J.K. Rowling and the Chamber of Literary Fame

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-19/j-k-rowling-and-the-chamber-of-literary-fame.html

by eegilbert • 13 years ago

144 91 13 years ago

ultimoo• 13 years ago

This faintly reminded me of the opening few chapter(s) of Gladwell's Outliers that I'd read a few years ago.

pkfrank• 13 years ago

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?

If she really wanted to stay anonymous, she would have chosen a different publisher, publicist, agent, etc.

runevault• 13 years ago

No, for a pretty simple reason. She wouldn't have bothered with all the effort to try and stay hidden if she didn't mean it. She doesn't need the money.

At least one editor has already admitted to passing on the book, not knowing Rowling wrote it, so she went through the "normal" means of querying under the pen name, not saying "I'm JK Rowling, and I want to publish under a pseudonym"

I will say though, it will look fishier if the Lawyer who leaked the information isn't reprimanded or fired, since he broke client confidentiality.

unavoidable• 13 years ago

Except that the lawyer is a partner and partners aren't just "fired".

jmduke3• 13 years ago

She wanted to see how the book would be received without the burden of her reputation, which she did.

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure a book with the tagline "the new book by JK Rowling" wouldn't have needed much PR.

stevenkovar• 13 years ago

By releasing the book under a pen name and THEN letting her identity be revealed, it provides the book a chance at being taken more seriously as a good read rather than just a piggy-backing effort.

If she openly released the book with her name attached, it would instantly be compared to her past successes and receive false praise or scrutiny based on her achievements as a fantasy writer.

jmduke3• 13 years ago

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 A Cuckoo's Calling was selling very well for its genre before Rowlinggate.

KeliNorth• 13 years ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Florin_Andrei6• 13 years ago

I think this rhymes with the article. Basically you're trying to jumpstart as many self-enforcing (positive, or runaway) feedback loops as you can, taking a shotgun approach, and hoping that one of them would catch.

kens2• 13 years ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

link to more on the music experiment: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.h...

jmduke3• 13 years ago

The obvious connection to HN is that people read and upvote the popular articles, so there's (probably) a lot more randomness 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 get reposted later and shoot to the top.

Perhaps a more apt comparison would be how certain blogs (37signals, marco.org, Svbtle, etc) rocket to the front page based off of their TLD alone. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing -- this is how branding works, after all -- but I would definitely be interested to see an experiment that throws everything on Readability and hides the URL to see if things change.

I could be incorrect, but I recall reading that part of the ranking algorithm is based on the commenter's average karma.

jbenz• 13 years ago

As I remember it, there was a feature implemented where leaders (veteran accounts with high vote averages) do get something of a boost when they comment, at least within the sequencing of the comments in any one thread. I think this was done to help improve the quality of the conversation, even before the removal of the vote totals next to each comment.

samolang• 13 years ago

When you said it was relevant to HN I thought you were going to say because the same phenomenon happens with start-ups. Being good isn't always enough, usually you need a little luck as well.

kens2• 13 years ago

Yes, totally. I was going to add that in an edit, but you beat me to it :-)

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Well, in a sense, the previous rating is an heuristic. Downloading and listening a song is "boring" unless the song is good

So it's more or less this: "rate this song" is different from "do you like this song that other people thought it was good as well?"

Maybe for HN you can randomize the order on the front page and hide the score

Florin_Andrei6• 13 years ago

Society is full of positive (self-enforcing, runaway) feedback loops. It is not self-stabilizing. It tends to flip-flop between extremes. This applies to pretty much any field. It's the strongest argument against laissez-faire economics, yet it's amazing how many people are blind to it (well, that's exactly part of the mechanism that enables the aforementioned feedback loops).

liber8• 13 years ago

Can you provide one example of such a phenomena operating on anything longer than a very short timescale? I'm genuinely curious. Nearly every example I can think of is long-term negative.

edit: I'd venture to say anything longer than 5-10 years could be considered long term for this question. Under that measure, I'd say government spending has exhibited positive-feedback behavior over the last 50+ years. Anything else?

nickik2• 13 years ago

It's the strongest argument against laissez-faire economics, yet it's amazing how many people are blind to it

If you actually would read free market economomics, for example market process theory. You would learn that actually free market economists do not belive that the market is this always stable thing that is pareto optimal.

