Final Thoughts on Selling a Book: The Black Swan Cometh

As we are in the final throes of completing our novel, this will likely be my “last word” for quite some time. So I thought I’d share a realization that occurred to me a while ago, which a bit of recent news brought back to mind.

The bit of news is that publishers are in trouble. They are losing money, pretty much across the board, and they have been required to explain why this is to their shareholders. Their explanations are enlightening. Hugh Howey has a blog post or two on this, and his distillation of their reasons supports conclusions I arrived at previously:

Publishers have no real idea what will sell and what won’t
They can’t create bestsellers
Their marketing methods are ineffective.

This gets to the heart my realization: a bestseller is a “Black Swan” event.

For those not familiar with Black Swan events (as defined in social/historical analytic theory), the important things about them are that they are essentially random and—critically—tend to be inappropriately rationalized after the fact.

The publishing industry, I believe, is now in trouble because it allowed itself to become driven by Black Swans: events over which they have no real control and which they rationalize after the fact, and those rationalizations are generally wrong.

But because these random events are both random and infrequent, the fact their rationalizations are wrong is not readily apparent and next impossible to disprove to people who are invested in them. This distorts their business model and so the whole industry becomes more and more disconnected from reality. Therefore, the industry as a whole now believes things that, boiled down, are basically nonsense (and has tended to be smug about it).

Now, a monopoly can afford to believe some nonsense as long as it maintains its monopoly status, and there is a market for what it supplies. But publishers have lost their monopoly status, and as a result their Black-Swan business model is starting to bite them. They have basically been reduced to hoping the next black swan will “save” them, and it might. But I expect that if this occurs, they will breathe a sigh of relief and continue on as they have been.

Meanwhile, their position will become increasingly fragile and they are liable to run afoul of a black swan that doesn’t work in their favor, and when that happens, they could experience a serious (even existential) crisis (if they are not currently having one).

My point here is not to encourage schadenfreude at the expense of Big 5 publishers (although I won’t much blame anyone who chooses to so indulge). It is to point out that what applies to the publishing industry also applies to us independent authors. While we may not depend on black swans, we do depend on similar events of less stature—call them “gray goslings” perhaps—and these are often similarly rationalized after the fact in inappropriate ways.

Anyone with a vested interest may do this. Thus editors may talk about the importance of professional editing and cover designers may talk about the need to have a “great cover” and a whole bunch of people talk about marketing, and even more people talk about reviews.

It’s not that editing and covers aren’t important (ignore marketing for the moment and reviews altogether). It’s that their importance lies elsewhere than some of these interested parties may assert. But, because of the nature of our business, it easy to make plausible-sounding arguments in favor of them (those after-the-fact rationalizations) that can only be challenged by an appeal to history and statistics which many people seem to be unwilling to undertake.

More to this, the publishing industry’s conclusions, even if fallacious, have the “authority of mass” behind them, and so influence our thinking, as they are held to be the “experts”. In effect, there is a considerable amount of the blind leading the blind going on—that is, enough to cause us authors, especially new authors, a good deal of confusion, consternation and wasted effort.

All of which leads to my second point. Consider the third bullet above. I have often heard fellow authors lamenting that they have difficulty because they lack the marketing resources of major publishers. It is often pointed out that while major publishers indeed have resources, they don’t expend them on new and unknown fiction authors, who still shoulder most of the marketing load when they are traditionally published.

But now we learn, because they have admitted it, those marketing resources are not terribly effective, in that they do not adequately support their business. This raises a serious question: if the major publishers, with all their resources and expertise, cannot market effectively enough to support themselves, what chance do we indie authors, with our quite limited resources and lack of time (life being what it is), have of doing marketing that will adequately support our business?

To anyone who has ever been wondering about the effectiveness of marketing (as commonly discussed in the indie author community) and is looking for a reason not to do it, there you go. To those who enjoy marketing and find it worthwhile, proceed apace.

But one thing I assert will never change. A runaway bestseller will always be a black swan, and selling any book will always be a gray gosling. So two final thoughts:

First, the only way to possibly benefit from these events is to write more and publish more. Commercial success is unlikely, but if we don’t play—and keep playing—we can’t win.

Next, last, and most important: few of us will be commercially successful authors who can live comfortably on just the proceeds of our writing. But all of us can be happy authors, reaping the less tangible (but, in the end, more lasting) rewards of our writing. That does lay within our power—and our power alone—and it is up to us to choose it or not.

Happy writing!