On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile | Page 4

many as 20); and when it was eventually bought by Bloomsbury, the one publisher who showed the smallest degree of interest, they paid but a small sum of money for it (sources say between ￡2,000 and ￡3,000). Clearly, none of the 'experts' who read the book in manuscript, and rejected it, had the slightest inkling of the massive money-making machine which they held in their hands.
Implications
The Harry Potter case is an all-too-typical example of the failure to identify a black swan at an early stage. And yet it is highly desirable to identify them, if possible, because of their massive power to generate income. The black swans dominate their competitors in a way which distorts the rewards available: they are part of, and may be the cause of, a winner-take-all mechanism.
In the book world, what this means is that bestsellers tend to become massive, while sales of 'ordinary' books are minuscule. It is not that bestsellers sell twice as many copies as the average novel: they sell hundreds of times as many.
This circumstance is observable in most of the arts: in other words, you are either overwhelmingly successful, in terms of money, fame, and reputation, or you are nothing.
Interestingly, the same clustering effect can be found in other contexts, outside the arts: similar concentrations can be found in the academic-citation system, and it doesn't matter whether the academic field is physics or social science.
It is also important to note that the concentration effect becomes more marked, not less, as the size of the pool of works on offer increases. The more product that is available, the more the big hits dominate and stand out.
How black swans come about
The appearance of a black swan is influenced by, among other factors, the 'tipping-point mechanism'. Contagious diseases spread furiously above a certain minimum level (the tipping point), but die down below that level.
In the arts, the mechanisms of contagion are accelerated by the media, and, of course, by word-of-mouth recommendation. Thomas Gilbert and his colleagues at the University of California have used some statistical methods which are normally applied to phenomena such as the spread of diseases, or earthquake aftershocks, in order to analyse the spread of information about books. They distinguish between exonogous (external) and endogonous (internal) stimuli. Publishers use exonogous methods of generating awareness of a book when they give it a large advertising budget; endogonous shock is what occurs through one person recommending the book to another.
Both exonogous and endogonous stimuli play a part in turning ugly ducklings into black swans. A large advertising budget may generate some initial awareness of the product, but it does not inevitably create a black swan; it may evoke nothing more than yawns. Endogonous effects, by contrast, are absolutely essential to the emergence of a black swan, whether it has a large publicity budget or not, and they cannot always be created, no matter how much money is spent; they either occur spontaneously, or they don't.
Taleb's principal conclusion about the black-swan phenomenon in the arts is that the process is 'far less fair than it seems to participants'. The randomness of the system is greatly underestimated. Furthermore, people involved in the arts tend to suffer from overconfidence, and overestimate the chances of their own success. This, believe me, is particularly dangerous for writers, but it can also be catastrophic for publishers who commit massive resources to books which flop. Example: the Dorling Kindersley collapse which occurred as a result of overprinting Star Warsbooks. Two observers reaching the same conclusion One of the reasons why I find Taleb's paper on black swans in the arts so intriguing is that it echoes, with added scientific and intellectual underpinning, my own conclusions, reached earlier and independently. My views on the 'secret of success' for writers were set out in Chapter 9 of The Truth about Writing: there I argued that success for writers is determined by circumstance.
Circumstance, I said, is a factor which some might call chance, fate, luck, serendipity, or karma. But the true definition of circumstance, for my purposes, iseverything that you cannot control, or even influence.
Here is an example of circumstance, drawn from the film industry. In the 1950s, the actor Montgomery Clift turned down the lead parts in four films. He declined (1) the part in Sunset Boulevard which was later played by William Holden; (2) the Marlon Brando part in On the Waterfront; (3) the James Dean part in East of Eden; and (4) the Paul Newman part in Somebody Up There Likes Me. As you will already have noticed, if you know anything about the history of the cinema, each of the actors who picked up a part that had been rejected by Montgomery Clift used that opportunity to establish his own name; and they all became stars as a result.