It is actually discribed much more as a lagging, thing where there are forces pushing the markets in the right direction in the longer run.

Also if you for example look at public choice theory, that is economic analysis to democracy, you will see that just because the market is not stable does not mean you want the state to stabalize it. The state faces insentives that make unlikly to do the right thing, even if we know what that right thing is. There you have to problem that you often get unintended consequences, that is even if you assume that the state is all nice and only wants to help you, there is still a question if the have the knowlage and forsight to actually implment things correctly. So in the end it makes it very lickly that the intervention actually has negative consequences instead of positive ones.

So, next time please inform yourself befor attacking a groupe of on the basis of what you think they belive.

tl:dr; free market econmists are not as dumb as you think they are, they actually have spend the last 150 years thinking about these problems.

bcgraham2• 13 years ago

Stephen King did this and wrote new novels under a pen name, and the books were also best-sellers.

n6mac417173• 13 years ago

From: http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/18/2147231/jk-rowling-s...

"King did say that he thought he was outed too early to obtain any conclusive results from the experiment..."

TylerE• 13 years ago

Plenty of real world examples of that effect. Look at bands that are huge in say, Japan or Germany but struggle to fill a small club in their home country.

dpeck• 13 years ago

A prophet is not without honor except in his own town

tpurves• 13 years ago

That study has been very influential to my own thinking about how things get popular. Another thing I found fascinating about the study was that 'quality' of the content did matter, but that it accounted for roughly half the correlation with success, the other half being random-chance snowball effects.

You could probably extend this theory of what makes things successful to a lot of other domains (music, books, fashion, ideas, memes, startups, people...)

However, it's possible the ratio of intrinsic qualities vs extrinsic luck varies or is not 50/50 in all domains.

With music (or books) you have to invest a few minutes or a few hours to really evaluate if you like something, so those factors may affect how much extrinsic "cumulative advatage" snowball effects count vs intrinsic quality.

I'd really like to see more empirical research of how success by "luck vs skill" actually plays out in other categories. Any one know of follow up work to that 2007 study?

bostonvaulter2• 13 years ago

It seems like this would be a reason to release more high-quality work rather than fewer excellent quality work. Although perhaps the excellent work would stand out more.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Some high-karma member could quantify this by posting half their comments from a new account and A/B testing.

As it happens, my wife is a HN member but has not found it easy to get traction for stories she submits. On a couple of occasions I have re-submitted an article that I thought was unfairly overlooked and it has attracted replies and karma in abundance. Anecdata to be sure, but based on this and other observations in HN and other online communities I think your hunch is likely correct.

If anyone feels like exploring this in R or somesuch, MetaFilter (where upvotes by other members are public) makes a large amount of its user pattern data available for analysis: http://stuff.metafilter.com/infodump/

confluence• 13 years ago

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).

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.

It's also incredibly depressing.

To randomness.

samatman• 13 years ago

It turns out that, while wealth and intelligence are uncorrelated in most studies, income and intelligence are positively correlated.

Wealth is dominated by inheritance and outliers, so this is less surprising than it first appears.

cliveowen2• 13 years ago

"great many things that occur in one's life are not in fact a product of one's own actions"

Well, this also implies that none of our actions have any foreseeable outcome. And since we're defined by our own actions, that means we have no means to define ourselves. And that's a scary proposition.

WalterBright2• 13 years ago

It also means we can just watch TV all day, and our chances of making it are the same as someone who gets out and hustles. I don't buy that for a minute.

WalterBright2• 13 years ago

Financial wealth and intelligence are also uncorrelated,

I wouldn't be surprised, because nobody gives you money because you are smart. You have to make a sustained, focused effort to create things of value in order to obtain wealth.

Intelligence without drive is like a car with a powerful engine but no wheels. One of the smartest guys I've known worked as a janitor and never had any money - while being smart, he just never stuck with something long enough to make it pay off.

BigBalli• 13 years ago

now that JK Rowling has been publicly identified as author, Amazon updated its listing: http://amzn.to/1bzcC72

xauronx• 13 years ago

Did you catch the top comment on the amazon page? It's pretty neat.

