he's brutally honest in saying that we'll probably keep being tricked by them anyway).
And here's an example of how it applies to the software world -<p>You find a piece of software that does what you need. You check the feature spec, the price, the About page and then you hit Support Forums only to see a dozen of threads, latest being from two weeks ago. And then you leave, because who wants a stale piece of software that nobody wants.<p>The take away is to hide any sort of activity/sales indicators from the website until you get proper traction and hit the critical mass. Low numbers make more damage than they do good.
now that JK Rowling has been publicly identified as author, Amazon updated its listing: <a href="http://amzn.to/1bzcC72" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.to/1bzcC72</a>
A ridiculous and poorly written article which sets out to claim that success is largely a fluke and has not much to do with intrinsic talent, rather if you are initially successful this tends to produce even more success in some kind of gravitational effect. It fails to explore this idea in depth or prove the point. I contend that nearly the opposite is true.<p>Success certainly has an element of luck as well as initial advantages (rich parents, living in the right country ...). but I don't think that success can be maintained without ability, talent and hard work. So for Jobs, Dylan and Rowling, their first break may have been a fluke, (albeit one attained by hard work and persistence), but their continued success was due to talent rather than to some winner takes all effect.
I'm very curious about the music experiment described.<p>I think that present 48 ordinary songs to 8 sets of ordinary people leads to wild fluctuations because it's an artificial setup.<p>As someone who discovers unknown music regularily without social recommendations: not all music is created equal, there is no "just music" that is listened to by "just people". Music is a result of coevolution of tastes and styles. If you give some random un-self-selecting people some random non-hit songs, they would most likely give on at all.
I don't think this is a very good example of what they are claiming is happening. The book sold roughly 1,000 copies in a month or two and received amazing, near universal great reviews. There is every chance that should she have continued writing the series (like she intended to) it could have been very popular. I'm pretty sure Harry Potter didn't sell 1 million copies within 2 months of being published.
Be careful not to draw too many conclusions from this. Specifically, it applies to entertainment, because what people really want, given a requisite basic level of quality, is to consume the same entertainment their friends are consuming. It applies far more weakly to tools designed to solve problems.
<i>By contrast, if success was driven disproportionately by a few early downloads, subsequently amplified by social influence, the outcomes would be largely random and only become more unequal as the social feedback became stronger.</i><p>So if you have 10 hipsters out of 30,000 as opposed to 9, there is a better chance that the songs that make it up to the top of the charts are wildly different. This does not constitute randomness. Having more people who appreciate one sound as opposed to another will give you a different result, and quite predictable. Unless of course the randomness is with the number of hipsters you are likely to get per sampling of population.
This is all good and well, but the Harry Potter books are some of the best I've ever read for many reasons. It's not luck that she created something so good