Stieg Larsson, Outliers, Black Swan Events and Bestsellers
My good friend Billy Ethridge got me to thinking about the following question:
Q: What do Stieg Larsson, and John (A Confederacy of Dunces) Kennedy have in common?
A: Nobody gave a damn about their books until after they were dead.
Obviously, being dead is no guarantee of writing a bestseller. All the forgotten dead writers are proof of that. (I’d name a few for you, but I can’t recall their names.)
No, it wasn’t being dead that worked bestseller magic, but a Black Swan event (no connection to the movie.) The phrase was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
In a a New York Times article Taleb describes the characteristics of a Black Swan event: “First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Authors spend countless — and mostly fruitless — hours trying to make a best seller (almost always without any help at all from publishers ).
Publishers lavish millions of mostly wasted dollars trying to milk previous bestsellers and occasionally trying to create another one.
The frustrating thing for both authors and publishers is the randomness inherent in the process. Random because the reading environment must be right at the same time a book is published. Frustrating, because what worked for a given book in retrospect, usually will not work for the next one.
Another excellent book that describes this is The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow.
None of us like to accept that world events, culture changes, and many other unpredictable events rule our lives. Authors like to think that the quality of their work and the subject matter will win out.
But that’s usually not the case.
As Kennedy and Larsson show, their books were bestseller material all along. Just not in their lifetimes.
Disheartening, yes. But not a reason to give up. I’ve been blessed with bestsellers, but I write because I must. I must. It’s a life imperative. I’ve tried to give up on writing and managed it for a while. During those times, I’ve made lots more money than I have at writing. But always at things that never nourished my soul.
As I told Billy, it’s awfully frustrating, but one needs to accept that Black Swan randomness lurks in most everything we do. It’s just that you need to keep on keeping on so the Black Swan has something to paddle around in … hmmm, one more exposition for my particular existential outlook.
