Creating biased book statistics…
This post is a follow-up on my post “Book Marketing—Anecdotes v. Real Stats.” In that article I was ranting against people treating anecdotal evidence about book sales as reliable statistics. Now I have something else to be riled about: Jellybooks. This reader analytics company based in London makes studies of book reading habits and passes the results off as reliable stats. Sound harmless? Please, please, don’t bury your head in the sand—it isn’t harmless at all! Both readers and writers should be concerned. All readers, not just ebook readers, and all writers, not just indie writers.
Let’s deal with the general situation first. It always amazes me that people froth at the mouth when they read or hear that the government is allegedly violating their privacy. The amazement comes from the fact that they let data-mining corporations and private firms peer into their private lives all the time on the internet. Private companies also manipulate people with false advertising and false endorsements. A recent case where Lord and Taylor paid bloggers on Instagram to rate a dress highly all at the same time created outrage, but folks, don’t be naive—that goes on all the time. Any product endorsement is suspect these days, and book reviews are examples of this.
Data-mining firms sell—ho hum, ain’t it obvious?—data they collect about you. They collect data about your personal lives, your consumer lives, your health histories, whatever. So does Google, Apple, General Motors, Microsoft, almost any big firm. (Have a gmail or Google+ account? You’re handing over all kinds of data about yourself to Google. Anyone online does. Wise up.) This process is far more insidious than what the U.S. government does. The government’s alleged purpose (I only say “alleged” because I can imagine abuses—I’m a mystery and thriller writer, after all) is to protect us. The purpose in the private sector is more insidious—they want to exploit us. That exploitation is usually associated with making money, and, because consumers in our consumer society have few protections, the perps usually get away with it.
Enter Jellybooks. Forget the “books” part of the name; I’m tempted to call this company Jellyball, because it’s like a jellyfish with stinging tentacles that are about to grab you and do you damage. Let’s analyze their business model, ripped right out of the data-mining firms’ playbooks. The people in charge saw a niche. What the hell? That’s free enterprise, right? They saw that traditional publishers really don’t have a clue about the readers they’re selling to or their reading habits. Up to now, publishers didn’t give a rat’s ass because they live thirty years in the past where there wasn’t much real competition. But Jellybooks is convincing them to care. While the publishers obviously have data on their own sales, that data is about purchases, not how people read. Jellybooks wants to look at readers’ reading habits in the same way the techie Billy Beane in Moneyball looked at baseball players’ habits so smart product design and sales strategies can be found (and now you know why I’m talking about balls, and they’re not Trump’s).
Jellybooks has an arrangement with some publishers where they hand out special e-readers that track how readers read. It’s like TV’s Nielson on steroids, only for book reading (Nielson’s muscles are a wee bit atrophied these days because of the new ways people watch TV, though). A recent NY Times article shows a few graphs Jellybooks has generated from preliminary data. Assuming traditional publishing has the means to digest the results (or Jellybooks offers that service as well), ebooks in the future can be more market-driven, something the Times thinks is wonderful, I suppose (maybe they also want to use Jellybooks’ techniques to improve their own content, which sucks for the most part?).
So far, so good, for the traditional publishers. They move from being stupid to being dumb. Still dumb, though, because they’re buying into flawed and biased statistics. The only smart ones are the snake oil salespeople at Jellybooks who sell these techniques. First, the data is flawed and biased because (1) the ebook readers volunteer to get free books—they aren’t really buying; (2) the ebooks come from traditional publishers and don’t represent the entire book industry; and (3) there are many readers who won’t read ebooks. Traditional publishers are being scammed by Jellybooks (better them than indies, I guess)—Jellybooks’s data, while an interesting peek into the reading habits of readers who read traditionally published ebooks, is largely irrelevant for predicting even a traditionally published book’s success.
Oh, and I almost forgot two other bias-producing aspects of this data collection. The first is that the ebooks used are already popular ebooks! A more valid picture would be obtained by following a book’s trajectory after it’s published, in another words, “to poll readers” at different stages in the publishing history of a large number of diverse books, whether successful or not. I guarantee the results will be different. (In fact, as political polls showed in the Clinton/Sanders Michigan race, polls can be wrong for a long time—maybe people only like their privacy invaded on the internet?)
And that takes us to the final bias-producing element, agents and editors. These gatekeepers represent that segment of traditional publishing that has always misled traditional publishers. They’re in the mix BEFORE the book is even published, and they arrogantly think they know what makes a book successful. That has to bias Jellybooks’s results. It’s like passing a signal through a bunch of noisy filters—the filters can color the signal so much that one loses track of the information content of the original signal. Agents and editors are biased individuals to begin with, so they impress that bias upon the books they approve for future release.
With or without Jellybooks, traditional publishers will never be able to predict the success of a Tom Clancy, J. K. Rowling, Hugh Howey, Mark Weir, E. L. James, just to name a few authors who have enjoyed an incredible success after being ignored by traditional publishing. Moreover, measuring how readers read these successful books is akin to studying how lottery winners choose their winning numbers—it’s meaningless! Most avid readers will laugh when they learn that someone is even trying, and probably more so when they learn that traditional publishers are buying into this.
Of course, this all just solidifies the idea that traditional publishing is desperate. These dinosaurs realize that a huge asteroid called indie books is about to destroy them. And they expect a Jellybooks to stop it? I can think of much better ways to save traditional publishing, but, of course, they won’t listen to me. In their arrogance, they think they know it all. Or, maybe they’re expecting NASA and Bruce Willis and his crew to blow up that asteroid coming toward them? They’re pathetic; Jellybooks is pathetic. ‘Nough said.
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Alien invasions are almost cliché. Mine isn’t. In More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, human beings are forever changed. So, what do they do? Go to Mars! The first part of the story stars a mutating virus. Is it a sly way for ETs to take over Earth? The second part features a Mars colony. Don’t look for potato-growing farmers, but you’ll meet some real ETs that human beings have grown. If you like your sci-fi stew with a new, zesty flavor, this novel will entertain you. If you don’t, go cultivate some potatoes.
In libris libertas….
