Nassim Nicholas Taleb popped into the office last week to see how sales of his new book, The Black Swan are doing – more of which later. He is off to Las Vegas to debate with Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve) on what the art masterpieces of the next fifty years will look like. It started me thinking what the great or most popular books of the next fifty years might look like — and how we will be able to spot them, buy them and sell them to booksellers who also see the possibility. In Taleb’s phrase, we are looking for Black Swans: statistically improbable events which share three principle characteristics: their unpredictability, their massive impact and after they have happened, and our seemingly innate desire to explain them, making them appear less random and more predictable than they actually are.
In bookselling the distribution of sales follows a tadpole pattern: most sales come from the top 5% of all titles published in a year (that number is approaching 200,000). No matter how many more titles are published, the number of titles that bring in the sales remain roughly the same. If that sounds like an argument to publish less, well, it is. Except that we don’t know which of the titles we publish will be hits. A dreadful admission from the inside, but the failures of the publishing world to spot every Black Swan are evident in the fact that the first Harry Potter was rejected by so many publishing houses and in the piles of C-list celeb bios filling up the remainder bins every January. What makes a bestseller? We select the books we’re going to do consumer advertising on, allocate trade marketing spend to get them in good slots in your stores and execute PR blitzes, but they are only a percentage of books we publish. Even with all that noise, a book can bomb. Another part of the bestseller equation is word-of-mouth, and that is something we can hope to influence, but can’t wholly control. I know at this point someone will point out that being selected for Richard & Judy’s Bookclub is the way to have a bestseller, but we don’t know what they will select (truly). So we publish a lot of books because we perceive that it lessens our risk (spread-betting) and because most of those books, if bought for the right amount, will be profitable even if they are not bestsellers.
The booksellers with whom I work have to make the same choices. If they don’t back a winner from the start, then they lose that all important market share and it’s not always easy to jump on board when the train’s already picked up speed. Take The Black Swan itself. It’s top five on Amazon.co.uk and we have had great support from some of our high street retailers who picked up on the potential size of its market and match to their customers early on. But not all. I’m not going to mention any names, but a couple didn’t see the opportunity and so now have to play catch-up to its success, having already given those who did see it (their competitors) an advantage. For a serious non-fiction title, such as The Black Swan, the internet now holds a very high market share as it can reach those audiences who read a review or profile in the Sunday Times and want to buy from their desks Monday morning. The success of Taleb’s book on Amazon indicates that if you connect word of the book (via publicity, word-of-mouth or sometimes having it in store, as people comparison shop) to a market (which for The Black Swan happily includes people involved in a huge spectrum of interests and professions from finance to physics, maths to marketing, and all areas of business, including, yes, publishing, as well as all those who love a book with a paradigm-shattering idea) but most importantly have availability at the time of demand (the job of publishing sales, supply chain and booksellers), then you might find yourself with a bestselling book.
To a certain extent, this reflects Chris Anderson’s assertion in The Long Tail that the internet with its advantage of having unlimited cyberspace to list books, offers the ideal opportunity to sell them. However, excluding the opportunity of print-on-demand, the success of internet bookselling requires very physical warehouse space with a supply chain able to respond quickly to customer demand which requires forecasting and pre-empting to the correct levels (how often have you gone to an internet site only to find the book you want is on a few days availability as supply can’t keep up with demand?). Bookshops have a limited physical space in which to stock and display books and the pressure of this can lead all booksellers (internet included to a certain extent) to miss the Black Swan. The more automated the forecasting system, the greater the danger of missing them, I’d suggest. You can plug in all the variables one time and you have a bestseller and repeat the exercise and be pushing a dog. The danger is that as costs escalate for all of us, we become more adverse to risk as failure costs us more and success might offer less value for money. We have to face uncertainty, accept that we don’t know, but keep the faith when something we feel is truly special comes our way.
Of course, none of this offers much insight on how to spot Black Swans and what the next ones might look like. I’d be interested in hearing your ideas on what you think the next big book phenomenon might be, post-Harry. In the meantime, it’s the fact that we can’t always spot Black Swans but that they are surely out there that makes this industry so exciting for me. Otherwise they’ll just replace us all with algorithms – ones without mortgages and holidays in California to pay for, I’m sure.
If you’d like to read more about Black Swans, Taleb’s homepage is a useful starter, and Michael Allen has written about Black Swans in publishing on his blog.
Fiona Buckland
Penguin Press Sales Manager
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