Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

My first bestseller got me scads of attention and lots of happy readers who gave me stellar reviews. I assumed they were spring-loaded to buy my next book too, and I assumed new readers would discover me as well. In other words, I was hoping history would repeat. I published my follow-up book, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, and it did well enough to top the nonfiction bestseller list. But overall, it sold about half as many books as the first. Why the heck did history decide to stop repeating just when I needed it??? One day my publisher explained to me that nonfiction books tend to follow the same pattern that mine had. The authors who consistently wrote one bestseller after another were fiction authors. Consumers of fiction want more of the kind of writing they like, only next time with different characters and stories. Consumers of nonfiction books apparently think some version of “I already know what that author has to say.” Especially when the topic seems to be in the same domain as the previous book. The defense against that pattern, for nonfiction writers, is to write books on entirely new topics if the audience lets you get away with it, the way Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis do. I use the same strategy now.