"July 7, 2013 By Karen This book is so well written that I suspect that some years down the road we will hear the author's name is a pseudonym of some famous writer. "

n6mac417173• 13 years ago

Karen is JK's other pseudonym :-)

DanBC• 13 years ago

It'd be fun to have a page of images from US and UK versions of books (but with the titles photoshopped out) and ask people to match them.

(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316206849/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...)

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cuckoos-Calling-Cormoran-Strike/dp/1...)

snowfox• 13 years ago

Interestingly all the 1 star reviews happened only after the author's true identity was revealed. What kind of psychology is that?

dev1n2• 13 years ago

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.

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.

psuter• 13 years ago

It's an avalanche effect. The outcome may not be random as you point out, but it certainly looks so.

dev1n2• 13 years ago

Then this PhD Cornell Microsoft person should not be throwing around the word 'random' in a highly publicized periodical when it is clearly not the term that suits the situation. Alternative terms would include seemingly random, deterministically chaotic etc... but certainly not random.

epo• 13 years ago

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.

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.

roc• 13 years ago

" 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."

As regularly and repeatedly demonstrated by the phenomenon of "one-hit-wonders".

cliveowen2• 13 years ago

While I agree that the article too easily discounts the weight of one's talent in achieving success I think the main point to take away is that the need for social conformance heavily skews our own perceptions. Imagine if a Youtube video was to start with 10k fake upvotes, I bet that video would be upvoted by the vast majority of users regardless of whether they liked it or not.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Buying a bunch of fake listens/votes on platforms like SoundCloud, Beatport etc. is actually a very common way of building an audience in the dance music genre nowadays. Nobody likes it but almost everyone does it, because it's the most effective marketing strategy on a small budget.

studiofellow2• 13 years ago

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.

The suggestion that the quality of my work might not contribute to my own success as much as I'd hope is disheartening.

I also wonder: how can I build up my own cumulative advantage?

Florin_Andrei6• 13 years ago

Fire as many "pellets" at this "bird" as you can. One bird alone is hard to shoot, but blasting away hundreds of little projectiles with a big shotgun increases the chance tremendously.

In other words, be relentless. Self-advertise, stay on top of things, keep pushing ahead.

studiofellow2• 13 years ago

Thanks. I was also 'thinking aloud' on twitter that slowly building a following could eventually build up quite a bit of momentum.

But that momentum will never build unless you keep firing pellets, so to speak.

Udo2• 13 years ago

  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.

This is where they lost me in Rowling's case (not that I disagree with the overall point of the article).

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 some weight behind the publication, albeit maybe anonymously and through her publisher or agent?

Zimahl• 13 years ago

I think you are missing the point. There's no argument that new authors can sell a ton of books given the right inputs. What the article is saying is that you can sell a lot of shit to people with a fanbase. The point is proven with an overlooked book that was critically acclaimed but ignored by the public, but once tied to Rowling is now a best-seller.

Off the top of my head, in the book world, Stephen King is one of those people with that type of fanbase. I think a lot of people agree that he's a fine writer but there's a lot of junk mixed in with his good stuff - yet even the junk still rockets up the best seller list just because[1]. Stephanie Meyer can do this as well, and critics have said she's not a very good writer at all (ironically Stephen King said this too).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6TRVXG4kQE

Udo2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure you read my post the way it was intended. I wasn't in need of a TL;DR.

My whole point (though admittedly tangential to the issue at hand which I already indicated I find plausible) is that it doesn't look to me like the mentioned critical acclaim could have come from nowhere - if the book doesn't sell at least a few copies it seems unlikely it would be reviewed at all, much less by prestigious critics.

tgb• 13 years ago

I think you missed the point of the above comment. The point was that you wouldn't expect significant critics to have reviewed a book by a no-name author and no marketing effort. So either it wasn't critically acclaimed, it had some marketing effort (the above poster's view), or just got really lucky and caught the eyes of some reviewers.

