
J.K. Rowling and the Chamber of Literary Fame - eegilbert
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-19/j-k-rowling-and-the-chamber-of-literary-fame.html
======
kens
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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&)

~~~
jmduke
_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 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._

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

~~~
jbenz
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.

------
KeliNorth
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_Andrei
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.

------
Udo

      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
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6TRVXG4kQE)

~~~
Udo
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.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Yes and no.

The critics weren't especially prestigious, at least not outside crime writing
circles - this wasn't the Times Literary Supplement or the national
broadsheets. They were relatively well known crime writers (rather than
literary critics which is where you might smell a rat) but not people you'd
know if you weren't in to crime fiction.

The level of reviewing she got is pretty much what you'd expect from a book
published by a major publisher in hardback. Yes they put their weight behind
it but they'd do that in all similar cases - by the time they've paid for a
manuscript to be edited and published as a hardback they're going to do
everything they can to get that book in front of people as they've made a
significant investment.

You might even argue in this case that they'd be more likely to go easy -
after all there is essentially no risk to them. If it fails all they have to
do is leak that it's her and it'll shift a load so there really is no reason
to go against what were presumably Rowling's wishes (particularly as she's
known to be strong willed and not someone you'd want to piss off if you want
to publish her again).

What sort of makes your point is that she was being published in hard back at
all - a major achievement for a first time writer and if she weren't who she
were handing that manuscript in she may not have been published at all, but if
you make the comparison between this and any other crime hardback, there's no
evidence they did anything special.

The same is true of the sales.

The article makes out that 1,500 copies was a failure. Had it been a JK
Rowling book that would certainly be true, but for a couple of months sales of
a hardback from an unknown crime writer. Typically a debut novel will sell a
few thousand copies in hardback and given that it hadn't been out that long (a
couple of months against a total hardback sales period of maybe a year) isn't
unreasonable to think this might have hit a pretty solid level. To put it in
context the first Harry Potter novel had a first print run of 500 in hardback.

TL;DR version: the research may be fine but there's little evidence tying what
happened with Rowling to it's point.

------
confluence
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.

~~~
cliveowen
"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.

~~~
WalterBright
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.

------
stonemetal
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.

------
alanctgardner2
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman)

------
jmduke
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.

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

~~~
seanalltogether
Isn't that worse though? Its seems that a partner breaching confidentiality is
a good reason for large clients to walk away from the firm.

------
6ren
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).

------
studiofellow
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_Andrei
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.

~~~
studiofellow
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.

------
vanderZwan
> _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).

------
huhtenberg
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
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.

------
BigBalli
now that JK Rowling has been publicly identified as author, Amazon updated its
listing: [http://amzn.to/1bzcC72](http://amzn.to/1bzcC72)

~~~
xauronx
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. "

~~~
n6mac41717
Karen is JK's other pseudonym :-)

------
epo
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.

~~~
cliveowen
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

------
guard-of-terra
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.

------
mehwoot
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.

------
rwallace
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.

------
dev1n
_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
It's an avalanche effect. The outcome may not be random as you point out, but
it certainly looks so.

~~~
dev1n
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.

------
crucio
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

------
Tichy
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.

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

I also liked Ender's game.

~~~
mistercow
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).

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

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