Florin_Andrei6• 13 years ago

Stephanie Meyer can do this as well, and critics have said she's not a very good writer at all

Not just critics. :)

stonemetal2• 13 years ago

prestigious critics Who said anything about the prestige of the critics involved? Just some critics somewhere said they liked it.

rca• 13 years ago

Maybe she didn't have to put that much weight, I think we can also consider the critics as one 'world' (in the article sense of the term). They influence each other, and if a small number of critics happen to find a novel above the average quality I can see how it could spread through their community, just like a viral novel spreads through the general public. Even more so as there are probably some links between the editors/agents and the critics, which could help bootstrap the critic-local fame (and then even a slight push by Rowling's agent/publisher can be enough to play the role of what would need to be 'luck' for regular unknown authors). What I mean is that success among the public and the critics share the same luck/quality mechanism, but independently. Of course there is some influence from the critics towards the general public (and vice versa, although less I guess) but not enough, hence the critically praised novels that still fail to sell widely.

chalst• 13 years ago

I think the "what are the chances" is the wrong way around for this case. Plenty of book review journals/ newspaper sections agree to review books of new authors before there are any sales figures, and it is not uncommon practice to send out review copies before the official publication date, because it is hard to get booksellers to stock books that either lack positive reviews or are "old" (i.e., well past official publication date).

So while it is hard for a new author to get reviewed by influential reviewers before there are sales figures, it is also the case that there are many such reviews.

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

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.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

huhtenberg• 13 years ago

And here's an example of how it applies to the software world -

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.

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.

rmc• 13 years ago

Kast activity 2 weeks ago? Sounds good! When last activity was in 2007, you should be worried. :P

There's a big, big difference between choosing software and choosing a fiction book which makes popularity much more important for software: New versions. Fiction books almost never get any sort of new version. There are no updates to fiction books. Software nearly always is updated, and updated many times. We even have multi-level version numbers (1.2.4) for all the different types of software updates.

Software is updated to fix it and to make it better. Software that's not updated means a bug you find now will stay broken. The amount of activity can (in same cases) be a proxy for how much effort the developer is going to put in. Too little activity and it's possible the software will be abandoned. Software not used much is software is software that will probably have bugs that remain broken.

A better analogy would be starting to watch an unpopular TV show with long story arcs. If it's unpopular, it's likely to be cancelled, which means you won't find out the ending.

bentcorner• 13 years ago

Sort of like how reddit bootstrapped, if you have a support forum it could be beneficial to "seed" it with common problems that QA has run into, with corresponding answers.

stonemetal2• 13 years ago

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.

Tichy5• 13 years ago

Then again, if you know of more books as fun as Harry Potter, please let me know. I am always in need of new reading material.

colomon2• 13 years ago

Assuming you implicitly wanted to add "in roughly the same genre", the books that instantly jump to mind are Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books. The first one really feels like he asked "How can I copy the Harry Potter formula but make it better?" He clones the trio of heroes, but (for example) doesn't force them to sit around school waiting for a plot to show up, sending them out on a cross-country quest as soon as the world is established. For my money it isn't quite as good as the HP books at their best, but all are significantly better than the early HP books and tighter than the late HP books. He's into a second series of them now, and managing to keep me excited after eight books is no mean feat.

Tichy5• 13 years ago

Thanks, I'll probably check it out. Wasn't there a movie about them recently? That might have put me off at first.

Roughly same genre, I don't know. Ordinarily I am not even into magic, but the odd fantasy book sticks.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

I found Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://leanpub.com/hpmor) way more fun. However, it isn't finished yet.

I also liked Ender's game.

mistercow• 13 years ago

HPMoR is apparently nearing its conclusion, so if you start reading now, it may be finished by the time you catch up (depending on how quickly you consume books).

Tichy5• 13 years ago

Read and liked them both, thanks!

micro_cam• 13 years ago

The Flavia De Luce mysteries are quite fun (we listened to them on long drives).

Tichy5• 13 years ago

Thanks, I read one of them and enjoyed it, although it wasn't an instant "get me the next one, too" experience. But I might eventually read the other ones, too.

vanderZwan• 13 years ago

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.

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).

norswap• 13 years ago

Is anything known about Rowling's motivations in using a pseudonym?

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

I'm very curious about the music experiment described.

I think that present 48 ordinary songs to 8 sets of ordinary people leads to wild fluctuations because it's an artificial setup.

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.

crucio• 13 years ago

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

mehwoot• 13 years ago

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.

6ren• 13 years ago

There is 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.

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 need for that comment, but almost any good comment could fulfil it.

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 great stories? They are good stories, that everyone knows. (though I really like the cinematography in Star Wars).

rwallace• 13 years ago

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.

J.K. Rowling and the Chamber of Literary Fame

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